Rich Habits Podcast - Q&A: Stock Market All Time Highs, Roth vs. Traditional, and Arbitrage

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

In this episode of the Rich Habits Podcast, Robert Croak and Austin Hankwitz answer your questions!---Public has finally released options trading on their platform! To learn more about all of the product features Public offers, click here!---⭐ Download our FREE Budgeting Template – ⁠click here⁠⭐ Earn 5.1% on your savings with a High-Yield Cash Account – ⁠click here⁠⭐ Automatically buy stock where you shop with Grifin – ⁠click here⁠⭐ Protect your family with term life insurance from Suriance – ⁠click here⁠⭐ Watch the replay of our covered call webinar – ⁠⁠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]---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.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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on Spotify. Happy Thursday. Now, before we jump in to the questions, we have some very, very exciting news to share. Public.com, the all-in-one investing platform is now, as of January 23rd, the cheapest way anyone in the world can trade options, point-blank period. That's because they're doing something no other investing platform has done ever before. They're sharing 50% of their options trading revenue directly with you, the customer, the investor, the Rich Habits podcast, listener. Whenever you trade options on public, you will get something back minimizing your transaction costs.

By them sharing 50% of their options revenue means you all will know exactly how much they make from your options trades because they're literally giving you half. You, the listeners, that's right. everyone here that follows along on rich habits. Public believes transparency is incredibly important, not just so you understand their incentives of what things cost, but also so they bring more transparency to the markets overall. So go to public.com and activate options trading before March 31st

to lock in your lifetime rebate, Public, the cheapest way to trade options. If you have not yet tried learning how to trade options, how to use them to generate income, We've got a little announcement to make regarding this. A lot of people have been asking about this. Yes, we finally, finally, finally, I know, don't come for us. We've been so busy. And we opened our mouths in Q4 of 2023 talking about putting out this webinar and it's

finally going to happen. Austin, what time and what is the date of the webinar? Because I am so excited to promote this. Everyone has been coming for us saying, when are you doing it? When are you doing it? So tell the audience the time and the date. That's right. We will be hosting the long-awaited covered call webinar, live stream, however you want to call it here.

But we're going to be live streaming how we do covered calls, the rich habits way, how I've been able to generate $4,050 in passive income on my covered calls completely passively and easily on Tesla stock over the last four months or so. That's going to happen February 7 at 4 p.m. Eastern time. It's going to be live. You're going to ask us questions. We're going to answer your questions. We're going to bring in the Wall Street experts to also answer your questions. Robert has a special guest he's bringing as well, right? This is going to be collaborative.

This is going to be an environment for people to learn, to practice. We're going to share with you different ideas, different automations to use. It's going to be a blast. So please, there's a link in our description below where you can click and save a spot. We only have so many spots available. Literally, there's only a thousand. So if you guys don't make in the first thousand, you're not going to make it. So click the link in the description below.

It's going to be right there. click Save My Spot, email address, first name, last name, and show up when it's live stream time, and we'll see you there. And did I mention, or did Austin mention it's free. We have gathered our big brains along with some really good guests, and we are going to knock this out of the park. It's going to be such an informative webinar that all of you will finally understand these covered call strategies that we talk about, broken down bit by bit, just like we always do here, rich habits. so everyone can learn yet another strategy to help them in their wealth building journey. I can't wait for this webinar. And hopefully you all will join.

Remember, there are limited seats. So let's get into this episode. We have a lot of great questions. So our first question comes from Daniel W. Daniel says, I'm trying to start my Roth IRA. However, I've reached out to two separate brokerages, Charles Schwab and Vanguard. And unfortunately, I can't invest into fractional shares of ETFs through their platform. Vanguard will only allow me to fractionally invest into their own

ETFs, which is great for VOO but nothing else. Do you know of any other platforms that allow for Roth IRA investing in fractional shares of all ETFs that exist? Robert, I'll kick this one off. I use M1 Finance for my Roth IRA and I do that for two reasons. The first reason, Daniel, is you already called it out. They have fractional investing for any stocks, any ETFs. I can find them all on there.

It's very simple. M1 Finance is the next thing. name of that. And so one, fractional investing. Two, they allow me to create something called a pie with slices inside of it. Now, the pie is the strategy. And so for me, the strategy is the Roth IRA. Now, the slices are the specific ETFs and the weightings of those ETFs that I want inside of that strategy. So for me, I've got like 80 or 90% of my Roth IRA into the VO-O-S-P-Y-I-V-V, just these big index funds that track the S&P-500. And the other. 10 or 20% of my Roth IRA is across other ideas, if that's a smaller index fund or maybe even a

Bitcoin ETF, whatever I really feel like doing. But I have the vast majority of that and the flexibility to choose that with M1 finance. Robert, do you have any feedback? No, I think it's a great strategy. It's a great question. And it's really just all about understanding your options. Not everyone does fractional. You know, some places have higher fees. You just really have to pick what works for you. And M1 finance is a great place for this particular strategy. And just to always remember that investing in these types of strategies is not a one size fits all structure. So do what works for you, research what works for you based on your age, your risk tolerance, and what your goals are. And the rest will take care of itself because there's many platforms

that you can do these types of strategies with. And it's just all about you charting out your own course because investing is never one size fits all. And just as a reminder, we're actually picking all of this week's questions from our email address. Rich Habits Podcast at gmail.com. We have countless emails we still need to get back to. We receive three or four a day from you all and they're very in depth. So stay tuned on that. But if you do have a question to ask us, you can always send us a DM on Instagram at

Rich Habits Podcast. You can email us, Rich Habits Podcast at gmail.com. Or you can drop a comment on the post that Robert and I share every week on the public app. Just find Austin Hankwitz or Robert Croke on public. We post about, hey, y'all have questions. Let us know. All of last week's questions came from.

from the public app. So it's another place. We'll be harvesting our questions for these episodes. Now, our next question comes from Natasha C. Natasha says, Hey, guys, I love the podcast and I've been listening to it every week now for a very long time. I have a question, though.

I'm not sure if I should do a Roth or a traditional 401K. I was thinking of doing a traditional 401k up to my 3% match and then doing a backdoor Roth IRA for both me and my husband. Let me know what you think. Okay, so Natasha, you just said two different things. So as a reminder here, The 401k is with your employer. The IRA is through your individual, right?

Your social security number, the individual retirement account. They are independent of one another. They're two separate accounts. And you can do both of them at the same time. Now, your original question was, I'm not sure if I should do a Roth or traditional 401K. That means that, you know, there's a traditional 401k and a Roth 401k. I had a Roth 401k with my employer because I wanted after tax dollars to be growing for me. So whenever it was retirement time, I could take that.

the after-tax dollars out tax-free and spend it however I wanted to. However, a lot of people don't have that luxury. Only so many employers offer Roth 401k is the vast majority of employers offer the traditional 401k. Now, Robert, we have a saying, we've been saying this for a while now. Match beats Roth beats traditional. Let's walk through that now with Natasha. The match from the employer, Roth 401K or traditional 401K does not matter.

The match is always a match. You want that free money. Now, if you're really trying to figure out Roth 401k to traditional 401k and you have that opportunity to pick between the two of them, just pick the Roth because you have, you know, tax free money now in retirement. I think that's a better idea because you know exactly what you're paying in taxes now. It's hard to predict what future taxes are going to look like. So I always pick the Roth. 3% match there. Next is the Roth IRA. We want to make sure we're maxing that out every single year at $7,000 and then finally the traditional brokerage account, public.com. If you have money left over,

assuming you've got the match, you maxed out the Roth and you still have this money left go head over to public.com, buy some music royalties, buy some index funds, buy some crypto, buy some single stock, cybersecurity, AI. We talk about this stuff all the time. That's how Robert and I have the playbook written. That has worked for us and that's what we think you should do as well. Yeah, I guess the best takeaway for this question and so many people get it wrong or they're confused is why not pay your taxes now? Get it out of the way. Have that tax-free growth for life rather than kicking the can down the road because you feel like you're saving more now and having more to invest, take the unknown out of the equation by doing the Roth and taking the taxes now,

pay them, get them over with, have that tax free growth because you never know what's going to happen to your tax structure and what that amount's going to be down the road. That's why we're always telling you to take the tax hit now, get it over with, get that Roth maxed out, and then explore these other structures to be able to get max earnings on your investment money. That's our opinion and I think that's the best strategy you can have. So this is actually really interesting you say that, Robert. The top income tax rate reached above 90% from 1944 to 1963, having peaked in 1944 when top taxpayers paid an income rate of 94% in 1944, right? It is bonkers. That was way long ago. Who knows if history is

going to repeat itself, but like, I don't want to get a 94% tax rate. I know what I have now. And I know what that looks like in the future once I pay that. I want to control my controllables and predict as much as I can. Yep, I love it. Great way to come back on that. And you heard it here, people. Please take notes, take action, and follow along, and the rest will take care of itself. So our next question comes from Cheryl G.

Cheryl says, thanks for considering my question. You all recommend SPY, which has an expense ratio of 0.68%, which is considerably more expensive than other securities you talk about. Can you please explain your rationale as to why SPYYI? PYI is being recommended, even though the fees are so expensive. Good question, Cheryl. And let me explain this to you as simply as I can. SPYI is a covered call ETF.

Their whole focus is to make sure that they can best track the total performance of the S&P 500. However, they're not alone in doing that. There's also two other very popular ETFs that have a very, I mean, I'd say identical investment objective, XYLD and JEPI. XYLD has a lower expense ratio, and so does JEPI. However, XYLD, they don't do the same strategies regarding the covered calls. They write at the money versus out of the money. And long story short, they underperformed drastically.

S.PY. outperformed XYLD by 8% in 2023. And they outperformed JEPI by 12% in 2023. So are you paying a little bit more for this ETF? sure, I mean, you're paying, you know, 0.68%. But are you seeing the drastic outperformance against their competitors that more than offsets the incremental payment that you are paying? Yes, right?

That's what you're paying for. And that's what they do so very well. So I love SPYI. I think they're triple win, win, win in my book. One, they actually track the S&P. They do it very well. Two, they use Section 1256 contracts, which are very tax efficient. And three, they write their covered calls and pay them out in a

way where their distribution yield is paid monthly, 12% annually. It is unbelievably incredible. So really good question, Cheryl. Yeah. And the key takeaway for me on this question and great way to cover it, Austin, is this. We spend more hours than you can imagine a week, Austin and I and our team flushing out every single thing that we talk about. We don't shill anything. We don't talk about anything that we don't invest in ourselves. So we are always going to find the best of the best of how to optimize your portfolios and ours. And so, of course, we're always taking into consideration the expense ratio of that item. Is it worth it? You know, SPYI in particular. Yes, it's a little bit higher than other ones, but it's actively managed. It's outperforming. There's just

so many reasons that make it better. So we're never going to shill you and we're never going to give you something that we would look at as a call out in our education process, that we have fully flushed out the reasons why. So you always have to keep that in consideration that we are putting all of our efforts forth to make sure we flush out the best opportunities that are out there in the markets, no matter what category or sector it's in. I couldn't have said it any better, Robert. Our next question comes from Julith G. Jules says, I love your podcast, and I've been learning a lot from you too. I have a question, though, regarding some extra money I have, sitting in a high yield savings account waiting to be invested. Should I wait until VOO is down a little

bit before I start investing? I just feel like new all-time highs isn't a great time to start investing. Robert, do you want to take this one first? I mean, this is an easy one. No, no, no. No, you should never wait. All jokes aside, you should never wait and try to time the market. I had a gentleman and jump on my live last night and said, well, I could time the market. And I was like, good for you, buddy. If you think you can successfully time the market, then that is just kudos to you. But the bottom line is this. In almost all situations, dollar cost averaging is the key to the win and how you should look at your investment strategies. You should never be sitting on the sideline with your money in some savings account making 0.000% when you could be dollar cost averaging into the V0.0.0.0.000. You should never be.

of the world and optimizing your wealth building strategies. We did a bit on an episode in the middle of 2023 where we talked about in Austin might have the numbers in front of us of what would happen if you missed the eight best investment days of the S&P 500 over the last 50 years. And it was crazy the difference in return. You almost went from this hundred and some percent return to zero or losing money just by missing the eight best days or nine best days. And that is just a testament to not trying to time the markets and just being in the markets. And we always say that don't time the market. It's time in the market, not timing the market. And it's just so important to understand that, especially when you're talking about V-O-O and the S&P 500.

Julia, just so we're on the same page here, in my investment accounts this morning as we're recording this, I invested another $2,000 in the S&P 500 today. And we are at all-time highs. And you know, I'm going to do next month, I'm going to invest another 2000. And you know, I'm going to do the month after that. I'm going to keep investing more, right? Because two reasons. One, I have a very long time horizon. We know over the short term that it's pretty unpredictable. I think Robert and I would agree on that. And you as well, Julia. However, over the long term, several years, decades, we know which direction the stock market's likely going to go. And that is up into the right. So if you do not need to have this money over the next 60, 30, 90 days, whatever it is here, and you have a long-term investment horizon,

then invest the money into the markets toward your retirement, right? And if you can't grasp that for some reason, if it's hard for you to understand and maybe you just have a lot of emotion with it, try and automate the process. If that is, you know, getting the auto-invest feature turned on on public or fidelity or whatever broker you use, but kind of automate that where it happens behind the scenes. Maybe it comes out of your paycheck, kind of like the 401K does whenever we get paid right. That has helped a lot of people take fear and emotion out of investing, just automating that process away. And you'll soon see, Julie, if that over time, if it's months or even years, even, for example, I remember I had a friend here who refused to invest during 2022 and

23 because they thought there's no way the market's going to keep going on. The economy's bad, this, this and that. And they just didn't want to invest. Well, what I did is I turned on my auto invest. I just kept auto investing, auto investing, auto investing. And my returns outperform the market. I think it was 34, 35% last year in 2023 is what I returned to my portfolio. Now, I did that without even looking, right? I just picked my index funds. I didn't even care. I just kept going. And now I look back and say, well, that was cool. Let's try again this year, right? Let's try again. Keep going and going and going. I don't care where the market is right now. I believe in American capitalism. And I believe in these long-term index funds that Robert and I have talked about for several

months now. Yeah, the easiest way for everyone listening and following along to understand and a practice that you can implement right now in seconds is to learn to zoom out. Every day people message me by the dozens. Did you see Bitcoin today? Did you see ChainLink is down 12% today? And I, and sometimes I'll be like, no, I don't look at the day to day prices. I don't have a reason to. But the easiest practice you can do is go to a browser, type in Bitcoin price, click on it. And instead of, of looking at all the red you see for the last seven days, click on year to date, click on five years, click on 10 years and zoom out and you can see that it's just this. Always going up and down, but to the right. Once you learn that practice, it will calm you down. It will get you to

understand that you don't want to look at the minutia in this day-to-day battle because you'll drive yourself crazy. If you believe in a sector, you believe in an investment, you've done your research, then stop worrying about the day-to-day fluctuations because it shouldn't matter in that long-term horizon. It's just way better to zoom out. I couldn't have said it better myself, Robert. Now, our next question comes from Tarun M. Turun says, I love your podcast during my daily drive to work. Thank you for the great content. I have a few quick questions for you. So, Robert, let's do some rapid fire. The first one is, what are the index funds you guys recommend investing into? Go. Me right now, V-O-O-V-G-T-Q-Q-Q-Q-A-I-Q, and I'd probably throw in some M-O-A-T for the long term.

I am right there with you. I would add BRK, Berkshire Hathaway. You know, you can buy that fractionally through their Berkshire Hathaway A or B shares. I would probably also want to add SPYI into that because I like some income. QQQ-Q-I is around the corner. They'll be releasing that as a new ETF in a week, which is really exciting. So stay tuned on that. That's going to be a massive 14 to 15% distribution yield for investors to track the total performance of the NASDAQ.

You called out Mote. I love that. Yeah, I love all those answers, Robert. Is there anything specifically related to AI beyond AIQ that comes to mind? Oh, there's just so many good ones. People should just really be looking at Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, META. You had a big call out on META a few months ago. People are sleeping on meta because a lot of times people,

struggle equating because they think meta is Facebook and nobody uses Facebook anymore, but they forget that Facebook might not be the most popular social media platform, but there's so much more to meta. Or they look at Google or Microsoft and be like, oh my God, why would Microsoft be important? But there's just so many really good AI plays right now that are super important. And so those would be the other ones I would look at when it comes to AI, but also in crypto as well. There's just some really good cryptos in artificial intelligence like Fetch AI, Ocean Protocol, AGIX.

There's a lot of AI plays right now in all sectors of investing that I'm really, really bullish on and dollar cost averaging into every couple weeks. Love it. Very cool. His next quick question was, what's an approach to open a Roth IRA if I'm above the income threshold? It's called a backdoor Roth IRA to ruin. It's very simple. Just go to Google, type in backdoor Roth IRA. Fidelity is going to walk you through it. Carrymoney.com can walk you through it very simply. And this third question is, what are your thoughts on using public.com for investing? Obviously, we love public.com. We use them for investing all the time. My favorite thing about them to ruin is their investment plans. So just like you can talk about automating your investing, you can do that on public and you can build out your investment plan. So say, okay, I want a dollar cost average into the six index funds that Austin and Robert just talked about every single two weeks.

I'm going to put 50 bucks in every two weeks into these six index funds. You can make an investment plan on public.com. You type in the tickers of the index funds. You talk about how much waiting you want. You type in the waitings there. You say every other week, 50 bucks, go. And it's going to do it for you. That's it.

Congratulations. There's no emotion. There's no fear. It's just automating your investing into these index funds that we talk about all the the time. So that's my favorite thing about public.com or these investment plans. Before we jump into the next question, I want to remind everyone that public is officially now the cheapest way to trade options. It just launched. We've been on this options

kick. We're talking about it a lot. We're doing the webinar. But that's because for public, they're doing something that no other brokerage has done before. They're sharing 50% of their options revenue directly with you, the customer. Whenever you trade options on public, you get something back minimizing your transaction costs. So go to public.com and activate options trading before March 31st to lock in your lifetime rebate. Public.com is the cheapest way to trade option. What a great reminder, Robert. And yeah, everyone go tune in on February 7 at 4 p.m. Eastern Time to the webinar that Robert

and I are hosting. There's going to be a link in the description below to learn more. So our next question comes from Samantha E. She says, hey, y'all, do you all have a favorite budgeting app? Do you think it's beneficial to pay for a budgeting app? Samantha, we do have a favorite budgeting app. Before we share that, though, just want to remind everyone, we have our own budgeting template. It is a Google sheet.

It's completely free for anyone to download and use. There's going to be a link to that in the description below as well. So go check that out. But, Robert, my favorite budgeting app is called co-pilot. They do a really good job of helping people track their recurring expenses, track their budgets on a daily and monthly basis, track their net worth, their investments, their debt, their loans, everything in between. It's a really holistic bird's eye view into someone's financial picture.

Yeah, I mean, co-pilot, you know, I was a big, you know, talker about Mint, and I used that for many years. But co-pilot definitely up the ante. They have AI integration to really keep you up to date with everything you're doing, where you're at on your network journey, all of that. So I'm with you on co-pilot. We are not getting paid to say that. We just like the app. And we're always going to try and provide you guys with the best possible platforms and investments that we like, we flush out, and we use. So I agree with you on co-pilot.

Yeah, co-pilot's awesome. So go check that out. Oh, and to answer that question yearly, yeah, Copilot has like a free version and a paid version. I would totally pay, you know, the $80, $100, $120 a year to use the premium version of a budgeting app. I think that's totally worth it. Because I mean, that's just an investment in yourself, right? That $120 you spend might be what is able to help you save $1,000 that year or $2,000 that year, right? So great return on your money. Our next question comes from Brian B. Brian asks, after last week's Q&A episode where you touched on the Bitcoin spot ETF announcement, I checked my Fidelity account and I noticed that I hold Bitcoin in my Fidelity crypto account. What would be the benefit of holding the spot Bitcoin ETF versus

the underlying crypto? Because both of these have the same liquidity, so I'm not sure if I'm missing anything. Robert, you want to answer this one? Yeah, this is a good question and many people don't understand. We're always going to tell everyone that'll listen to buy the underlying asset. Buy it directly. You can buy it at public.com, a great place to go. We love that, but you can also get it at Coinbase or Kucoin or Crypto.com. There's a lot of platforms that are trustworthy. You can go buy the Bitcoin directly. But the reason for the ETF is for these large family offices, newer investors, and people

that want to help with management. They want that custodian of their money. So you're not getting any real advantages unless you want management help of your portfolio and crypto of buying it through them versus buying it direct. It's just a personal preference of what you want to do because you are owning the same underlying asset. I think at the end of the day, the people who want the spot Bitcoin ETF that really are going to help them with their investing journey are the folks who have these retirement investment accounts that never really could buy Bitcoin to begin with. So by being able to have a little bit exposure

to Bitcoin, maybe they have outsized returns in the future. And that's what the spot Bitcoin ETF does for them. I don't need to own the spot Bitcoin ETF because I just buy Bitcoin straight up. I just buy it on Coinbase or public or uphold or I buy it on M1 finance. I just buy it all over the place. I even have some Bitcoin, Robert, on my cash app. Do you know the cash app has Bitcoin? Yes, I keep getting these requests from people that think I'm just going to give them free money. And they will request $50 in Bitcoin on cash app and then just keep pinging me messages to get me to send them money.

That's so funny. I'm going to start requesting you now. Get you to pay for my pizza. Do not plant that idea with anyone because I have people that will DM me and they'll be like, hey, Robert, I love your content. You're so successful. Will you pay my rent? Hey, Robert, I can't make my car payment this month. Will you pay my car payment? I'm like, I don't know what I can do with all of that. I try to help as many people as I can with information and time and all of that, but it's just tough to be put in that situation. Well, speaking of loan payments, let's jump into this last

question by Kelly. She says, I've got a question about my student loans. Is it possible for me to leverage $20,000 in order to pay off my $30,000 in student loans. Hear me out. Here's what I'm trying to say. I have $30,000 in student loan debt from nursing school. And I'm wondering if I can invest some of my savings, aka this $20,000, in a way that could cover my $460 month student loan payment. Then, once I've used the dividends to pay off my payment, I would now have dividends to

just reinvest anywhere I wanted to. I'm hoping there's a way that I can finagle some money around to. hopefully benefit me financially in the future. Gosh, shout to Kelly. Kelly's over here, like, getting the arbitrage game and taking it up and latch. This is crazy. Yeah, I like it, and I love anyone that's thinking positive arbitrage because we talk about it every single day. It's always getting everyone that will listen as we shout to the mountaintops that you want to have that positive arbitrage in your favor over someone else's, the banks, the student loan debt, whoever you owe that to. But in this situation, the math might not math out. Because of

we look at it, you've got this $20,000, you want to arbitrage it to pay the payment on the student loans and then after the student loans are paid off, you're still going to have that money to keep rolling along. I love the idea, but I don't think it's going to work out from a stability standpoint or a gain standpoint, because if you have to make a 15% consistent return to be able to make that $400 a month payment on your $20,000 that you're using as your upfront money to create that 15% return, it's probably not going to work out continually, but I love the concept of it. And I definitely think it's worth trying, but you still might have to come up with some extra money outside of the investment amount to be able to pay those payments every month. I love it that you're

thinking in ways of making your money have inertia. We always talk about make your money work as hard for you as you work to get it. And I love this strategy, but it's going to take some work. Yeah, I'm over here just thinking like, okay, $20,000, 10% annual return, that's $2,000. You know, she needs about, call it $5,000 a year. So she's like kind of halfway there, not really. I just, yeah, you're right. The math ain't math in, unfortunately. But, Kelly, I love where your heads at, right?

This is the type of questions that we love answering here on the podcast because this is what the Rich Habits podcast is all about. How can we use our assets to pay for our liabilities? And obviously, you know, you're a nurse right now, probably making $60,000 to $70,000 a year. So it definitely paid off for you, right? Taking on these student loans worked, which is great. So let's try and figure out maybe instead of taking all of your savings to like pay off the student loans, maybe we take a little bit of savings, bring the student loans down from maybe

30K to 20K or even 15K. And then you take the other maybe five or 10K that might be in your savings. Maybe you could park that into a SPY that'll pay you $1,000 or $2,000 a year depending on how much you put into that, which could cover a couple monthly payments, right? or maybe you take some money and you buy some real estate. There's a bunch of different ways to think about this. But I love this because it really brings into perspective how much of a liability that student loans are and that people put them in kind of the forefront of their wealth building journey. They think I've got to pay off my student loans before I can start investing.

Kelly said no and we would agree with her. You know, Ireland, for example, my girlfriend, she has student loans like $30, $35,000 worth. But I told her, I was like, listen, you don't need to go gung-ho focus to pay off these student loans before. you start investing, it's not black and white like that. There's a little gray area, right? You could do 200 a month in your Roth IRA, build your base, get started investing, and then anything beyond that, obviously pay off the student loans in a normal fashion. But, you know, if you have an extra couple hundred bucks, put that in a raw IRA. You don't have to worry about paying off these student loans so, so quickly. So, Kelly, I love the question. I think Robert Gade have an even better

answer, and we really, really love where your heads at. I have another takeaway on this, too. And this is really kind of a bigger part of this community and this ethos that we're building around rich habits. And it really revolves around the complexity and the thought process that went into that question. I am seeing more and more in our DMs and our emails and people that are reaching out. You guys are really learning. And you're really understanding that in business and in life and in finance, never take anything at face value. Never look at something and say, oh, well, this is it. This is the way it's done and this is how I have to accept it.

Think outside of the box. Think of ways to better keep more money for yourself. Find those legal ways, those tax advantage ways to make your overall financial situation better. Someone asked me the other day and they were like, man, it's so bad that we're doing so well in crypto and I'm making a ton of money, but there's no way to get any tax benefits on my gains. And I'm like, what do you mean? There's no way to get tax benefits. And then I shared with them some various ways that you can offset capital gains in cryptocurrency.

We should probably do, you know, a portion of that. Yeah, we should probably do an episode about that. Because I shared with them several ways that are really cool. One of them is taking your crypto gains and you can invest in opportunity zones. And if you stay in the opportunity zone investment, say you buy a building or you buy a multifamily in this opportunity zone, if you do it for five years, I think you get a 25. to 50% reduction in your capital gains. And if you hold that investment for 10 years, it goes to zero. So there are ways to have these taxed advantage benefits in all aspects of investing. So I really love, for me, the takeaway of this episode in the last month or so is how complex you all's questions are,

because it really opens up the dialogue that you have to think outside the box and think of asking the questions that you may think is just a no or it's impossible, and let us help you find a way to make those extra gains for yourself and put it into your pocket. What a great way to round off this episode of the Rich Habits Podcast. Everyone, thank you so much for hanging out with us on our question and answer episodes. We think for the most fun episodes. We get to hear from y'all. Shout out to Kelly, Brian, Samantha, Tarun, Judith, Cheryl, and Natasha and Daniel for sharing

our questions via email. If anyone else has a question to ask us, shoot us a DM on Instagram. Send us an email at Rich Habitspodcast at gmail.com. Ask us a question inside the public app. There's actually a pinned post on my profile at Austin Hankwitz. Just hit a comment there, join the other couple dozen folks who asked us questions. We are here to be a resource. We're here to share, here to join the community and be excited alongside y'all.

Don't forget, we're hosting the covered call option contract webinar. February 7 at 4 p.m. Eastern Time. There's a link in the description below to go learn more about that. And as always, thank you all for following along on the Rich Habits podcast journey. We're so excited about doing this covered call webinar, and it just times itself really well with the announcement on public.com that we just talked about for options trading. Just so much great information moving forward as we venture into 2024 and find the ways to optimize all of our financial journeys in a positive way. So again, thank you all so much. share the podcast with a friend.

Get us those five-star reviews if you love what we provide. And just always from the bottom of our hearts, thank you for joining. Have a great rest of your week.