Rich Habits Podcast - Q&A: Max My 401(k) or Roth IRA? Making $110K in the Military, & Should I Sell My Stocks?
Episode Date: July 25, 2024In this week's episode of the Rich Habits Podcast, Robert and Austin answer your questions!Do I max out my Roth IRA or my 401(k)?How do I best help my dad get ready for retirement?I'm a 39 yea...r old immigrant, what next?I make $110K in the Army, do I buy or rent? I'm up 100%, should I sell my stocks? ---Don't forget to check your email inbox this morning! The Rich Habits Newsletter goes out every Thursday :)---Register for our pre-IPO / angel investing webinar! Click here! ---Public has finally launched options trading on their platform! To create an account and begin trading options, click here!---The Rundown by Public!---⭐ 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⭐ Automatically buy stock where you shop with Grifin – click here⭐ Protect your family with term life insurance from Suriance – 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 – christian@witz.vc---Disclosures: Options are not suitable for all investors and carry significant risk. Certain complex options strategies carry additional risk. Options can be risky and are not suitable for all investors. See the Characteristics and Risks of Standardized Options to learn more.For each options transaction, Public Investing shares 50% of their order flow revenue as a rebate to help reduce your trading costs. This rebate will be displayed as a negative number in the “Additional Fees” column of your Trade Confirmation Statement and will be immediately reflected in the total dollars paid or received for the transaction. Order flow rebates are only issued for options trades and not for transactions involving other assets, including equities. For more information, refer to the Fee Schedule.All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA & SIPC. See public.com/#disclosures-main for more information.Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank. See public.com/#disclosures-main for more information. Alpha is an experiment brought to you by Public Holdings, Inc. (“Public”). Alpha is an artificial intelligence investment exploration tool powered by GPT-4, a generative large language model offered by OpenAI. Given that Alpha is an experimental technology, it may sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information. Any output generated by Alpha is not and should not be construed as investment research, investment advice, or a recommendation to buy or sell a security, nor should any output serve as the basis for any investment decisions. Alpha output is provided “as is” and Public makes no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy, completeness, quality, timeliness, or any other characteristic of Alpha output. We strongly recommend that you independently evaluate and verify the accuracy of any Alpha output for your use case. Additional information and disclosures at https://public.com/alpha.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.
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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Rich Habits Podcast question and answer edition.
These episodes come out every simple Thursday and they are exactly what they sound like.
Robert and I sit down and we answer your questions.
We collect questions from our Instagram DMs at Rich Habits Podcast on Instagram and we also
collect them from our email address at rich habitspodcast at gmail.com.
Do not forget to check your email this morning.
You should have received an email from the Rich Habits newsletter, which is a
our weekly Thursday morning newsletter we send out. And it's very illustratively focused. We've got some
really cool charts in there. We never want to bore you with, you know, crazy analysis or anything too
in depth. It's always fun. It's informative. And what we're trying to do is take a lot of the
headline news chatter you see in the business realm for the week. And we condense it down to a very
easy to read digestible newsletter. That's also actionable. Robert, what's your favorite thing so far
about the rich Habits newsletter.
Ah, I think my favorite thing is just my excitement over what we've built with the newsletter.
You and Christian have really crushed it.
You and I kind of penciled out what we wanted it to be and how we wanted to be actionable,
because I'll be honest, you already hit the nail on the head.
Most newsletters bore me, and I'm a financial guy and a financial educator by nature and for my
career, but they just put too much wording and too long. We break everything down in the newsletter,
just like we do on the podcast and in our lives, and that is actionable snippets. And I think that's
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make it the number one newsletter in the country for people that are learning, personal finance,
education, and investing just because we make it so actionable. So I'm super excited about it.
I'm excited that it's growing so quickly and I just can't wait for us to keep making it
better and better every week. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Already 4,000 people since we launched it
about a month and a half ago have subscribed. We're at about 44,000, 45,000 total subscribers now,
adding about 100 new people every single day.
So go to Google and type in Rich Habits newsletter.
It's going to pop right up.
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You click it.
It's going to be my beautiful face next to Roberts.
And you click subscribe, putting a little email address.
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All right.
So our first question comes from Mike B.
And by the way, Robert, all of the questions from this episode are from the email,
which means that you people that are sent us emails, we read them and we include them.
Don't worry.
So Mike B says, hey guys, my name is Mike and I listen every single week.
My company contributes 9% per year into my 401K as a profit share.
Now, currently, I contribute 6% of my salary.
My 401k has not been doing as great as I would have hoped.
I've got roughly $250,000 in there.
I'm 33, and my salary is about $100,000 a year.
Do you think I should reduce my contribution to the minimum of 1% into my 401k and instead
try and max out my Roth IRA?
I can't afford to do 6% and max my Roth simultaneously, unfortunately, so I'm trying to figure
out which one to choose.
Robert, what do you think?
So my opinion is here, Mike, and great question.
would be, I never want to see anyone max out the 401K. You want to go up to the company match.
But even in that instance, what I'm hearing is it's not performing very well. So you definitely
want to get that Roth maxed out. And then anything after that, you could then look back at putting it
into the 401k. But you never want to go above the employee match, especially if it's underperforming.
Yeah, especially if you do not have autonomy and it's underperforming. Like, go get your match, get your
100% return and then ride it out somewhere else. I mean, at the end of the day, you have full
autonomy at your Roth IRA and you can use your Roth IRA as a way to really build your wealth
Mike over the coming 10, 15, 25, 30 years before you have to retire. And then you can go look and say,
wow, my 250,000, it did grow, but it didn't grow as much as my Roth IRA because I had autonomy
and I put it inside of V-O-O-V-G-T, V-T, V-I-Q-Q-Q-Q-Q, and M-O-A-T. So yeah, that's what I would do.
And again, I mean, max out the Roth, but you can have a little bit of your 401k money working for you, especially if you can get that match.
But you're making a right choice by focusing on what you have autonomy over, especially if it's been underperforming, like you said.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that is definitely the takeaway and a really good strategy to maximize your earnings on your money and make sure that you just don't have something that's underperforming and really not kept up on like the 401K.
That's why we always talk that you want to active management.
So many people think a 401K is a retirement plan and it's set it and forget it.
And you just leave hundreds of thousands of dollars over your career on the table by not maximizing your earnings with these strategies that we talk about.
I know we talked about this, Robert, in a couple episodes ago, but I want to just say it again so our friend Mike here can really understand.
My friend Chris, when my childhood buddies called me the other day, and he was like, hey, man, I think about selling my house, whatever.
So we talk about it.
And I was trying to figure out, well, how much do you have invested?
He's, I think, 30 years old now.
And he's like, well, I've got 35,000 in my 401k.
I was like, oh, cool, what's it invested into?
And he's like, what do you mean invested into?
It's invested into my 401k.
And I was like, no, dude, like you have to know what the money's invested into.
Unfortunately, he had all of it in a target date fund and it underperformed the stock market
for the last three years, literally by half.
And so I was like, dude, if this was what you bought for the last, I think it was like
five, six, seven years now that you've been investing into this.
and you instead put it in the S&P 500,
instead of all these bonds and international names and whatever else,
you probably would have $70,000 or $80,000 in your 401k at this point,
but you only have 35.
So Mike, again, really want to encourage you to know what you're investing into
and to have autonomy over your money.
Our next question comes from Zen J.
Zen says, hey Austin and Robert,
I love spending my Monday and Thursday mornings
listening and learning from the Rich Habits podcast.
Thanks for all you do with the newsletter, the webinars,
and your Instagram posts,
Which, by the way, follow us on Instagram if you haven't already. Shout out to Zen here for the reminder.
Love that. Zen says I'm helping my parents, especially my dad, with retirement accounts and thought
maybe you could see if I'm doing okay or where I could even start doing a little bit better.
They both started investing late in their 30s. My dad is 62 and plans to work until he's about
70 because he really loves his career. But his employer recently eliminated his 401k match and the
company has some financial and growth struggles, which really concerns me. So earlier this year,
we did a rollover of his traditional and Roth 401k funds into Robin Hood's traditional IRA and
Roth IRA accounts to get that 3% match that they offered. That helped make up for the match
loss that he had at work. Now, his invested funds in both accounts are 85% into the index funds and
ETFs you talk about, 15% into Amazon, some Bitcoin, some Nvidia, and even some Robin Hood stock
because why not? Now, the Roth IRA is fully invested, but the traditional IRA has $10,000,
of cash profits that we took because we are waiting for a market pullback. Now, here's my question.
Should we take all 10,000 of this and keep it on the sidelines ready to buy a dip? Or do we deploy it
immediately back into the markets? I'll take a first step of this one, Robert. I think whenever
I'm thinking about retirement accounts, and he is 62 years old, so he's up there. Don't get me wrong.
He's up there. But when you have five, six, seven, ten years of investing ahead of you,
trying to buy a dip is pretty meaningless, in my opinion. I mean, at the end of the day,
seven years from now, I know for a fact, no matter what dip I bought or thought I bought,
the S&P 500 is going to be higher than it is right now, which means that even if you
deployed all $10,000 today, your money is going to be making money for you. Now, with that
being said, we are experiencing a dip right now. We just had an episode talking about how the
Fed's interest rate cuts will impact people's portfolios. And so if you want to maybe strategically
deploy $2,000, $2,500 a month toward the ETFs that you have on a monthly basis as a dollar
cost average, that could be a really good idea to kind of weigh both sides of the equation here.
But I would not keep $10,000, especially at his age with his balance there in his portfolio,
on the sidelines for longer than he has to.
So my thought is 62 years old, wants to work till 70, you only have eight years.
So trying to sit on the sidelines and time the market to me with that small amount of
just doesn't make sense. To me, I would either only dollar cost average $2,500 a month for four months,
or I would dump it all in as soon as humanly possible start making that money to get every day
in the market you can to maximize your earnings over that next eight years. That's my opinion. I think
that's what you have to do to try and get maximum gains rather than sitting on that sideline
and trying to time the market because I've never seen anyone properly timed the market.
Zenjay, major shout out to you, man, for really trying to help your parents here with their money.
And thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
Our next question comes from Stefano S.
Hi, Austin and Robert.
My name is Stefano.
I discovered your show a month ago and found it extremely interesting.
I'm 39 years old and I'm from Italy, but I just moved to the U.S. 10 years ago and got married six months ago.
I worked my way up from being a waiter at a restaurant to my current role as a director of real estate for an Italian company.
I would love to understand how to better manage my money.
So here's my question. I'm making $120,000 per year. My wife is currently not working. I have a 401k with $60,000 into it. My company matches 3% and my contribution is 10%. After listening to your show, I opened a Roth IRA with Wealthfront where I put $3,500 in and chose the automatic investment since I'm not exactly sure how to invest it. But I plan to contribute the max every single year toward my Roth IRA. I have $15,000 saved in a high-yield savings account. I have a car loan at literally 0.99.
with a new car that we bought for my wife. I have $5,000 in credit card debt with zero interest until
March of 2025. So you have a bird's eye view of my finances, Austin and Robert, what do I do next?
Robert, what's your perspective here? I think this is all you. I think this is a great question,
tailored for you. All right. So first thing I'm doing is I'm going into wealth front and I'm changing
my investments. You said you are 39 years old. You can definitely be aggressive. They will put you
in bonds. They'll put you in international stocks. They'll put you in different funds.
I would delete everything. I had to do this for my girlfriend. And I would put 50 to 75% of the total
worth of your Roth IRA into VO. And I'd put the other 25 to 50% of the worth there into QQ.
I mean, those are the only two funds you need. If you want VGT or VTI, you can do that as well.
But the first thing I would do is get out of the bonds and the international stocks that Wellfront
put you went to. The second thing I would do is I would take $5,000 out of my high-yield savings account
and I'd use it to pay off my credit card debt, and I would not go back into credit card debt.
You're done.
It's over.
Pay it all off.
It's behind you and stop going into credit card debt.
It's a terrible idea.
And I know you're trying to, oh, no, zero percent though.
It's fine.
Like, dude, just, if you're a credit card person, you're a credit card person.
If you're not, you're not.
I don't know which one you are with how little credit card debt you might have right now.
So it's hard to make a determination there.
But if you're not a credit card person, don't use credit cards.
I'm a credit card person.
A lot of people are credit card people.
I know a lot of people that know how to use them responsibly, pay them off,
get the points, rewards, cash back, whatever. And if you are that, be that, just stop going into credit
card debt. The last thing I would do is I would probably make sure that I might pull back a little
bit on my 401k contribution. Maybe pull that back down to 3% or 5% if you have autonomy and your 401k
is in the S&P 500. And I'd use that other 5% of your 120,000 a year salary, so $6,000 a year to start
building out a bridge account on public.com. This is a normal.
taxable brokerage account. And we talked about this on our episode last week with Dave Ramsey.
Where a lot of people, they have all this money in their 401ks, but they don't have the
bridge account. So they're working until like, you know, 55 and they're like, all right,
I'm ready to retire, but they can't do anything because it's all locked up in retirement funds.
And you can't touch those without penalties and taxes and fees and stuff like that.
So those are my like three hot takes by just looking at this. But Robert, I'll let you chime in as
well. Yeah, I really only have one other hot take because you mentioned the car loan at, you know,
under 1%. Don't pay extra payment. Don't pay the car down. It's free money. Pay the minimum payments
on time and use every other dollar to go to everything else. That's the only thing I have to
add to this scenario. Yeah, 0.99 interest. I think it might be a Tesla. I think Tesla was running
something like that, right, where they did like a 0.99% interest rates on some of their new cars there. So
Shout out to you for buying a new Sessler. That's pretty cool. I want to tell one of the funniest
stories of my career back when I was a car salesman and I was in finance real quick. It was when
General Motors first introduced 1.9% financing and the car business went crazy. It was a
Friday afternoon. It was the busiest dad ever seen on the car lot. My roommate who ran the
finance division, I was like, dude, we should stay open until 9 o'clock tonight and just
Rip. He's like, what do you mean? No dealer's ever been open? I go, look at the parking lot.
I made him look outside. So I ran across the street to office max. I bought 10 clipboards,
a box of pens, and a bunch of these little post-it cards. Got all golf carts out. Every other
salesman, everyone left the building but me and him. And I literally, I opened the doors up,
turn the light back on and people are walking in. Are you still open? I'd like to buy a car.
And I was like, here you go. Go right down the stock number. We'll pull it up for you right away.
At 9.35, we had the waiting room for F&I backed up. The owner of the dealership rolls up in his Ferrari. He's like, croak, what the hell's going on? Why is my dealership open? I walk him over to the finance store. I go, that's why. He lost his mind because I sold and delivered. I think it was nine or 11 cars after hours in one day. It was amazing because it was right when that kind of financing came out. So I wanted to share that story.
It has nothing to do with anything except for the low financing, but it's awesome.
Oh my gosh, that's quite the story.
Man, good for you.
Good for you for taking advantage of the moment.
22 years old and I was just ripping it.
It was so fun.
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change. Full disclosures in the podcast description.
And Robert, speaking of public.com, I'm telling you, dude, every day, I love starting my day
out listening to that rundown podcast that they've got. Zaid and Mani is so funny. He's always breaking down
earnings news, headline news, crypto news. I mean, this guy is all over the place. It's five, six,
maybe seven minutes long of a podcast, real quick hits here. And it's what I do to get ready for
the investing day in the investing week ahead of me. So if you've not yet checked out the rundown by
public.com and added them to your rotation, your podcast rotation, a little bit of filler podcast
there as you're waiting for the next Rich Habits podcast episode to come out, definitely check.
out the rundown by public. Zade is a master at his work. Yeah, it's a great filler podcast. They're
short and sweet and just really, really insightful. And I think they do a really good job with it.
So, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that because I just think it's a great product.
So our next question comes from Michael H. Robert Nostin, thank you for hosting Rich Habits. I listen
to every episode. My name's Michael. I'm a captain in the Army and I wanted to come to you for
advice. I don't recall you answering questions for military personnel, nor do I know how familiar
you are with it, but I trust you guys too much, so it doesn't even matter to me. I'm 26 years old,
and I make around $110,000 a year. I've got $80,000 in a brokerage account on Schwab, $40,000 in a
Roth IRA on Schwab, $20,000 in my Army retirement plan, $20,000 in a checking account, $20,000 in a high-yield
savings account on public.com. Parentheses, thank you so much for the advice. You're welcome.
I also have $5,000 in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I'm moving to North Carolina, my next duty station,
this December. I'm interested in buying a home there, and this will be my first time getting into real
estate. I see it more as a long-term rental, not my dream home. Being in the military, I do qualify
for a VA loan, which requires a 0% down payment, and I do have some liquid cash available. Do you all
recommend I pursue buying a house as opposed to renting? And if so, what do you think my price
range should be? Also, should I put my checking account money somewhere else? Am I having too much in there?
Robert, Michael gave us a great breakdown of his financial situation.
And before we jump into the question, I do want to thank Michael so much for his service.
We appreciate you more than you know.
So, Robert, what's your perspective here on this sort of bird's eye view as a 26-year-old with all this money?
I love it.
I do have some questions that maybe Michael can follow up with a DM to us or an email to us at Rich Habits.
But I do have a question of, what is the Army retirement plan that the 20K is in?
What is that invested in?
what type of plant is it. I would love to know more about that. I do think having 20k in a checking
account is a lot. You've already got 20k in a high yield savings account. And with the checking account,
you're obviously making no money with that. So I don't see why you need that much there.
I would rather see that 20K whittled down to maybe 5K because, you know, any money that's parked,
I consider dead money and I believe it should be working. And I would really look to getting 15 of that
20K, put somewhere else maybe in a traditional brokerage account and really get that money moving
as well because especially you want to have another account where you have full autonomy
if you're going to be buying this property. But we don't want to leave money on the table by it
just sitting in a checking account. So that would be my main takeaway of the changes I would make
to set himself up better. So Michael, to answer your question, in North Carolina,
of there's some really good markets in and around there. And I just think you could do either.
I like the idea of house hacking because of your age and the ability and flexibility you would have
there, but also building up equity for your future while not having a lot of overhead
while you're building your financial base. So I like that idea, but I'm totally fine with
renting as well for now because contrary to a lot of the fake gurus say, renting is
much, much less expensive, allowing you to put more money towards your future. So just I would look around
at can you find a duplex, triplex, or quadplex? What is the capital appreciation in those areas?
So you know what you're looking towards as far as, you know, appreciation on the property.
And you could really do both and you wouldn't be wrong. So I think it's just up to those criteria
and figure out what's best for you. I like that answer. And I'm just thinking here out loud,
You know, Michael said he makes 110,000 a year. He's obviously done a very good job of investing his money, both into his retirement accounts through the Army, as well as his Roth IRA and his brokerage account, right, he's crushing it. I would assume that of that 110,000, maybe he's taking home between 80 to 85,000 of that, which is about, let's call it, $7,000 a month. And so I think from a price range perspective, if you wanted to borrow, let's call it, $320, $330,000,
for a mortgage, that'll put you depending on taxes and insurance, all this, other stuff,
around $2,500 a month in payment at current interest rates.
At a $2,500 month payment, taking home about $7,000, that's going to put you at a 35% sort
of allocation per month toward housing, which I think is pretty healthy.
It's not house broke.
It's not obviously perfect.
But it gets you in the door, dude.
Like, the best decision I made was buying my first house.
I paid $280,000 for it.
It's now worth $450,000.
I put $10,000 down.
I now have $150,000 of equity.
I mean, if you wanted to buy a, again, I don't know how the VA loan does like the multifamily stuff,
but if you wanted to buy a house for $250,000, $350,000, $350,000 with 0% down, I'm not mad at
that because it gets you in the game.
I mean, I've seen so many people online.
There's a guy I follow on YouTube that talks a lot about dividends.
And he was like, yeah, the big thing that really bumped my net.
worth up was I was able to sell my house over this recent kind of rally we had in 21 and 22 for
$400,000 more than I bought it for. So, I mean, all I know is that, you know, housing goes up over a
long period of time. And if you want to get in the game, 26 is a great age. You're definitely
there from a, I don't see any debt. I don't see anything bad here, Michael. So really want to
encourage you to get into some sort of real estate. I think you've rented long enough.
And now is your time to start diversifying into some different asset classes. Now our last question
comes from Max B. Max says, hi, Austin and Robert. Thank you for all you do. I'm a long-time listener,
and I have a question about my taxable brokerage account. Here's some context. I'm 24 years old. I'm in
graduate school. I receive $4,000 per month in a scholarship. I have $100,000 of student loan debt,
but I have $30,000 invested across my Roth, my taxable in Bitcoin. I'm matching a part-time
401k at 3%. I have a six-month emergency fund at $10,000.
and all of my remaining cash, which I'm saving for a wedding,
is going in a high-yield savings account, paying nearly 5%.
Now, I've invested into a few individual stocks back in 2018 when I first opened my brokerage account.
Those were Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Eli Lilly, Realty Income Corporation, and Berkshire Hathaway.
Fast forwarded this year, and I'm now too busy in graduate school to track these individual
companies.
I've started investing into the ETFs you mentioned because they're easier to just set it and
forget it while I'm trying to build my base.
So what do you recommend I do with the individual stocks? Because I'm up over 100% with most of them.
Do I consolidate them into the ETFs? So don't have to worry about individual stock picking. Do I let them ride?
What do you guys think? I'll take this one off. I think you should absolutely consolidate them into the ETFs we talk about, right?
Because Robert and I, we want everyone to build their base of $100,000 invested. And you got to do that through the ETFs, right, a diversified portfolio before you start doing some individual stock picking.
and trying to get sexy with it in the portfolio and make some money here and there and whatever, right?
That's cool. You can have fun doing that once you have your base built, but we want to make sure you have your base built before you start picking individual stocks.
Because, I mean, really good example here is what happened with Disney. You know, you've got Disney stock. I'm going to pull it up real quick here so we can all talk about this out loud. You bought it in 2018. You probably paid $10,510 for it.
It went all the way up to $180. And then it crashed by 57.
between 2021 and 2023.
That's a 57% crash because you got it in a single stock here and we can't predict that stuff.
What I do know is that the S&P, the NASDAQ, and some of the funds we talk about are not going to
crash 57% like that.
I mean, that's a black swan event if I've ever seen one where Disney was just kind of a little
bit of political stuff as well as some movie flops.
There's a lot of things that can really impact that.
So if it were me, I would cash those out and put them into the ETFs we talk about.
the only one I would keep is Berkshire Hathaway, because at its core, Berkshire Hathaway is very
similar to an ETF. It's a company that owns equity in a lot of other companies. So if you
want to keep that one, I would not blame you one bit. I have a ton of Berkshire Hathaway myself,
and I kind of treat it like an ETF. Yeah, I agree, Austin, especially because he mentioned
how busy he is now. He's unable to keep track of things. And one of the biggest things that
happen like in the Disney instance is you can't control where things are going. And if you're not
paying attention, it's even worse. And so I like the idea of migrating all of those funds while he's
at a really nice profit into some of these funds we talk about because then he can really focus on
getting through school, making more money, and really just defining what's next for him in his financial
journey. So I like that takeaway and I think it's a great approach. Max, we're wishing you the best man.
Thank you so much for your question.
Everyone, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Rich Habits
podcast.
Don't forget, Robert and I are hosting on August 15 at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, our webinar all about
pre-IPO investing and angel investing.
We're going to show you our playbook, the companies we invested into, how much money we've made,
the companies we should have invested into, as well as the opportunity to invest alongside
of us in some awesome, cool companies in the future.
We're talking SpaceX, OpenAI.
I mean, some of these crazy companies that everyone knows and loves, and we want to unlock
that asset class to our listeners.
We're going to explain everything in the webinar, so be sure to join us.
So we can't wait to see you there.
There's a link in the show notes below to do that.
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