Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Former Financial Advisor: “Do Not Buy A House!” Do THIS Instead! | Humphrey Yang

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. What I'm going to tell you right now is going to be very different. What are the worst decisions people can make with their money in 2025? Right now, I don't have that cash. It's all fully in the market. How do you stay sane when the market goes down?

Ideally, I just keep all that money in the investing portfolio forever. Let's talk about crypto. Oh, I have a 5X. 10x. How complex everything is. People saying you should sell everything. And you do the same for your meme coin strategy, right? Not financial advice. Hey guys, welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. It looks like 2025 is going to be a wild ride for everyone who is interested in investing, starting a business, anything to do with finance. So today we have a financial expert here, Humphrey, who are going to talk to about building wealth in 2025 mistakes you can make with your money in

2025, a general wealth building advice. Because I feel like for a lot of young people, it looks like, 2025 could be a great year to start building wealth, especially when you see markets growing. It's like, it's a good place to start, right? Yeah, exactly. Everything's falling. Yep. Let's talk about that. Can we start with like a general budgeting strategy for people in 2025, how much you save, how much you invest? I'd like to say for most people that they should try to aim to save 20% of their come if they can. If they can do more, that's great. But most people, I think the average personal savings rate in the United States is about 4%. So if you can get up to 10, 15, 20%, that gives you a lot more flexibility. And that will help you save and invest more in the long run. When you say save,

like, okay, I'm putting aside 10%. Does it stay as cash or does it go into a high yield savings account? What would be the strategy there? Yeah, I would stockpile some cash until you have at least three to six months of an emergency fund saved up. So if your monthly expenses are $2,000 a month, that's what you need to live. You should at least save $6,000 or up to $12,000. Put that away, put that aside. That's high yield. Put it in a high yield account. You don't touch that money. That's just for emergencies. And then anything else you make on top of that and you can save, then you should invest that. That's the general guideline. What should be the investment strategy for someone who's just starting out? Yeah, so investment strategy super depends on the person,

risk tolerance and their time horizon. So if they need the money next year, I probably wouldn't say you should invest because let's say you need money for a wedding, right? And you know you're going to spend money on the wedding. If you invest that money and it goes down in value, you would probably feel pretty bad about it. And if you can't afford your wedding when you want to afford your wedding, that's not going to be good. Let's say your time horizon is 40 years. So you want that money to be your retirement money. Then in that case, invest all you want and you don't have to worry too much about it. Kind of put it into the market and forget about it. For most people, so I'm going to get to what you should invest in now, for most people, I think ETFs are pretty solid,

and those are just exchange-traded funds. That just means you're buying one fund, and within that one fund, it encompasses, let's say, 500 other stocks within that fund. So by buying that one fund, you were buying literally 500 stocks all at once. Do you just buy that fund, or is there a split? Like, it has to be like, I'm 20% international. An ETF, the trust. tracks Bitcoin, right? We just have these. What would the strategy be there? Let's talk about long term. Let's talk about like 10 years. So there are a lot of ETFs. You don't just buy a random ETF. You typically want to buy an S&P 500 ETF. That's the U.S. stock market. You can balance it out with international ETFs. So the rest of the world has a ETF called, I think it's like all world minus US.

So basically it's like every, it's like every other stock in the world besides the United States. So you can do that. And then you could also balance it with bonds. What's the percentage? Yeah, so a typical percentage, let's say you wanted a three fund portfolio, which is a very famous portfolio. It's a lot of people online like the three fund portfolio because it's very well balanced as well as it does well in times of prosperity, but doesn't have as much downside risk. The typical split on a three fund portfolio is something like 50% in U.S. stocks, 25 to 30% in international stocks, and then the rest would be bonds. But sometimes bonds for a younger investor is not risky enough. So that's something you kind of have to balance away with yourself. Like if you're a riskier type of investor,

you might do more in U.S. stocks because U.S. stocks are probably, they have the greatest potential for upside, but they could also go down too. Same thing with international stocks, yeah. And where does crypto, real estate, everything else fall into like, how do you decide about those things? And like even individual stocks. Because Nvidia, that's like the best investments ever. Yeah. So I think there's this. So we'll talk about how to build wealth because what I just kind of laid out for you in terms of the three fund portfolio is a very safe way to compound your wealth.

But if you want to build wealth faster, typically you need to take a little more risk. And the more risk could involve individual stocks. It could involve you getting into real estate. it could be that you buy some crypto. But for the general person who doesn't really want to spend too much time investing, the portfolio I laid out earlier is perfect. You might want to add 5% in alternatives like crypto or real estate. You could do that.

But then so like, because I'm thinking about myself, like what number do you reach when you start thinking about something alternative? Like, okay, let's say, I don't know, 100K invested in the stock market. Is that the time to think about other things? Yeah, that's a tough question. I think you can always think about it, but higher numbers better for thinking about other things because the way capital works, you know,

if you get 10% on 100K, that's a lot more significant than 10% on $100. So as your numbers and your portfolio balance grows, you can maybe set aside a portion of your portfolio to take higher concentrated risk so that you could try to make more money. But you never start with it, right? you start with, ideally, you start with something. Ideally, you want to get your base up to at least $100,000

and then you kind of, from there, maybe you take small concentrated bets on things that you believe in. I think the danger of taking big swings when your portfolio isn't $100,000 already is that you could go to zero again. Or it could be really demoralizing. Let's say you get your portfolio up to $50,000 and you spend half of it and you put it into an individual stock

that goes down 80%, then you're kind of right back where you started maybe, maybe you lost a few years of progress. And that can be really frustrating. So instead, what I like to see people do is get that momentum and keep that momentum going. Just invest in. How often do you check your balance? And how do you do regular investing? What would be your advice?

Is it like manually or you can automate it? You can automate it. So you can do something in your brokerage account or even your Roth IRA or IRA or 401 where you contribute a certain amount every interval. typically every two weeks is good, every month is good too. But that's called dollar cost averaging. You just want to always buy into the market. Typically, people...

Is there a good day? I know for crypto weekends are good, right? I don't think there's ever such thing as a good day. I think it doesn't really matter. As long as you're consistently investing, I think that's more important. Does it buy into like... So you oughtn't you tell it like every second Monday of the month, you buy this, this and that. And every brokerage can do that?

Most brokerages have that feature. Yeah. It's just called recurring investment. Can you recommend maybe two or three brokerage apps? Yeah, my favorite brokerages are probably fidelity. That's like the biggest kind of well, one of the most well capitalized brokerages in the United States. Another one I think that's very beginner friendly that got a lot of hate in 2021 was Robin Hood,

but they've made a lot of improvements since. You just have to kind of be careful there. It's a little more gamified. Do they have automated? They do have automated. Yeah, you can automate it. And then some other ones like Schwab is fine. M1 finance is good too.

In general, the bigger the brokerage, usually the better. So you mentioned those different accounts. Sure. You mentioned like brokerage, like general investment, 401K, Roth IRA. So if a person just starts investing and they're aiming for like 10 years, would you start a 401K or would you just put it in a brokerage account? Because 401K, you can only start taking out money when you're like 70 something, right? Yeah, I believe it's, uh, I think 4-1K, sorry, I get a lot of the accounts confused sometimes,

but I'm pretty sure 401K you can start to take contributions out, or sorry, your earnings out at 59 and a half, but then they start requiring you to take money out around the age of 70 and a half. I think that's required minimum distributions. Because when we started 401K and we started only two years ago, because when I was talking to my husband, he's like, why would we just put money there? and like we are 34, like 33, we're so active.

Why don't we invest in business? Like, why would you invest in 401K? And I have my financial advisor who's like, Marina, you don't understand. Compound interest without tax. That's a writer for your business. So he's kind of making us contribute every year. But for me, psychology, again, I come from a country where we had so many turmoil where our savings just disappeared.

So what would be your general advice? Like, do you start with a general brokerage account or you go straight? into tax savings strategies. Yeah, that's a great question. I believe with your audience, which probably a lot of them are non-U.S.-based, is my guess. You're going to have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the 401K. That makes total sense. And sometimes it's better to take control of your own destiny and just like take that money and go buy a house with it or buy a rental property with it and you can tangibly see the money there. I get that too. The reason why the 401k in America is so good is that it's a forced savings mechanism. So it's a

It forces people to save that normally wouldn't save. If you're already a great saver, like, let's say you save 50% of your income and you are a better active investor or you feel like you can do some business with it, maybe you do that instead. If you need the money in 10 years, like what you just said, then you probably wouldn't invest it in a 401K because you got to take that money out eventually. And if you put it in a 401k, you're not going to be able to take that money out. But you can borrow against your 401k. Yeah, you can borrow against it. There's some strategies. Yeah. But I would say in general, most people, if they need the money before they retire, brokerage is fine. Yeah, you're going to be taxed on it. But that's better than, let's say, paying penalties because you're withdrawing for Iraq. Because the balance is a great, like 10% or plus tax. I feel like a lot of people who are watching also just moved to the U.S. And they're like starting to realize how complex everything is. Very complex. Now, the 401k is worth it if your employer gives you the match. Yeah. Because that's just free money. And also if you have your own business because that's a write-off. And what I really is. And what I really is,

realized what my CPA told me, once you get a 401k distribution, it goes onto your W-2. So if you're applying for mortgage, that increases your W-2 income, so it's good for mortgage. Oh, that's good to know. That was another key takeaway. Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. Cool. Okay.

So we talked about saving, et cetera. What about real estate? What about, like, do you rent or do you rent? I currently rent. Yeah. Yeah. But in San Francisco, it's a lot cheaper to rent than to buy. So I live in San Francisco, the city.

Is there a general rule? So you said in San Francisco, it's cheaper to rent. Like, how do you calculate that? Well, I look at how much I pay in rent. And I look at the comparable amount that I would pay in mortgage and what type of house that would afford me. And for the same amount of rent, I would not be able to afford anything nice. It's just like I get maybe like a one-bedroom condo.

And I live currently in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom. So you're not following the rule where you live under your means? No, I'm definitely living under my means. for sure. Yeah. But not too low. But not too low. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I still need space for like my studio. And I realize I just kind of like the nicer place to live. So yeah. But don't you have phomo of like missing out on prices rising here? Yeah, I do. Because they double every 10 years, right? Here in the Bay. Yeah.

Mostly. Not San Francisco condo market. That's kind of stayed flat. That's like a crazy market. It's state flat. Yeah. That prices is so low and nobody. What's the?

Yeah. Because you can't really rent it out. If I can afford something down here and pay, you know, put a good down payment on it, I would probably do that. So down here would be the peninsula. Yeah. Because real estate tends to appreciate quite well down here. Yeah. And what I realized, a lot of people who bought here, they pay twice as much in mortgage versus what we pay in rent.

But they are, they have this upside when the property just, you know, gains a couple million. Yeah. Especially in the Bay Area where that's very, very common. I would say across the country. there are some cities where real estate hasn't appreciated in the last 10 years. And so that's what you have to consider. Like, where do you live? How does the appreciation look historically? Yeah. If it looks good historically, how? It might be a good idea. Yeah. Is it an indicator that it's probably going to continue growing? Um, I mean, in the finance world, you always say

has performance. It's not a predictor of future results, but I mean. Because I'm always worried like Hawaii, right? It's growing so. crazy in the past 10 years. Yeah, exactly. Is it going to continue or talk? Yeah, I think those are tougher questions and those kind of come down to more personal beliefs and decisions with their money. Have you ever considered buying real estate?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Have you bought anything or what's your plan here? No, I want to buy something probably the next year or two. So yeah, I'm still planning to, but mortgage rates right now are quite high. Yeah. Are you going to buy something to live in or you're going to rent it out? I would buy something to live in personally. Yeah, I think I thought about renting things out, but I don't really want to be someone's landlord.

I think that's what I've realized. Why not Airbnb, like all the depreciation things? I think I feel like I could just make way more money. With the stock market? Yeah, or just focusing on my main business. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

But you can have someone manage it. I guess I could. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I know you have an Airbnb. So we can talk about it later. I'm just trying to understand, like, other people's strategies.

Yeah. And I totally see how Airbnb didn't really do anything in terms of like income this year. It's just lost money and, you know, it generated good revenue, but it still went to like covering the mortgage, et cetera. Did you spend a lot of time on it? No. Okay. Well, I spent some time. I went there filming and like we bought the furniture.

Yeah. And we're like to say we had to change the air conditioner and we had to do the listing, the photo, like everything. Yeah. But that was cool experience. Okay. As long as you enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But not as much as compared to like my business. Right. Let's talk about crypto. Let's do it. I like crypto. I am so like this year. I'm like, should I buy meme coins?

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Get a quote or find an agent today at thehartford.com slash small business. Maybe you should. What do you think? What would be advice here? Okay. my crypto advice from what I'm going to tell you right now is going to be very different from my YouTube channel.

On my YouTube channel, my audience hates crypto. I've already tried to talk about Bitcoin. I'll try to talk about Ethereum. People are very anti-Bitcoin Ethereum on the channel. And so I just tend to shy away from it on the channel. I think my personal opinion is that crypto is one of the best ways to kind of level out wealth in a way.

like a meritocracy. So if you're able to identify really great coins and get in them early, that's like people actually do make a lot of money with that. However, for every one person that makes, let's say, a 20x or a 50x on a crypto coin, you have 99 people losing all their money. And I think that is incredibly difficult. That's the incredibly difficult part about crypto. And with crypto, your greed gets imagined, like unimaginably high. You get so grieve. because you're like, oh, I have a 5x. I want a 10x. And then that's hard to manage emotionally.

And if you're buying a lot of crypto, you have to watch it all day because it's 24-7. It never stops. So there are a lot of mental issues, not mental issues, I want to say, but it takes a toll on your mind if you're investing in crypto. However, I have seen people turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money just by buying the right crypto coin. But even knowing the right- And retiring at 20-something. Exactly. So how do you, have you tried thinking meme coins to invest in?

Yes, I have. How was it? Some are great, some are bad. How, what? I'm up. Yeah. And I do. This year?

Yeah. Yeah. So how do you find them? Through friends chats? Typically through friends chats. Yeah. I would say you have to be kind of plugged into a crypto community of some sort. You can do that by buying like, let's say, let's say you have the most

expensive NFT, right? Like back in 2021, it was like a board eight, right? They might have like a little insider group on Discord where you can kind of trade, trade ideas with each other. The longer you're in the crypto space, the more you get to know the people on in crypto. Sometimes there's crypto Twitter, so you get to know some of the influencers. Maybe if you know some the influencers, that's great. If you work in crypto, right? So it's mostly insider information. Yeah, I think there is some inside information, but there's also just like keeping a pulse of what's going on in the crypto markets. And you can even make money not being an insider, but you have to keep a pulse on what's going on all the time. And you have to be able to move fast and you have to be

very objective and not get too emotionally like tied into it. That's what's, that's what's very hard. Because even if you're right, if you're emotionally too invested and let's say you stay in the coin for too long, you could lose all your gains. So you track every single day what's going on. And if you see going down, you just sell. Something like that. I mean, I only, I'm only in like four right now, but I used to be in like, if you're in 10 to 20, it's hard to track everything. But if you're just in four, then you just check every, you know, you just check the four. What is the platform that you're using for? Or is it a different platform for every?

I have Coinbase and then I have a Solana wallet on Phantom and then I have a Meta Mask wallet from my Ethereum transactions. Okay. So those are decentralized exchanges. Yeah, I have Metamask. I have Coinbase. But I remember when I was trying to play with meme coins in 2021, I had to get in so many exchanges because they're all so different different platforms, you know, they only launched on this

exchange and you're like, oh, I need to transfer money there and convert it into some weird coin to buy another weird coin. These days it's a lot easier. Mostly it's just on like either you're either on the Salana chain or you're on let's say Ethereum or base, which is coinbase. So Phantom for Solana, Coinbase. Yes, not financial advice, but you know if you're trying to get into it, that's what you would do. But it's very hard. I would say if you're completely new to Crypto, you probably won't make money. You kind of have to have a good network of people you already know. You kind of have to get into it a little bit.

Or maybe you buy into a community, something like that. Okay. Let's do a simple strategy then. Let's do Bitcoin. What would be your recommended percentage of the portfolio that goes into Bitcoin? Of crypto. Yeah. No, in general.

Oh. If you believe in crypto for the long term, which Bitcoin is the best asset of all those, I'd probably put three to five percent of your portfolio in Bitcoin. Remember how it was 1 to 2%? It was? Like three or four years ago, I'd ask everyone would be like 1 to 2% now. I think BlackRock raised it from like 2% to 4% in their portfolio.

And like suddenly my financial advisor is like, yeah, 5%. Oh, wow. Yeah, 5%. I mean, 5% is not going to kill you. Then I go to such a fact. It's taking over. It just like, it's wild seeing this trend. And like people believing in crypto and then suddenly not believing.

It's just such a. Well, I think this year was pretty monumental for Bitcoin. in particular because of the ETF and also a lot of these institutions adopting it. So I don't think Bitcoin's going to go anywhere, let's say in 20 years. There was kind of the threat of the quantum computer chip. Did you see that?

No. Google released like a quantum chip like a couple weeks ago or May last week. And that kind of threatened Bitcoin because the whole idea was like... Oh, because it's a lot of energy to... No, the idea is like the chip could just break Bitcoin's encryption relationship.

fast. I didn't? No, it's not going to happen. Not yet, at least. I think that was like a fleeting rumor or fleeting news so that Bitcoin's price reacted a little bit, but then it just went back up. Okay, so the strategy would be, okay, if it's 5% and you don't want to get on those exchanges, you can just basically buy an ETF through whatever, like fidelity.

Yeah, you can get exposure through an ETF, like fidelity. Yeah. Fidelity has their own ETF for Bitcoin and they back it up with Bitcoin. So they buy Bitcoin to back their ETF. Yeah. That's great. And if you have, say, $10,000 that you would put into crypto next year. Okay.

How would you do it by utilizing dollar cost averaging? Is it like $10,000 throughout a year? Yeah. How fast? I'd probably do like $10,000 across a year. Yeah. Because a year is a pretty good time. It's a longer time in crypto.

But for crypto, it looks like it's such a long time. It is a long time. I would say like for stock market, that sounds okay. But for crypto, you might like miss on all the... You might miss, but crypto could also go down 70% you know, in the summer or something. And you might be able to get it cheaper. So, yeah, I think a year is pretty good.

So will it apply to any amount of money that you have in mind for investing? Would a year be great for a dollar cross-tebraging? Like if somebody saved up... Yeah, cryptocurrency. They've been saving. And they're like, okay, 2025. I'm going to do it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like every year is pretty good. Every two weeks throughout a year. Yeah. Why don't you do, why you split up your $10,000 divided by 24 equal payments and do it every two weeks or 26 equal payments? And just ETAF that tracks Bitcoin because a lot of people talk about like Ethereum, that it has so much. Yeah, it depends on how deep you want to get into crypto.

I mean, if you're just doing Bitcoin, then ETF is fine. There are no ETHs for Ethereum? They're pending. Okay. I think they're not fully out yet. Okay, so Bitcoin, it would be the easiest. Yeah, if you want to buy Ethereum, you have to go on Coinbase or some sort of exchange that's available in your country and then buy, you know, buy it through there. Okay.

Yeah. All right. Well, we talks about investing. Okay. These are like good decisions. What are the worst decisions people can make and do things with our money in 2025? Yeah. So I really think it's like, think about the things that kill your wealth early on.

Like before you get to $100,000 dollars in net worth. for, let's say, a big milestone, like 50,000, if you kill your wealth, shopping, doing dumb things, buying a new car you don't really need. Like, your case might be different. You might need a new car and you have the funds

that you could afford a new car. You know, we spent like two hours yesterday with my husband debating if $10,000 is worth saving, buying the new model Y or the old model Y. And I'm like, with the new, you get the service, you have the warranty and all of that. And I'm like, is it worth a headache?

But I could invest 10K in Bitcoin. And it's just so hard to make those decisions. Those decisions are harder the less money you have, right? Like, actually, they're easier the less money you have, which is like, if you don't have that much money, don't spend 10K on the new model Y when you buy the old model Y. How do you make those decisions? Do you come up with an Excel spreadsheet or like calculate the NPB? No, that's definitely harder to make that decision like off the bat with like you kind of have to know your own personal situation.

but your monthly payments or your monthly payment for transportation should not be more than 10 to 15% of your gross income. So all of a sudden, let's say you make 50K a year, if your car payment is like $800 a month, like that's clearly a poor financial... And then there's insurance and then there's the registration fee,

which is... Exactly. So I think a lot of people spend too much money on cars. That's typically a wealth killer, especially early on in your wealth building journey. And in America, it's very common, right? That thing, everyone wants a fancy car. and then credit card debt, anything that's slowing down your wealth building. I think that before you get to a milestone number,

you should just be as frugal as possible and just get there quicker. Because the quicker you get to that bigger number, the better that money will compound for you, let's say, invested. Do you ever sell? Because if you see the market is all-time high, you're kind of tempted to sell. And you're like, oh, let's sell, wait for another dip, or use this upside to just finance my lifestyle this year and maybe not work?

Yeah, I mean, okay, so my ideal holding period is typically forever. That's the best holding period. But sometimes like right now, all my cash is fully deployed into the market. So I have like all of your, what about your. I have my emergency fund and like my business bank accounts. Is it for business or just your personal? I have both cash reserves for business and personal. But all my investing funds are deployed.

Typically I would like to see 10 to 15% of my cash in my portfolio. Like that means of all my funds in my portfolio, I'd like to have 10 or 15% in cash. Do you feel bad about that cash just in the account when the market is growing so fast? No. Because because what happens if there's a correction or something something unexpected happens? They'll have some cash to buy that dip up. But that's in the high yield savings account or it's just checking. That's just in my brokerage account. It's probably I think it earns 4.5% on the money market. But I want to have extra cash in my portfolio in case there's a dip or a big correction or I can get some stocks for cheap if something bad happens.

Right now I don't have that cash. It's all fully in the market. So I'd like to sell a little bit of my positions just to replenish that cash pile going into 2025 because right now everything's all-time highs. It's kind of frothy, they call it, which means that it's frothing to the top, which means there's not quite a bubble, but it's like multiples are high right now. So are you going to sell this year or next year? I would probably, if I sold it would probably be before December 31st. Yeah. When you said you have this money in your brokerage account and it earns 4.5%.

Is it a standard thing that brokerage accounts do? Typically, yeah. Typically, if you're in the right brokerage, your money gets called swept into like a money market fund, which just means it just sits in money market funds. And those money market funds typically pay around 4 to 4.5%. So if I transfer it right now, is that fidelity? That's infidelity, but I think Schwab probably does it too. So you just transfer your cash there and they automatically start doing that?

Yeah, it's not a high yield, though. It's not a high yield account. It's a money market fund, which means that you can take it out any time. You can take it out any time. But the rate is not guaranteed either. It fluctuates a lot too. Yeah. But with those high yield savings accounts, sometimes they give you a period, a time period, like six months and you can't take your money out before that.

Or if you take, there is a penalty. That would be a certificate of deposit, yeah. CD. A CD, yeah. Wow, that's interesting. 10 to 5% cash. 10 to 15% in cash and your portfolio

would be nice. That's me. I'm a little more less risk on and I'd like to have some cash or opportunities. So when you sell your stocks,

it's only to replenish the cash. Yeah. Ideally, I just keep all that money in the investing portfolio forever. I haven't withdrawn from my investing

portfolio in like 10 years. Wow. How often do you make investments that are not part of your plan. So you have automated investments? Yeah.

But like, is there like a Monday every two months when you sit? I'd say this year maybe I've made four investments that weren't part of the original plan. Can you share? Yeah, I bought some Coinbase, bought some Nvidia, and I bought some Robin Hood. I feel like everyone bought Invidio. Coinbase, Nvidia, Robin Hood. I bought all those, like, I bought Robin Hood in February and March and then a lot in June and August. Coinbase I bought some, I think, in February,

and then NVIDIA I bought before an earnings report. I remember, NVIDIA was training for like 665, and I was like, oh, I want to buy the earnings just for fun, and it went up a lot, yeah. But, you know, 665 pre-split, so now it's 66. So it's basically triggered by news. It's usually triggered by news,

or I read like a quarterly report that I think is very bullish for the company. And then I try to do some financial analysis on, like, what multiple is that company trading for and do I think that's undervalued? So that was the case with Robin Hood. Their user growth was off the charts. They started innovating on all these products, right? They had like seven products coming out, including a credit card,

which I thought would be really great for their business. Their average deposits were going up. They still had a long way to go before they reached total adjustable market for assets under custody. Like Schwab has like $9 trillion under custody. And Robin Hood had like $200 billion. So like there's a lot. there's like a way, a long way to go, which I thought was good.

And I also thought the price of the stock was beaten down because of the negative sentiment that it had from GameStop. Like, people just forgot about it. This was back in February. And I thought the multiples, I think, on it were pretty low. Like, it was valued, I don't remember the exact multiple, but it was valued lower compared to comparable tech companies. Oh, that's a lot of analyzing. Yeah. Do you do that every day?

No, that was only for that particular company. I was very interested in it. And I was reading a lot about their financials and reading a lot of their quarterly reports to make sure that I want to invest in that company. And you do the same for your meme coin strategy, right? No. No? Meme coins are kind of... You see you buy it and that's it?

Meme coins are like, the less you think about it is typically the better it does. Okay. Yeah, I mean, you can do some research on it, but it's not going to have the same. Like, you can't evaluate a meme coin like a stock. Like a stock has fundamentals that it has backing it versus a meme is like, how good's the meme? Yeah. Yeah. It's not the same.

When talking about like the individual stock investments, what is the percentage of your portfolio? For me, it's 50-50 now. So it's 50% of individual stocks, 50%s, TTS. But that's only because all my individual stocks grew so much this year. Like, Invidia is up like a crazy amount. Ideally, I'd like to have like 60 to 7% ETFs and then the rest of the individuals. But right now it's definitely higher individual than. So basically the strategy would just like, ideally.

deal if you want to follow your plan, you would sell some of the individual stocks to put it back and rebalancing. Or whenever I add money into my portfolio next, I want to buy the ETS to bring the weight back up. Wow. So it looks like a lot of work for. It's a lot of work for, I would say, like, if you're working at like a corporate job, you just don't want to worry about it, just do ETS. Yeah, you just do the split that we talked about at the beginning.

When does it make sense to hire someone to do that? Or does it? Yeah, no, no, it does. It definitely makes sense to hire someone. to do it if you don't want to pay attention to it and you need more financial guidance than than most people like that you don't want to do it yourself and you don't feel like you even want to focus your time on it because I'm in it every day so it's a little different for me like I like it. Number one and you probably have like a portfolio of I'd say around 100K

starts to make sense anything below that they might charge you too much. Yeah and they charge like 1% or typical financial advisors will charge you 1% of of your portfolio size a year. If you're lower than that, they might have just like a minimum fee, but even 1% is a lot. Because 1% will eat into your compound growth over time. However, they can also offer you a lot more advice

than just investing. They can help you with estate planning, retirement planning, your kids' education, college planning, stuff like that. They can do a lot more. What's your general recommendation? Because I feel there are so many videos on YouTube people like never ever hire someone because it compounds. You can do the same strategy just by yourself. My opinion is if you need more than investing advice, you go to a financial advisor.

But if you just want investing, you know, just do yourself. Just do those splits. Just do a split or do an ETF, yeah. Okay. I think my question that's going to wrap this up will be how do you stay sane when the market goes down? I would say I always like to think of what the stock market might look like in 30 years from now. And so you know in 30 years from now, it's probably going to be a lot higher than it is right now. Is that what you say to yourself? Yeah. And then things go down. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, drawdowns of 20 to 40% happen. So, like, your portfolio could be, let's say your portfolio is at $100,000. They could go down to $60,000 in a year. And now it sucks. And now it suck. And it could go to almost zero. But how do

you, how, basically, it's like a conversation that you have with yourself. Yeah. Because when COVID happened, everyone was like, that's pretty much like the Great Depression. Okay, we're going to lose everything. Let's spend like 2008. And it keeps happening more often than it used to. It's tough because I think this goes back to not needing the money, right? If you don't need the money and you can just leave it in the market and not touch it for a long time, then you're going to be able to weather. Then don't touch it.

Yeah. You're going to be weather, weather those storms a lot easier. But like, let's say you needed the money next year and all of a sudden it's down 40 percent. you might be like, all right, I just got to sell because I don't want it to go down more. So that makes you more emotional. I think the longer time horizon you have, the less emotional you naturally are because you don't have to worry too much about it. Because you know in like 30 years it'll be like during the 2008 financial crisis or let's say the COVID crash, if you told yourself in 30 years it will be a lot higher, you'd just leave your money in. And you didn't have to wait 30 years.

You just had to wait a year and then it was a lot higher than it was. Same with crypto, right? when Bitcoin went down so much, people are like selling off panicking. And social media doesn't help to everyone. Yeah, I think that's the problem is that investing takes a long time and we live in an age where everything is instant. And you're overloaded with news and information and CNBC

and people saying you should sell everything. Yeah, panicking. Yeah, really you should just invest and just like forget about it for like 15 years. come back and oh great yeah that's the yeah that's that's what you should do but most people can't do yeah and so it's more fun to track the market because it's like something to do you know something to talk about it's like tracking your sports team exactly yeah thank you so much i think it was so useful this is going to be my first like video of 2025 where no way this is it i think so yeah so people

can start the year with the right mindset you know this year is the year for me to build my wealth start building it. And coming from a person who's an immigrant and starting building her wealth in 2020, this year has been just incredible, like seeing that my investments can generate that much income. That's compared to my active income.

I'm like 34. Can I retire at 35, please? Cool. Thank you so much, Humphrey. It's super useful. Please subscribe to Humphrey's channel. He gives advice weekly or several times a week. Every week.

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