The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Chad Hufford, Financial Planner of Veritas Wealth Management on Best Strategies for Investing and Planning for Retirement

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Chad Hufford, Financial Planner of Veritas Wealth Management on Best Strategies for Investing and Planning for Retirement Veritasalaska.com Born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska, Chad grew up in the financial industry, but also developed a strong background in athletics, nutrition and performance psychology. As a Top Ranked Financial Planner and Dave Ramsey’s SmartVestor Pro, Chad brings a coaching mindset and the heart of a teacher to financial planning and investing as he strives to both empower and educate his audience to not only become better investors, but to live more intentionally and create an abundant life. Chad owns a boutique financial planning firm, Veritas Wealth Management, that manages $500 million dollars and serves several hundred families across the US. In addition to finance, he regularly teaches and speaks on fitness and faith, seeing these as all important aspects of a purposeful and abundant life. Chad and his wife, Tiffany (also a life-long Alaskan), have been blessed with six wonderful children. Tiffany stays busy homeschooling the kids, and the whole family is very involved in their church and local community. Believing that to whom much is given, much is expected, Chad strives to employ his knowledge and experience to serve and enrich the lives of those around him.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. How are you? As always, welcome to the big family that you are all a part of.

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See us over there. Today, we have an amazing mind and gentleman on the show. And of course, none of them are me because I'm just the one here with the frontal lobotomy. And we're going to be talking about some amazing things. We're going to be talking about wealth coaching and discipline investing, holistic planning for your future and uh and retirement so uh if you're not planning for your future what's the old line those who don't plan uh those those who fail to plan plan to fail if i can get that right i i forget who said that but uh maybe they didn't plan it rightly so that i remember. So there's that. Chad Hufford joins us on the show today, financial planner of Veritas Wealth Management.

And he does some amazing things. He was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He grew up in the financial industry, but also developed a strong background in athletics, nutrition, and performance psychology. He's a top-ranked financial advisor and Dave Ramsey's smart investor pro. He brings his coaching mindset to the heart and the heart of a teacher to financial planning and investing as he strives to both empower and educate his audience to not only become better investors, but to live more intentionally and create an abundant life. He owns a boutique financial planning firm, Veritas Wealth Management, that manages $500 million and serves several hundred families across the U.S. In addition to finance, he regularly teaches and speaks on fitness and

faith, seeing these as an all-important aspects of purposeful and abundant life. Welcome to the show, Chad. How are you? Hey, I'm doing great. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here and help bring some of my experience with all these years coaching folks and bring some of that to your audience and help apply some of those principles to their own lives. There you go. So let's get into it. What's the dot com for you so people can look you guys up on the interwebs? VeritasAlaska.com. There you go.

We're founded here in Alaska. Again, like you said, Chris, we have clients all over the United States, even a few internationally, but the website is still VeritasAlaska.com. And you guys have been doing this for about 17 years. Is that correct? That's correct. That's correct. There you go. It was interesting what you said about planning to fail or failing to plan.

That's one of the things that we remind folks all the time. We tell people, you probably don't have a plan to run out of money in retirement, but do you have a plan not to? And what we find is a lot of people, of course, nobody wants to run out of money, but very few people actually have a plan not to. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do and how you do it and some of the things that you do when you coach people and work with them directly. Well, a huge part of what we do is helping people identify their long-term financial goals and needs and then reverse engineer that to where they are today and creating that roadmap in between, connecting them from where they are now to where they want to be, and then coaching and encouraging and educating them along the way. Because it's one

thing to have a plan and a path, and it's another thing to stick to that plan for 10, 20, 30 years, however long it takes to achieve financial freedom. There you go. And you got that Amazon card that's always calling out to you. Go spend money over here. You don't need a retirement. You need another, I don't know, dish towel. Something I don't know. Well, and it's not just Amazon. It's the financial media. It's my industry talking about this newest, greatest investing strategy or the doom and gloom. Did you see this terrible thing that happened while you were sleeping last night? This is probably going to end the world.

You should pull your money out and bury it under your back shed or something. It's nonstop. There are nonstop distractions. People and things, events trying to pull us off the path. And truly, the Amazon cart is a big part of that. People spend money today that could have been paying their future self. trying to pull us off the path. And truly, the Amazon cart is a big part of that, right? People spend money today that could have been paying their future self. There's a lot of distractions out there,

and that's a big part of what we're trying to do is help people cut through that so they can focus on what they're trying to accomplish long-term. There you go. So what do you find most people that you're working with now, what do you find they're struggling with that you're able to help them with? I think a lot of folks struggle with fear and anxiety um you had a a gentleman on your show here recently talked about that in more broad sense but uh very much in in the financial realm i think anxiety is a big deal people feel uncertain about their futures sometimes they feel helpless i think a lot of futures. Sometimes they feel helpless. I think a lot of folks lack agency. They feel like their financial future is going to be determined on

whether they guess the right mutual fund or whether the economy or the market does what they want it to do. And they're kind of out of control. And what we want to do is help people feel like they're back in the driver's seat of their financial lives. There you go. And do you find that, I know, you know, I read a lot of news reports, but you have probably a better finger on the pulse for this. Do you find that a lot of people are ready for retirement? No, I think a lot of people have underprepared. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But even for the people that have done a good job saving, what we find, Chris, is a lot of people haven't really invested strategically. They haven't

really developed a strategic objective. They've kind of just collected investments over the years. So even for folks, again, who have saved, they have all the pieces and parts, but a lot of times they're not put together in a comprehensive plan. But to your question, a lot of folks haven't even done that. They haven't saved. They've not paid their future self. They've lived too much in the moment. They've racked up too much debt. They just haven't been intentional. And that catches up people pretty quickly. There you go. And a lot of people, you know, they've, yeah,

I knew people that had their savings and their, and, you know, a lot of them had their kind of their, their house was their investment. I know a lot of them got wiped out in 2008 and then COVID was very destructive. We kind of had like two major events, at least if you don't count Black Friday, but I think a lot of people would recover by that by now, but it depends on what age you're at and how close you are to retirement. But, you know, we've had two major events that really kicked people financially in the head. And, you know, it's kind of hard to recover from that. Well, it's interesting you said that because we've actually

had, just since I've been alive, nine major recessions and some very, very violent market crashes. And if you go back to the 2008, 2009 meltdown that you referred to, if you were the unluckiest investor in history and you put all your money, let's say it's a million dollars, you put it at the peak of the market, which would have been October of 2007, October 9th, 2007. And between October and March of 2009, so what is that? 16 months later, the S&P 500 would have lost almost 60% of its value. So that million dollars would have gone down to about 400,000. A lot of people panicked and fled,

but the story that doesn't get told is, again, if you were that investor with the worst timing in history, you invested a million dollars at the peak of the market in October, 2007, even in the midst of a market decline right now that investor would have over four million dollars all he had to do was not panic all he had to do was stay the course and back to your your thing about you know the amazon we talked about distractions but people are getting pulled off the course people end up taking a temporary decline and turning into a permanent loss so it isn't the isn't the economy that's doing it to them. It's their own behavior and reactions that oftentimes cause that destruction. There you go. You know, we've

had billionaires like David Rubenstein on the show. And I know he's talked about how, you know, if you're a smaller investor, especially don't play the market. Don't buy in and out. Just kind of buy in and stay in. And over time, and I think Warren Buffett kind of operates by the same sort of mentality, right? Yes, absolutely. Yeah, the metaphor that we give is building wealth is like an orchard. And you're not going to dig up your trees every time somebody on the news said there's supposed to be a storm coming through. That's a perfect analogy. Well, if you don't mind, I'll keep going with it but you know if it's part of the thing too is let's just economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look like they have legitimate

jobs i mean just like your weatherman a lot of times they're spending half their time explaining why they said should happen, didn't happen and making excuses and things like that. And even if you could perfectly time the economy, you still couldn't time the markets. They're fairly loosely connected in the short term. In fact, the markets often react much faster, much sooner than the economy. So by the time that we're in a full-fledged recession, a lot of times the market's already been going down for months, maybe even a year. But when we go back to that analogy or the metaphor of an orchard, yeah, number one, a lot of times these weathermen, these economic weathermen,

they're forecasting storms never come. But even when they do, we have to keep our trees planted in the ground. Because I'm not so concerned about how much your trees are worth at any given day, Chris. My concern for you is that by the time you're ready to retire, by the time you're prepared for a work-optional lifestyle, that those trees produce enough fruit every month, every year for the rest of your life. So it's not how much they're worth at any given moment. It's how much income somebody's investments can provide for them. Because a lot of people forget that retirement is not a principal issue. It's an income issue. It's not about how much money your account is worth today. It's how much income

it can provide you with over a lifetime. And that's something that gets missed a lot. There you go. I mean, there's ups and downs in how things are going. And tell me if this add-on to your analogy is correct. A lot of the times the weatherman's wrong. Like he'll say, it's going to be sunny day. And you're like, did you go outside before you called that? There's an old adage in the weatherman business. Make sure you go outside and check the weather before you call it. Because sometimes, you know, everything that they're predicting is wrong. And a lot of times, I think the weatherman, and again, correct me if I'm wrong,

is focused kind of on today and not really tomorrow. I think one of those weathermen might be Jim Cramer, excuse me, from Lehman Brothers, you know, calling Lehman Brothers to double down on Lehman Brothers a couple days before it filed bankruptcy to FTX, you name it. I mean, I pretty much learned that with Jim Cramer, whatever he says you should buy, you should probably sell. So what about those weathermen?

It's funny you mention that. I won't name any particular names, although Jim Cramer, his name's already out of the bag. He's an entertainer. He's not out there to make anybody a better investor. He's out there to get you to watch the show. He's driven by advertising dollars. People forget that financial media is not out there to make you to watch the show. And it's driven by advertising dollars. And people forget that financial media is not out there to make people better investors. In fact, my industry as a whole, a lot of times we try too hard to sell people products, to give people a quote unquote

better investment. What we need to do is actually help people become better investors. Giving somebody a better mutual fund doesn't make them a better investor any more than giving somebody a paintbrush makes them an artist. But I love these analogies. You have great analogies that nail it on the head. Thank you. Again, I won't name sources, but there was somebody that came on recently and there was somebody that was criticizing a major economic forum. And they were just joking. They're saying that this group had had correctly predicted or sorry. Yeah, they're correctly predicted 13 out of the last three recessions, meaning 10 of the last recessions they had predicted never even happened.

It's like the old adage, most of what I've worried about in life never actually happened to me. And that's what you're exactly asking. The economic weathermen, so to speak, are often forecasting things that never come because doom and gloom sells fear motivates people and if if i came on a major news station and just talked about the importance of being future focused and ignoring the present looking past your current circumstances and keeping your eyes locked on what you're trying to build long term not the current weather you can't replay that story every day because people aren't going to turn in. But if I tell you about this new tragic thing that you probably didn't realize happened in some city that you've never heard of that might create this trickle effect in the economy

and your savings can be wiped out, you're going to listen. And then tomorrow it'll be a new Armageddon. And that's what the financial media does. And it's, it's really destructive because like you already alluded to it, it takes people's eyes off their goals and gets them focused on what they can't control. There you go. And you know, the sky is always falling. I mean, I respect the news and I respect great journalism and integral journalism, but you're right. I mean, sometimes it's really focused on the now and the sky is falling and whatever's on fire today. And, you know, it's very boring to say, hey, buy some stocks and hold them for 30 years.

All right, thanks, we're out. You know, that sort of thing. You're like, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. That's how it works. So let's talk about this because I know I've been reading that a lot of millennials have, and some Gen Xers have not taken care of nest egging their retirements. I know the costs are going to be even more expensive. I mean, even if you save a million dollars, it may, you know, people living longer, there's issues.

When should someone start planning their financial future? And you talk about retiring on purpose and how not just to retire from your career, but retire to a life of meaningful purpose and abundance. So give us the beginning and end of that and what we should really be thinking about, because some people just don't like math, but they really need to think about their life quality. So you asked a couple of different questions. I'll try to answer the first one initially and then go into the second. They're obviously tied together. But I think a lot of young folks, they have an excuse or at least use an excuse. They don't make enough money. There's not enough income. I'll save when I make more money. And it's kind of like somebody saying, I'll go to the gym when I get in better shape, or I'll go to church when I become a better person or whatever. I'll go to marriage counseling with my wife and I have a better relationship. No, you start the habit now

and you might only be able to save $5, $10, whatever, but it's the habit. I'm not a runner, Chris. I'm not going to go out and try to run a marathon but if i was going to train for a marathon i would probably start by doing just slowly lengthening the runs i'm already doing it's not so much what you're doing today it's the trajectory it's the path that you're on that matters so creating those habits even if they're small because if you're a broke college student and you're still able to save $10 a month, $50 a month, that's still creating that habit. So as your income gradually grows over your lifetime, you'll be able to save more. But the reverse is also true.

If people can't make a habit of saving when their income is relatively low, they're probably not going to save when they're making a lot of money we run into people who are making two thousand or two two hundred thousand three hundred thousand half a million dollars a year still essentially living paycheck to paycheck because spending habits are like a goldfish they'll often grow into whatever size enclosure that we put them in so unless we constrain that goldfish and teach it to eat less than he consumed less than is available, our budgets will often consume all of our income. The other thing I would say too, for young people is avoid debt. Because even if you can't, even if you can't save a lot of money right now, if you can avoid debt, pay cash for crappy cars, beaters with heaters, drive cars that get you from A to Z and barely that. If you're 22 years old, you should not be

driving a BMW. You don't need to. But a lot of people dig themselves a hole in their teens and early twenties. So they have to have a good income just to be able to break even every month because so much of their paycheck is going towards student loans, car payments, credit cards, buying stuff that they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't even like. So I think, I think those are critical lessons for younger folks. You mentioned meaning and purpose, and this is really important because a lot of what we do is helping people find meaning behind the money. I believe, Chris, that investments are just a tool. If our focus is the investment, then there's never enough.

You can always earn more money. You can always push back your goals and dreams and retire later to try to accumulate more and more and more. And for some of those folks, that just means they die on a bigger pile of money. And this might seem weird coming from an investment advisor, from a financial planner, but money is a tool. It's a tool to help you build a better life. So unless you know what is meaningful and important to you as an individual, a lot of times people are building futures based on what they think other people want. They're dancing to somebody else's music and you can have somebody that's worth a lot of money, but if they don't know what is fulfilling to them, if they don't have a meaningful pursuit in retirement, they're not going to feel a lot

of abundance. It's not going to be what they thought it was. So wealth by itself does not buy freedom. Meaningful pursuit combined with financial freedom, that's what financial independence truly looks like. There you go. What are some of the most common mistakes you see investors make or people when they're trying to start out make in investing? Well, I think one of the mistakes that people make starting out is kind of what we alluded to earlier. They kick the can down the road because they think they have more time. And the longer you wait, the harder you have to work to get to where you want to be. Because eventually you get to a point where time is working against you, not for you. I think one of the other big mistakes people make is not having a blueprint, not having a plan, not having something to keep you on the path to connect

your future goal with your current actions. Because I've already kind of mentioned this a couple of times, but it's this idea of paying your future self. When you put your money in a Roth IRA and a 401k, it can feel like a cost. If you're thinking of it in today's dollars, that's money you could spend on something else. But if you think about it, I'm paying the future version of me. That's still not super tangible, right? But at least it doesn't feel like a cost. But what we want to do is connect that life that you want in the future with where you are today. And that requires a plan, a strategy.

So nobody would ever buy or say nobody. People shouldn't be building a house without a blueprint. You shouldn't be building your financial future without a plan either. Most people don't have one. Kind of like we talked about on the outset of the show. Nobody has a plan to run out of money, but very few people have a plan not to. And that's what a financial blueprint can do is keep people on that straight and narrow, help block out the distractions by saying, here's where you want to be. Here's where you are right now. Here's the steps that you need to take this week, this month, this year to stay on track. There you go. I love the analogy, pay your future self. I love that because Uh, because that's a great way to think

of it. You know, Hey, um, you know, I'm going to need money in the future. Uh, let me ask you this. What, what, what would you say a good low end, uh, or bottom end of, of, uh, what do people need to retire these days in, in, in today's world with inflation that may change in a few years, but, uh, so you're watching this year. So now you may need to adjust that. But what would you say a low end of what do I need when I hit 65? If you're going to hate this answer, it's going to sound like a political dodge. But it really depends on individual goals. So that's one of the things. In fact, let's do this for the audience. So if you guys email ask at VeritasAlaska.com and put in find my number in the subject, my team will help you guys find your retirement number, the amount of money that you need to retire comfortably based on your goals and needs.

So that's the process. It takes 10 or 15 minutes. It's not super complicated complicated and it gives people a a good target to shoot for is it perfectly refined no but it gives an idea of here's what my financial house needs to look like so i can have financial freedom but let's just just to use for sake of metaphor let's let's use something like a million dollars somebody who is a millionaire let's let's wipe your slate clean. You have no debts. You have no assets. And I write you a check for a million dollars.

Let's say you go out and buy a house. It's a condo even because you can't find a house for a quarter of a million bucks, but we'll just use this in our metaphor here. So you have a house, quarter of a million dollars. You write a check for that. So now you're down to $750,000. But you have a paid for house, so that's great. Now you're going to need some furniture. You're going to need to buy a car. You're going to need to equip the house with some things because, like you said, we started from scratch. No debts, no assets. So let's say that's another $50,000 to get a car, buy some clothes, buy some necessities for the house.

Now you're down to $700,000. If you're invested in good growth stock mutual funds, like we help people find, like Dave Ramsey talks about, you're still looking at a healthy withdrawal rate of something like 4% to 5% a year. And going back to the orchard metaphor, it's like, we're not digging up the trees. We're just picking the fruit. We're not digging up the trees we're just picking the fruit we're not digging into the principle that way our income can be sustainable and it can gradually rise to outpace inflation that means we have to to draw a little less early on so if we're drawing four percent a year four and a half percent a year off that seven hundred thousand dollars that's this left that's like roughly twenty five hundred dollars a month that we're living off of now we've got a paid off house we got a paid off car we're living off twenty five hundred dollars a month can you survive off that absolutely but you're not living a lot of freedom you're not you're not going out to eat every night you're not able to go on a lot

of vacations twenty five hundred dollars a month in most parts of the country, even with no debts and a paid off house is still not a lot of money to do everything you want to be doing. So that just puts in perspective on what a million dollars does today. If you have a million dollars net worth and you're trying to retire. There you go. And of course, inflation and taxes can impact that as well. We've seen some inflationary nature of cost of goods and stuff, and it doesn't look like it's going to stabilize anytime soon. COVID's really caused some issues. And then, of course, it seems like everything gets more expensive over time and doesn't keep up with wages. So there you go.

And I love your analogies that you use in helping people. When you coach people, who do you usually work with? What is a good client base for your company or who We work with a lot of folks who have good-paying jobs, but they're not making extravagant income. Our biggest niche is probably law enforcement and oil field workers for various reasons. It wasn't intentional. That's kind of niches that we fell into. I think I personally connect well with those groups. Here in Alaska, the oil and gas industry is huge. It's kind of the lifeblood of our economy. But it's the idea that the folks we're working with, they're willing to do the mundane, monotonous things. They make good

money so they can put money away consistently but they're willing to do the difficult things that most people aren't willing to do um they're they're patient they're perseverant they're i'm not sure if perseverant is a word they have perseverance i should say they're disciplined um and they're coachable so those are the folks that we like to work with the people that are are willing to do what others won't to get to where other people probably won't end up. And that's financially independent. Yeah, the worst thing you can do is run out of money.

Then there's all sorts of different things that can happen. I remember when one thing I never knew was I remember when my father passed away. I didn't know. I always thought that the wife or the husband inherited their spouse's Social Security income. I didn't know they had to. You can only choose one, whichever is higher, if it's a smarter move. I didn't know you had to do it that way. And I was like, wow, I always thought you'd get the dual income if one or the other passed away.

And it really impacted some people that I've seen in retirements planning taxes have impacted, uh, you know, they, I guess some people thought there was no taxes after you retired on your money because you've been putting it away. It turns out there's different things that can impact health insurance. Of course, it's constantly going up in this country and, and probably will continue to as doctors and nurses leave the business. Um, so, um So how do you, how do you deal with people to create better habits and a healthier mindset

where, you know, do you give them a plan on how much to put away every month to help achieve the goal they're shooting for? Yes, we do. And that's, that's part of that idea of having that financial blueprint, right? It not only connects the future, who I want to be, what I want to be doing, where do I want to be in the future? It connects that to where I am today, but it also breaks down a big goal into meaningful bite-sized chunks. Because let's just say if we ran the find your

retirement number scenario with you, Chris, we run the process and we're like, okay, Chris, you need $2.5 million to retire comfortably. That might be really over, I'm just making up this number. But it's a number that's reasonable for a lot of Americans, uh, to be able to replace that their, their lifestyle or that the income that they need to sustain their lifestyle. So two and a half million dollars, that can sound completely overwhelming to a lot of people. And the tendency for human beings is if there is something overwhelming is put on their plate, they just ignore it. So if I say, Chris, you need to accumulate two and a half million dollars in the next 10 years in order to retire comfortably, you could easily pass that off as future Chris's problem. That's not something you need to deal with. That's what Chris in 10 years needs to deal with. I'm going to go on vacation. But if you take that two and a half million dollars

and we run the numbers and we reverse engineer that to where you are today, we're like, okay, Chris, based on where you're at right now, based on your current portfolio objectives, you're going to need to save an extra $1,000 a month to get to that $2.5 million in 10 years. So I know you're already putting money away, but we've got to find a way to increase that by a thousand dollars a month. Now that might be challenging. It might be hard, but it's less overwhelming for most people than saying you need two and a half million dollars in 10 years. The other thing it does is it makes every day meaningful. Because again, if I say you need two and a half million dollars in 10 years, that's 2033 Chris's problem. If I say you, if I say you need to save an extra thousand dollars a month to hit that goal in 2033, now every day matters because you're trying to save an extra 30 bucks a day,

$33 a day to hit that thousand dollars a month. It's no longer just future Chris's problem today, Chris, and next week, Chris and next month, Chris has to figure out a way to save and invest this money. So again, it connects us more to that, that future self a little bit. I think I'm going to rename my eight personalities, those different variations of

Chris that you outlined there, uh, future Chris one, two, I think, and then that way I'll just work with them to plan for the future. So that's always good. So across your website, you have several different things that you offer as resources and tools. You've got a retirement plan checkup, chart your financial course, personal financial planning, portfolio MRI. That's kind of interesting. And then you got riskalize tell us about riskalize this is kind of interesting what you guys do there and you help people analyze where they're currently at with their investments yeah it kind of it kind of analyzes where people's

current volatility is in light of what their comfort zone is now that can be a little bit misleading because if we always did what's comfortable, we're not going to accomplish much in life. And that's not just in finance. I'm going to go to the gym right after we get done with this. It's not going to be comfortable. It would be much more comfortable to walk across the parking lot over here. I have McDonald's 100 feet away. It would be much more comfortable to do that, but I'm going to go to the gym instead. So what you are comfortable with on a volatility basis is only one part of the equation. And a lot of times what we have to do is find what somebody is willing to put up with from a volatility standpoint, from an uncertainty standpoint, what they need to make it to the long-term goals and find a

marriage, find a compromise between those two. So they're comfortable enough to continue, but they're willing to experience enough discomfort to actually get to where they want to go. So we don't want to make it so uncomfortable that they're in this really high growth investment. They might have tremendous long-term potential, but if it's so volatile in the short term, they don't stick with it. That's not a good fit for that individual. It's like somebody who's never worked out a day in their life. They're like, yeah, I'm going to go do what the Navy SEALs do.

It's not going to last. It doesn't mean that's a bad workout program. It's just not going to work for you. So you need to work your way up to that. So Riskalyze allows people to kind of get a handle on what their own ability to tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity looks like. But then we try to connect that to the long-term goals. And sometimes people have to take on more temporary volatility to get to where they want to be. And what we tell people is, you got to remember, when we're talking about market declines and things like that, the risk is temporary.

The pain is temporary. The declines are temporary. The advance is permanent. So be willing to trade away short-term discomfort for long-term security. Too often, people make that reverse trade. They trade away long-term security for short-term pleasure and comfort. And again, that's in health, that's in finances, it's in business in a lot of areas. We sacrifice the future for the present. There you go. And it's really important. I mean, I see what these kids are spending on cars and

stuff. And I learned, I did the same thing when i was young and got money i i bought you know bmws and houses and and uh i had a little too much fun but i had fun but uh you know then i watch fight club and it's like we buy stuff to impress people that don't give a shit about us and uh and i was like wow you know i do that i'm trying to impress all these people and no one really cares. Like no one cares, whatever. I mean, maybe your date does, or maybe your wife does or whatever. But for the most part, you know, I see people that are just, they spend money on crazy stuff,

especially now where we saw cars go to like, there's some trucks that we're selling for $150,000 with $50,000 markups over COVID and stuff. It's crazy what I've seen. And then I've seen a lot of people that are like, I can't afford my student loans. I can't afford paying what I'm paying. And I've seen advisors review them on TikTok, and they're like, you're going to DoorDash like three times a day eating there,

and you're eating $10 meals, but you're paying $40 a pop for the delivery service. And, and, and they're like, no wonder you're broke. They're like, well, I got to eat. Well, it's like drive to McDonald's and pay 10 bucks, you know? Uh, you know, even at my income, I, I'm just like, I'm not'm not doing that i'll i'll get in my car and go maybe i'm old world that way but people people really don't think about some of the money they just waste on bs sometimes and uh you know you don't you don't need the latest range rover i mean maybe if you can afford it uh and you've got your investments in play good for you uh but you know if you're young you know it it adds up you mentioned this investments in play, good for you. But if you're young,

it adds up. You mentioned this early in the show and I wanted to get to it. I think you said like $30 a day or just a small amount per day. It adds up and it compounds with some of the things that go on in the market. I had somebody recently say to me, I want to make $100,000 a year, but it really seems hard to do. And I said to him, look, it's $273 a day you got to earn to do that. So find a product, find some sort of service, something you can do that can earn you $273 a day or about that. Focus on making $273,000, or $273,000, focus on that eventually, but $273 a day. And if you focus on that eventually. But $273 a day. And if you focus on that, just selling that, marketing it, selling a product, selling a service, you're going to be $100,000 a year person. And it's a whole lot easier to chew the elephant at that point.

And the same perspective goes into investing. You know, putting, you know, that little, you know, here's some extra money every day, put it away, et cetera, et cetera, and all that good stuff. It can make all the difference. One thing you guys have on your website is see if your retirement plan is still on track. People can go there and do, is that the same as your MRI service where you see if everything's working on their portfolio? So, no, the portfolio MRI is really a health checkup of their portfolio. Is their portfolio how it's constructed in alignment with their long-term goals? The retirement plan checkup is really, are they on the right path overall? So if your investments are the vehicle, the portfolio MRI is, do you have the right vehicle based on the road that you're trying to be on?

The retirement plan checkup is more like, are you even on the right road? So they're looking at the problem from two different areas. Are you on the right path? And number two, do you have the right vehicle to get you there? There you go. Speaking of vehicles, I was going to say that because this is super important. You alluded to several things that a lot of people don't understand. People do not understand the opportunity cost of the four wheels that they roll around on every single day.

So the average car payment right now, the last few years, it's crossed over $700 a month. It might be higher now because of interest rates. I don't know.'s crossed over $700 a month. It might be higher now because of interest rates. I don't know. But at $700 a month, if you were to take that money, let's say you started when you were 20 years old, and put that into good growth stock mutual funds, $700 a month, instead of going to your car payment, you're paying it to yourself. depending on rates of return. If you got a moderately aggressive rate of return, eight to 9%, by the time that individual is in their sixties, that would be two, $3 million in a retirement account. If they do it to a Roth IRA, it'd be a couple million dollars tax free. So that $700 car payment that people roll around with, they don't realize that's a $2 million car when they're 60 years old. So people don't count that opportunity cost.

And I practice what I preach. I hope this doesn't sound like a humble brag, but I was making over a quarter million dollars a year before I purchased my first car that cost more than 10 grand. And it was like 15. It wasn't even that cost more than 10 grand. So I was before it was, it was like 15. It wasn't even that much more than 10 grand, but I was making a quarter of a million dollars a year driving $8,000. And this is embarrassing. $8,000 a year, powdered blue Volkswagen Passat that I bought at night. My brother checked it out for me. He's like, no, it's good. He's he's, he works in the car industry. He's like, it's good. You should buy it. It's great. I bought at night. My brother checked it out for me. He's like, no, it's good. He works in the car industry. He's like, it's good. You should buy it. It's great. I bought it at night. I thought

it was silver. I brought it home. My wife's like, yeah, that's like periwinkle blue. But I still drove that car because it was paid for and my money was going towards my future self, not to a car payment. One of the issues people have is when they get some extra money or an extra bonus, they will take in, you know, go looking on Amazon cart. And so, you know, should we really have a mentality of like paying ourselves first to use for an investment or as you put it, pay yourself investment wise first into the future and um the uh should we have the mentality of trying to you know pay our future selves first as opposed to you know going on amazon cart whenever we get that like bonus from the thing or whatever i think you hit it right on the head you pay your future self first um in fact i think for a lot of folks um giving to somebody else, whether that is a church, a charity, whatever, and then giving to your future self. So those two things are really powerful because

when you give to your future self or give to, you know, you donate to somebody in need or give to a charity, give to a family member, don't always give to family members. That can cause problems. But let's just say your church, right? It actually sends a signal. This might sound like psycho mumbo jumbo. It sends you a signal that says, I have enough. I have enough that I can actually do things for other people. And it actually creates more of a mindset of abundance. Being generous leads to more of a mindset of abundance. Being generous leads to more of a mindset of abundance, helps people break out of that scarcity mentality. And I've met multimillionaires, people with 10, $20 million that still live in scarcity. So being generous is super important, but also more pertinent to your question. Yes. Pay your future

self first. A lot of people say that they're going to invest whatever is left over at the end of the month, but most people end up with more month than money at the end of 30 days. And it's kind of like saying, you know, I'll, you know, I'll, I'll work out at the end of the day after I've gone to work and I've eaten dinner and I've watched my shows and all that, then I'll go to the gym. At the end of the day, you're exhausted, you're out of time, you're out of energy. It's probably not going to happen. So most people have to get those hard things, the hardest parts of their day, whether it's a workout, maybe it's making prospecting calls if you sales, maybe, maybe it's a difficult conversation with a player. If you're a coach, but you do that early, you, you block out time in your

day to make sure that thing happens. Same thing with planning for your future. You block out that, that money for your future self early in the month. So, you know, what happens if you wait till the end of the month to see what's left over there almost never is there you go um one of the things that people forget about too is credit card debt uh as a mortgage company that i run for 20 years we always used to tell people if you have five thousand dollar balance on your credit card uh with an apr of 16 which, I mean, it's pretty low compared to nowadays, and a $100 minimum payment requirement, if you only pay those minimum payments, the very minimum, it will take you six years and 11 months to pay that off. And while I don't have that number here, the number we used to quote people is you'll pay $25,000 over that term, or you will pay usually

four to five times the amount of that credit card, which is down payment on a house technically. And people don't really realize that. I mean, how much do you feel when you look at people's ability to invest and what they're doing, do you look at their credit cards and getting that sort of paid off? Because some people are paying a much higher interest rate. Yeah. So we hired recently a Dave Ramsey financial coach specifically for those things, because we had so many people coming to us who they wanted to invest. They wanted to build this financial plan, but we can't start building your financial house while your land is on fire. And that's kind of what was happening is that there, there's so much risk in other areas of life. We got to put out the fires before we start building because it doesn't, it doesn't make sense to invest in something you hope might average 10%

a year when you're paying 25% a year to your Home Depot credit card. And, and getting on top of debt, we already touched on this a little bit., is so critical because debt is not only destructive from a financial standpoint, but also from a psychological standpoint. Because you're starting out every month working from behind. You become a slave. The Bible says you become a slave to the lender. Psychologically, that's what happens. It causes a victimized type mentality. And it's no wonder if all or so much of my paycheck is going to pay banks, credit card

companies, student loans, all those things. And I'm just left with a few dollars left over. It's hard to feel empowered when you're giving your so-called first fruits out to credit companies. Yeah. And you're bleeding out so much money. I mean, you think about, you're spending all this money that's just not ever really going to the principal much. There's probably a small teeny amount, but sometimes just paying a little bit extra to that or looking at that. Because if you're paying, especially right now, I think some people that have adjustable rate credit cards, with the way the Fed has gone, they're probably paying an incredible amount and they probably haven't even paid attention to how much

that's impacting them with the federal rate increases. If they have an adjustable on their thing, I think most people do on credit cards. But yeah, I mean, it impacts you and it just eats away at you. If you're making those minimum payments, you're not really thinking about it. If you're trying to get 20% or 25% out of your market investments, but you're bleeding out at, I don't know what people pay, 20, 20, 25, I've been trying to pay all mine off recently. And if you're paying that horrendous amount of credit card debt, you're kind of canceling out your investments, I think. Is that an appropriate sort of analogy? Well, I don't think it's – I think most would be underwater because you look at long-term.

The S&P 500 for the last 96, 97 years has averaged about 10% a year. But because a lot of people try to time the market, they make mistakes, they panic out. The average investor over the last 30 years in good growth stock mutual funds has actually averaged less than 5% because they've misused the tool. It's kind of back to our previous metaphor about the paintbrush and the artist. You can give somebody a paintbrush. It doesn't make them an artist unless they know how to use it. You can give somebody good growth stock mutual funds, but if they don't use them appropriately,

they won't get the full return. And it's not because of fees and commissions. That's part of it. But it's because they're not doing the right thing. So let's just say that they got the full S&P 500 return. Let's say the average 10% a year. Most people aren't getting even close to that. But if they did, that's still probably roughly half of what credit card rates are. So again, it's like building a house in the middle of a forest fire.

You're burning up what is being built. It doesn't make sense, but people don't, we've become so accustomed to it. Debt is such a normal part of our life that we don't realize how detrimental that is. And to your point, Chris, about the timing of this, the way that credit card payments are structured, the way that student loan payments are structured, they're designed to last potentially for decades. And with credit cards, it's even worse because you're making the minimum payment, which takes 15, 20 years to pay it off. Plus you're still buying, you're adding to that. So not only are you dripping a little bit of water on this forest fire, you're pouring

kerosene over here. So it's just, we've already said, I want to beat a dead horse, but debt is one of the most destructive factors to financial independence because it's this liability. You think about it, what debt is, you're still paying for purchases from the past. You're dragging these purchases from the past forward. And if, if climbing,

if, if building financial independence is like climbing a mountain, then doing it with debt is like dragging a sled full of rocks behind you. It definitely is. Never used that metaphor before. You're good at metaphors, man. I love your metaphors and analogies because they make sense. They hit home to the truisms of how to kind of reframe your brain and the paradigm of how to look at wealth management and building it.

You know, I looked at some of my credit cards. In 2015, I was pretty much all cash. All my credit cards were zero to nothing. I just had a few. I was living my best little life. And then I started getting a couple of credit cards to buy some toys and cameras and stuff. And I started looking at them over the last six months and going Jesus I got that in 2015 that credit card that means I'm still paying on the debt that's back there what am I doing you know

and meanwhile I'm investing in cash and and got plenty running around here and I'm like well shit um so I started paying off credit cards recently and going, let's get rid of this stuff, man. Let's get back to that zero mark where everything is cash. You know, you can keep the credit cards for a rainy day or, you know, health issue or something like that. But Jesus, I started looking at it. I'm like, what am I doing, man? You know, you're trying to, you know, you're trying to go up one way.

It's like playing with your hand behind your back with credit card debt. So this has been really insightful, Chad, and you just have an amazing way of changing people's paradigms, giving them a mental focus to think about things in a different way other than, you know, I mean, some people, they, they hate the math of financial planning. They hate, oh God, I got to plan, you know, for the end of my life and things that I don't want to think about, you know, no one wants to really think about being in retirement. Well, some people probably want to retire, but you know, I'm at 55. So I'm just like, I'm not really excited about retirement. Cause I know there's kind of death looming there a little bit too. Um, give us, give us the best way people can reach out to you, get to know you better, talk to you,

start engaging with you and maybe have you help them analyze where they're at and where they should go. Well, I just want to just real quick push back on this idea of retirement as a slow death. A lot of people do view it that way. We've even pushed back on retirement in general. It should be a work-optional lifestyle where, Chris, hopefully you're still doing this show. You're still having fun, but you work because you want to, not because you have to. So retirement or at least financial independence, financial freedom doesn't mean that you have to retire. You have to quit working. It just means that your investments over here can replace your paycheck over here. You no longer need your job. You no longer need your career. You no longer need your business because your investments are covering that.

That's a work optional lifestyle. We talk about that a lot in my book. We're going to be doing a pre-release in early November. It's Forging Financial Freedom. And if you want to be on our book list when we do the pre-launch, you can send an email to ask at veritasalaska.com, same email address as before. Just put book in the title. We'll add you to that list. And you can also check us out again, veritasalaska.com. I'm on LinkedIn. We also have an Instagram page, Facebook, all that stuff. You can keep on top of what we're doing. But if you're

struggling to find your retirement number, you need a strategic objective to work towards and a clear path to get you there, reach out, find my retirement number, email that to ask at veritaslaska.com. We'll help you out. We'll help you find some clarity and confidence in your financial path. There you go.

Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. You've really helped me change some of my paradigms and given me some tools to work with and our your financial path. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on. You've really helped me change some of my paradigms and given me some tools to work with and our audience as well. Thank you very much, Chad. We really appreciate it, man. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

There you go, guys. Plan for your future. Pay your future self. I'm going to start thinking of my future self because, I don't know, I haven't planned very well, especially when it comes to weight management and health management and working out and stuff. And so over the last few years,

I've been going to the gym and eating better and being more healthy. But man, playing catch-up is sure annoying. I look back at my past self, why didn't you plan this better? So do it now. Capture the moment now and be present. Thanks for tuning in.

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Thanks for being here and part of the Chris Foss show family. Be good to each other. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time. And that should...