The Ben Mulroney Show - David Chilton - 36 years later he's updated "The Wealthy Barber"

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

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Sponsorship opportunities and tables are available. For more details, visit hope in the city, Toronto.ca. That's hope in the city, Toronto.ca. Welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. Happy Friday. It's Friday, November 7th. I buckle in Canada because I'm about to give you financial advice. Absolutely not. That would be a disaster. It would probably be criminal and the stock market would crash. I would be terrible at that. However, I do have someone joining me right now who is the right person to have those conversations with. We're not going to be talking specific advice on what to invest in, but he's a man with a lot of knowledge and I think we could all

do with a little more David Chilton in our lives. Welcome to the show, sir. Great to be on. Congratulations on how well things are going. Well, thank you very much. So the wealthy barber is, you're defined by that in so many ways, right? So you wrote that book 36 years ago? 36 years ago. Okay, 36 years ago. And you have now since re-edited, updated it. And you were telling me during the break that it took you longer to write this version than the original. It really did. There's so many more products. But also, you think about it. When I wrote the original there was RSPs. Now there's TFSAs, FHSAs. You don't only have to teach the reader what they are, but how do you prioritize in your circumstance, cover off the subtle nuances, make it entertaining,

make it understandable. It took me 16 months full-time writing to do the follow-up book. But I'm glad it's out there. I was joking with you. I'm amazed how many people have said to me, I didn't think it'd still be alive. Like I read that four decades ago. What are you still doing here? Okay, so for those who don't know what the wealthy barber is, first of all, it's one of the biggest selling books in the history of this country. Like, I think it's top five. I think it's top five. easily. So, so many people have a copy of this book, but some don't. What is it? It's a novel said in small town, Ontario, Sarnia, where a barber dispenses financial advice teaches people what they need to know well, he's cutting hair over a nine-month period. So it's conversational, there's humor,

there's stories, there's back and forth. The narrator of the book, one of the young patrons, starts out with no financial knowledge, no math skills, doesn't think he can do it. And you learn along with him and the other characters in the book. And for whatever reason, the formula seems to really resonate with readers. But David, on top of sort of the world's changing and therefore you had to update it. You changed. You're 36 years older.

You've had the priorities of your life. Your investment priorities must have changed in this chapter of your life. Did that alter how you wrote or what you wrote? No, but my experience certainly helped me. I'll give you an example. In the first book, I didn't give a lot of attention to spending summaries.

And by the time I was 36 years older, I realized they are incredibly impactful positively, so I wove them in more aggressively. But the book is still written for that 25-year-old, 35-year-old, it's written for the younger Canadian set. And, you know, drawing down from my kids' questions, my kids' friends' questions, my friends' kids' questions, et cetera. You really kind of knew where people were going wrong,

what the challenges were and put all that into the book, and I think that's why it's flowing. What do you say to those, if you've written this for the younger generation, if those younger Canadians would say, great that my dad gave me the book for Christmas, but I can't afford rent, let alone, let alone paying for, like investing anything into my future. How do you get, how do you get past that?

How do you get past the numbers? The toughest part of writing the book was the housing affordability challenges and how they're draining a lot of people's savings, even when they get in the marketplace because owning a home is so expensive, not just the mortgage, property taxes keep going up at greater than a CPI level, so does maintenance, so does insurance, et cetera. It's more and more difficult to save the 10% and 15%. I mean, it's sad, but one of the most important piece of advice in personal finance is choose your parents wisely.

Unfortunately, we can't all do that. And so for a lot of people, this has become exceptionally difficult, more people than I think I've ever seen in all the years I've been doing it. And there's no easy answers. I think you're going to see Canada be forced to, and I think this is a positive thing. How do we draw investment dollars back into the country from outside, but also from inside, so we can raise our productivity and therefore have wages rising at a faster rate than inflation? because right now there's just too many pinch people, no doubt about it. There were small business owners and representatives of small, medium-sized business community who were kind of disappointed that there wasn't more for them in the budget.

They said, you know, they were hoping that like during the Kretzian era of austerity, there would be cuts to business taxes so that they could then take that money and reinvested in their business and they could hire more people, wages could go up, the value of those businesses would go up. they'd do more business and then they'd pay more taxes. And they didn't see that this time. There are some things in it for them. What's your assessment of the budget for a small business owner, but also for the individual?

Well, for the individual, not a lot changed. It was nothing dramatic on that front. So not generational, transformational. No, not on that front. I think that really the budget was supposed to be about how do we invest back into Canada more through infrastructure spending, through incentivizing big company investing. But you're right,

there wasn't a huge focus on the small and medium-sized business. And that tends to be the engine for growth in Canada when we turn the corner. 52% of our non-government GDP comes from small and medium-sized business. And the CFIB did a study a few weeks ago. They released that said that over 70% of small business owners would not recommend to a friend to start a small business in Canada today. Yeah, it's challenging. I mean, lots of regulation here.

Obviously, we deal with relatively high taxes. But I think the other reason is we've got a lot of uncertainty around the U.S. trade situation. And remember, a lot of these small businesses are serving big businesses and they're supplying them to some extent or certainly buying from them. And so we need to bring more certainty to what we're dealing with right now. And then again, if we can do that, we can slowly start raising our productivity figures because they're our biggest challenge. When you look at our productivity numbers, that's the problem. And so, you know, we don't just need growth. We need growth in productivity so that the wage growth outstrips the inflation growth. Okay, let's live in a world where

the lives of Canadians are markedly improving. Like, I want to be solutions oriented and I want to be positive as well. So let's get to a point now where people have optimism and they have a little bit more cash on hand. What do you, generally speaking, what do you recommend that somebody who's starting out do with that cash if they are saddled with debt? You know, they've been trying to stay afloat and they've been taking on debt, but they have some money, could they invest it, should they pay down debt?

What's the recommendation there? You know, paying off high interest rate debt is still hard to beat. It really is. If you've got a credit card debt of, say, 21%, you're not going to be able to invest over the long term and beat that mark. And remember, that's non-deductible interest. And so that's an after-tax return. That tends to be priority number two. But, you know, it's interestingly not priority number one for Canadians who have a group RRSP at work with matching from their employer.

That tends to be priority number one, especially since in Canada, we have a lot of very generous employers doing dollar-for-dollar match. drives me crazy when people don't take advantage of that. So those are two of the first things you can do, is if you have that, take advantage of it, certainly paying off non-deductible, high-interest rate debt. That has to be a focus. And then we go back to the old-fashioned basic. You've got to take 10 to 15% of your income,

pay yourself first, and dedicate it toward long-term growth. The good news is with TFSAs, with RSPs, we have containers to put those investments in that are very much taxed advantage and can compound over the years quite effectively. So that's the kind of thing that the book talks but how best to do that? What are the nuances?

How do you force yourself to save more effectively? But again, it's still difficult, no doubt. Yeah, David, I love saying, you don't know what you don't know. Right. And what you just described there is, you know, there are some people who are leaving money on the table. Oh, it's huge. And it's if they just knew to do those things. You know, I love that line.

I can't remember what bank it was. You're richer than you think. Right. But is it worth it for everybody to find some financial advisor? even if for just a one-off to sit down and meet with somebody who can look at their books, you know, I don't know how much it costs, but I have to believe that it would be of value, even if it was an initial cost, that somebody could say, you know what, if you just change these three things, here's X amount of $100 extra dollars a month

that you don't have to change anything for. It can be. I mean, the fee-only financial planning business in Canada is full of very competent people. A lot of our best trained people go there, but they are going to charge three and $4,000 and the average person starting out is not going to pay that, maybe doesn't even have it. And so then they turn to the rest of the industry, which is often, not always, but product sales oriented and sometimes get put into high fee products. People don't love hearing this, but you have to take some responsibility to yourself

to learn the basics. The good news is a book like The Wealthy Barber. A lot of the YouTube videos are very well done now. We've got some great information out there. You can learn it. In fact, I know this sounds motivational and corny. But one of the most important messages, you can do this. The tricky stuff doesn't.

work the good things are easily grasped like anybody can read the wealthy barber in four hours and go i get that it's not that tricky and that that could be the beginning right that's right absolutely it's the beginning you know what i think that i've got some one of the i can avail myself of x y or z through my work that's right and then they can start doing the research themselves and then it's a positive feedback loop no doubt yeah all right well listen we're going to take a quick break you're going to stick around for the next segment and we're talking to david chilton the author of the wealthy barber and we're going to take some calls from you at home. 4168-8-2-200

or 1-3-8-2-25 talk. Let's talk financial health in general. We're not giving stock tips today, but don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulrudey show. That's annoying. What? You're a muffler. You don't hear it? Oh, I don't even notice it. I usually drown it out

with the radio. How's this? Oh, yeah? Way better. Save on insurance by switching to Bell Air Direct and use the money to fix your car. Bell Air Direct, and Insurance, simplified. Conditions apply. You know what's better than the one big thing? Two big things. Exactly. The new iPhone 17 Pro on TELUS's five-year rate plan price lock.

Yep, it's the most powerful iPhone ever, plus more peace of mind with your bill over five years. This is big. Get the new iPhone 17 Pro at tellus.com slash iPhone 17 Pro on select plans. Conditions and exclusions apply. Welcome back to the Ben Mo Rooney Show, very pleased to be in conversation with David Chilton, the Canadian author of The Wealthy Barber, one of the most successful books of any type in this country.

It's a financial health novel. It is. It's a novel. You know, I got the idea of watching Cheers. Really? Yeah, I was watching it. I called it the wealthy bartender initially. And then with the alcohol flowing, it became tough to write.

So I moved it over to the barber shop. My dad said it was a really dumb idea, solid because he's not too sharp and off we went and the rest is history. How hard was it to hit the streets and try to get something to publish it back in the day? I published it myself, but not because I couldn't get it published, but because I'm a control freak and I wanted to control special sales. So I took it to the market myself with the goal of selling 10,000 copies. And as you mentioned, went on to sell 2.1 million. So, I mean, who knew? Was it a slow burn to two million? It was. You know, there's a myth out there that it took off quickly. It didn't. It came out

the first year and moved along okay, maybe even under okay, but the second year of the word of mouth kicked in and carried it to those heights. And for four or five years, it was number one. That's a story of Seinfeld. Absolutely. It takes a while. That show is going to get canceled in its first season. The second season wasn't that good either.

And eventually it just found its legs. Well, even Dragonston. Yeah. You know, Dragonston started out really slowly the first couple years, then went on to become one of Canada's most favorite shows. Do you miss doing something like that? I do. I do.

That was really busy, though. If you actually did the due diligence and then closed a lot of deals, it was a bit overwhelming. I mean, when I left the show, I had 24 deals in place. Yeah. And you're acting as a quasi-CFO. You're helping the people every day, making introductions, studying their math, etc. It was a lot, but I enjoyed it immensely great experience. You came on a pitch, do you

remember? I did come on and it died in due diligence. And then somebody else did it. Did it. It's called Diner, I think, or something like that. Honestly, we thought you were coming on joking around, but your pitch was very, very good. So for context for our listeners, I was coming on, it was the 10th anniversary of

Dragonsden, and it was this, instead of doing a junket, a press junket, they're like, hey, let's have all the dragons sitting there and the members of the press will come in and that will be how we promote the show. And I was told by the organizers, they said, okay, so just come in and offer up a stupid idea. And I was like, all right, I guess it'll be a vacuum cleaner for red carpets. Right. Because I was doing entertainment reporting at the time. And then right before I come out, the floor director or something, is trying to, that does what I'm sure she did to everybody, tried to psych me out.

It's like, all right. And I was like, listen, I've been doing TV longer than you've been alive. Yeah, exactly. You're pretty experienced. This is, I could, this does not bother me. But what she did say is like, they're going to give you the full dragon deal. I said, well, a second, you told me to come in with a stupid idea. Now they're going to tell me my idea is stupid.

No, I got an idea. I just got to call my partner to see if I can, if I can pitch it. And so he said, absolutely. go for it. I came out and pitched it. And yeah, I got a, I got a handshake deal. How many of those deals died in due diligence? Depends. Like, in my case, I closed a tremendous number, but every dragon is a little bit different. I will say one thing in defense of the dragons, two things. A lot of the people came on the show just for their promotion and didn't really want the money. They were already funded. But the second thing is, you get a lot. And the second thing is you get

a lot of answers that end up not being accurate. So you say yes in the show because you hear the bottom line is X percent. It turns out it's nowhere close to that. Yeah. And so both those things can lead to deals falling through. But I want to sing your praises before we go back to finance. It was a very strong pitch. Thank you. You actually had very good answers. And we drilled you pretty hard. I think everybody went, okay, this guy's got a pretty solid idea. Yeah. We've been working on for a little while. It was, for anybody who's wondering, it was like overstock.com for restaurants, right? At the time, it was, you know, we know that every single top, every single seat is a moneymaker or a loser, depending if there's someone in it or not. And so if you are,

if you have late cancellations or if you just, you realize you got a two top that you really need to fill, you could push it out to our service and then it would be offered up with some sort of discount. You get a free dessert if you come in, if you pick it up. And we thought it was a great idea. I was already

reaching out to restaurants all over the city to try to sign them up for it. And then I guess it just died in due diligence. It was a shame. I'm not sure that whomever partner with you knew you were 100% serious because of the nature of that day. It was Kevin. It was Kevin. You know, say no more.

Let's just, yeah. Let's say enough said. Let's just drop it. But, but you know, are you surprised with the, um, the evergreen nature of these shows? People keep tuning in. You would think that at some point, look, can it, American Idol, the appetite died? But if you look at it, Dragon's then, you know, for a story to be compelling, it has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And it has to have character and conflict. Those are the five key parts of making a compelling story. Well, look at people walk down the stair in the pitch. That's the beginning. Then you have the middle when they're drilled. And then they have the end. They get a definitive yes or no. And of course you have character.

Of course you have conflict. So it really sets up very well. Plus, people are always coming up with innovative new ideas that make for good pitches. I mean, no, it's been a remarkable show. It really has in many, many countries. Yeah. Well, I've got a question for you here. What do you say to people who are worried about their nest eggs, so their homes?

Biggest investment they'll ever make. In some markets, they've lost 30 to 50 percent. of the value of their home, they are stuck? Well, they are. I mean, a couple things. One is you could see home prices were going to come down. I mean, when you go back to late 21, early 22, you saw that huge run up to levels that didn't make any sense.

Almost nobody could afford to buy them, from the investors to the new buyer, et cetera. So we knew that it was going to pull back a little bit. Now you've got the uncertainty in the economy, although rates are down a bit. In the last little while, they're up from that particular level. So it's a formula for lower prices. I think in some ways, that's good.

We talk about the housing crisis. How complicated is it? For people who haven't bought yet, they think it's wonderful prices are falling. For people who have bought, they're like, oh, my gosh, this is absolutely crazy. But I will go back to something I've said forever in a day. You can't make your home, your financial plan. Yeah. And so you need your home to be a part of that, but it still has to be affordable enough

that you can take advantage of RSPs, TFSAs, and so on and so forth. You don't want to be house poor. Absolutely. We see so much of that where that's the only asset, and that's why some of those people are in a position of panic right now. Yeah, it's, and I know a lot of people, I've, I've felt panic in my life. I'm not going to lie, it's the last few years have not been, I mean, I remember a time in my life where I'd never worried about money. Right.

And I was investing, you know, I was putting stuff away. And sometimes it was a, you know, it was a big gamble and some, and some, and, you know, a lot of the traditional stocks, you know, I'd go with the energy stocks and the banks and all that stuff. And, you know, the career reinvention is well on its way, but it's not complete. Right. And so I'm not there yet. And so it's been touch and go, and it's a lot of stress. Now, everyone has their own version of what I just said. For some people, it's existential.

For others, it's just a, it's a general malaise that they feel. But almost everyone has been impacted. You've said that very well. In fact, look at all the research that supports that the biggest stress people have, it's financial stress. It's also the biggest stress they take to work. I've often said you need HR departments at the employers doing a better job. Yeah.

of helping people to feel better about their finances, educating them more. The old-fashioned U.S. luncheon learns that they use so aggressive, we don't see up in Canada very much, but I think they're probably a very good move. Yeah. Well, also, I think that with the advent of AI, there are a number of really great mental health resources out there

that don't cost a lot anymore. I agree. There are avatars that look and feel like human beings that could be free to access at big companies that would help with... You'll see more and more that you already are. I mean, you're seeing a lot of that come on stream and that's a positive. We've got a call from Kathy.

Kathy, welcome to show. And please say hi to David. Hi, David. I've been following you on Instagram a lot. Thanks so much for all your information that you give us. My question is, what would you advise people who have inherited a self-directed stock portfolio? And I know nothing about any of that. how would you advise them to dissolve it?

I've been told I'll lose a ton of money if I dissolve it. If the banks take it over, they'll sell it all and I'll lose a ton of money. Kathy, I don't want to interrupt you, but we're up against the clock and I want you to give David a chance to answer. I think you've got to get very good counsel. I might even go to a fee-only financial planner and get some overriding instruction. You have to worry, do I have a lot of pent-up capital gains and therefore there could be tax consequences. That doesn't mean you don't sell, by the way, but it's something. you certainly have to weigh in the decision.

You may want to take the equity portion and move it over to a pure index fund to keep it a little bit more simple. That being said, I can't say, without seeing the portfolio, knowing all the details of your circumstance. So the big thing you've got to do is find a trusted advisor right now

who can walk you through all the different ways to take this. But it can be a little stressful and overwhelming. In fact, strangely, inheritances often are quite overwhelming. That being said, never turn them down. Despite the fact you're stressful, take them at every single operational.

opportunity. Absolutely. Kathy, thank you so much for the call. We appreciate it. Good luck to you. Thank you. Thanks. So before I say goodbye, and it's been so wonderful catching up with you, what are you working on now that the book's done? You know, I'm 64. And so I don't think another update 36 years ago makes a lot of sense. How about this? Promise me that when the book sells its third million copy, you'll come back to the show to celebrate. I absolutely will. I enjoyed today immensely. It was great seeing you again. David Chilton, thank you so much. The author of The Wealthy Barber and just a wonderful calm voice in a time where we need it so desperately. We appreciate it. All right.