The Derivative - The Business of Staying Wealthy with Homer Smith of Konvergent Wealth

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

For those lucky few who’ve sold a business, inherited wealth, or otherwise find themselves in the enviable position of staying wealthy, not getting wealthy – the investment game can be more about playing defense than going on offense. But how do you go about that, who do you partner with to figure out complex tax and estate issues. This week, Jeff is sitting down with Homer Smith(@HomerSmith_KWP), the founder of Konvergent Wealth Management, to dig into just how investment advisors like him go about solving the complex financial challenges end investors face. Homer and Jeff dive into a variety of topics, including how allocating to managers differs from being an asset manager, how to add DEFENCE to build an all-weather portfolio, the benefits of return stacking (Be sure to check out this WP on Return Stacking), how to navigate and scale an investment firm, and take a closer look into the future of wealth service. Plus, we're playing two truths and a lie with Homer; tune in to see if he really is Matt Damon's stunt double — SEND IT! Chapters: 00:00-01:13 = Intro 01:14-11:51 = Flipping the Script: How Picking the Managers differs from Being the Manager 11:52-28:34 = Adding DEFENCE to make an all-weather portfolio 28:35-37:23 = Return Stacking, Leverage & Wealth destruction in the Tech Wreck 37:24-58:56 = The RIA: Then vs Now, helping navigate life, scaling your firm & the Future of Wealth Services 58:57-01:05:06 = Two Truths and a Lie: Matt Damon's Stunt double? Follow along with Homer on Twitter @HomerSmith_KWP and also Konvergent Wealth @KonvergentWP and for more information check out Konvergentwealth.com Don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, follow us on Twitter at @rcmAlts and our host Jeff at @AttainCap2, or LinkedIn , and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer

Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Happy first day of September, everyone. You guys crushed our back to school episode last week. Thanks for that. And we've got great guests coming up throughout September. So make sure to subscribe and be the first to get new pods as they drop.

On to today's episode where we flip the script a little and talk to an end user of all these pros and asset managers we have on the show. We've got Homer Smith, the founder and CIO of Convergent Wealth. We get into how to talk to clients about defensive strategies, what's next for the wealth advisory industry, and being in the stay rich versus get rich business. Send it. This episode is brought to you by RCM's Managed Futures Group. Go to rcmalts.com to sign up for all the great content there and pick up the phone and call one of the specialists to hear what's going on under the hood. You won't want to miss it. Now, back to the show.

All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome, Homer. How you been? I've been well, man. It's been a good summer so far. I know, depending on when this gets posted and delivered, but it's been a good summer so far i know depending on when this uh gets posted and delivered but uh it's been a great summer out here in the pacific northwest yeah tell me a little about the great northwest up there what do you guys do in the summertime for fun a lot of boating you know where uh puget sound is if you look on a map and dial it in it's pretty much you know every city town has got water mountains something related to that. A lot of time around water. We ourselves just built a property or built on our property.

We've got an acre and a half ponds. We've got our own little mini lake. That's our version of waterfront, but we're out on kayaks and paddle boards and doing all that sort of fun stuff. Yeah. An acre and a half lake is pretty big, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is a mini lake and it's a really pretty property. And we just moved in last year and last summer was all packing and then moving in.

And so we really lost the summer. So it's been nice to really have a relaxing summer out on the property. Do you stock it with fish or fish you found there? Yeah, there are fish in there. We haven't stocked it yet, but we got heron and, and, and hawks come in diving in and grabbing fish out of it. We've seen them get some pretty good size fish out of there. So it's about 12 to 15 feet deep in the middle. So it's a decent, uh, decent depth. So yeah, our goal is to get, get it more stocked and have some fishing tournaments with, uh, friends and family out there and do some fun stuff like that nice the uh i was involved in a golf course development a while back and like totally artificial lakes and ponds right and people would be catching huge bass and stuff out of there like

how does that happen and finally i learned like the eggs will get stuck on ducks feeds or the herons you mentioned right and they fly from one place where there's natural fish come land in this lake deposit the fertilized eggs and boom you got fish that makes sense yeah nature finds a way um and does anyone ever go like offshore right like into the pacific ocean you're just tooling around in the sand oh yeah there's a lot of people for fishermen do for sure and people who like salmon fishing and uh halibut and they'll go pretty far off the coast um it's a decent drive from you know seattle area you know it's a good couple hours to get out there yeah past kirk cobain's house i think yeah yeah down to aberdeen and out yeah for sure um and you just set me up for my favorite dad joke uh why do fishermen go fishing why is that just for the halibut nice my girls are at dinner time

lately as we sit around as a family they've been asking me to do jokes i have to look them up um online so i'll have to add that one to the mix there's a good uh twitter guy i follow like uh pun something i'll send it to you but yeah he's he's got all those that are pretty good nice um this one today was there was a french fire a factory caught fire in france all that was left was debris all right we'll stop on the dad jokes show um so anyway wanted to get you on fun for me kind of to flip the scripts for our listeners here you know we're usually talking to the asset managers uh the ones making the trading models doing the execution figuring out the complex option theory etc etc uh and happy to have you here the one saying, Hey, I like the cut of that guy or gal's jib.

I'm going to allocate some client assets to them. So tell us a little bit what it's like being in your chair from that perspective and having to make sense of all the math and separating out fact and fiction from all these hedge fund guys you hear on our podcast here. I appreciate being on. And I, you know, one thing I can promise is you won't have to pull out the dictionary like you would if like Jason Buck were on or something like that. I always enjoy learning new words when he's on. But no, it's, you know, in terms of,

especially this space that you guys live in, you know, more of the trend following managed futures, long volatility space. It's relatively new to me, really, the last couple of years that we did our research and came along to this world. So podcasts like yours and some of the others out there, it's been a massive educational experience for me to kind of learn a whole new part of our investing world. You know, we grew up in the broker dealer RIA space and you kind of get into the 60 of our investing world. We grew up in the broker-dealer RIA space and you kind of get into the 60-40 portfolio world and you don't really look much beyond that. And no one really expects you to look much beyond that. And so the rock stars that I look at now in the investing world are probably very different than what most traditional advisors

would view as people that are very interesting and have the best takes and most interesting research. And so it's been really fun to find your podcast and find your firm and the research you guys do and the people you bring on because it's been transformative in our business. And how much of a learning curve was that for you to kind of get up to speed with just some of the vernacular, like you're saying, some of the vocabulary and like these concepts of like, okay, like, I think you can get it conceptually, but then oftentimes here we go into the weeds. And it's like, is that helpful to you to get that far into the weeds? It is. It's super helpful because I think one thing I've always been good

at in my career, I mean, I started really young in this business. And I think one reason why I made it and did well was I've been good at taking back into something more simple for them. So, and needing that knowledge. So they need to know that I have the knowledge on that topic to be able to trust the translation into their more simple vocabulary. So yeah, it's been extremely helpful to have that depth. I used to joke with these managers who write these big 30 page monthly letters and stuff, right. Or quarterly letters. And I'm like, then they were transitioning into mutual fund world. I'm like, all right, your letter needs to become a paragraph. The wholesaler reads a paragraph, gives it to the RA, explains to them. Then the RA turns it into a sentence to give to their client.

So you're, you're basically your 30 page letters getting boiled down into a sentence to the end client, which is more difficult than it seems right like you gotta you gotta pull out all the pieces um i love it and what and how hard is that like how many pitches are you getting a week or a year in terms of people coming in saying i've got the next best thing here it is and you kind of have to suss out we've already got some of that. We don't have that. This is interesting. What's that look like? It's easier now because I have a good team. And so I, they, we have good gatekeepers and they have rules of who can get to me and who can't. And so it's, you know, we get a lot. I mean, it's constant as you can imagine. I mean,

I emails are, you know, five, 10 a day at least, or more, and then phone calls in are constant, but thankfully they know, you know, we have a certain philosophy our team does. And so only so many get through. And, and, and so I, but rarely do I entertain new meetings if it's not something I've found through my research. And so usually those meetings come about because I read a piece that was really interesting to me. I then reached out to the management group to find out more and see how it fits. And then they might say, hey, you should talk to this manager or this manager because they're doing something similar. And so today I try to keep it, I try to not entertain too many new ideas because there are so many and only so much time in the day and and um mostly find them through my own research now and you're saying you get five to

ten new pitch emails a day not total emails a day because then then you're gonna be my hero yeah oh my god if i got five to ten a day i'd be right would be happy yeah you'd be out on that pond just sitting in a rowboat doing something i've got all sorts of rules in my email now to capture those and send them to their own files i don't ever have to really look at them even but um and so that i like that and so that's like just killed a bunch of people are like no we'll do linkedin ads and uh reach out to ras on linkedin and be like hey you need to be involved in this new read or this new whatever whatever. So that doesn't work. No, that doesn't work either, but I get plenty of those too.

Sorry, LinkedIn marketers. And so how do you keep that focus or what you said, there's some rules, like what are those rules look like? And so you're not like chasing down some new condo project or a private sale of some unicorn stock, right? Yeah. So part of it is we do have an investment team and they're tasked with kind of the general, you know, so I have my philosophy. And so, you know, we'll talk about, you know,

we have an all weather approach in general to our core philosophy for working with clients. But, you know, we do have a lot of clients that have sold their business or, you know, inherited family wealth. And they are looking for more than a simple model to manage their money. And so we do have access to private capital markets and private equity funds. And so they're tasked with really doing a lot of that research and narrowing to the scope down to where it fits what we're trying to do as a firm for our clients.

And then for me, it's a lot where it comes about for me is when I do my research and how I came about to the altweather, for instance, was I read The Allegory of a Hawk and Serpent by Chris Cole. And the first reading of it was, okay, this is a really interesting idea, a hundred-year portfolio. I work with multi-generational families. That's really interesting. No idea what long volatility is, a little bit of an idea what trend following is and gold and all that. But after the third or fourth reading, I was like, this is really profound and I need to figure this out and really get to know this. And so that's how I kind of got down to the road to all of those

managers was really starting with a research paper and then doing self-education on the strategy and the idea and then finding who does this and and for our clients and in the retail space even the high net worth retail space how do we access this how do we how do we fit this into what we're doing and how does it fit into our philosophy and so i copied in one of your tweets in my notes here back from May. You said, never slept better in my career. I started my career the week of September 11th. We'll have to maybe get into that story. That's crazy.

That very week of it? Yeah. Took over managing a branch for a major broker dealer in October of 7. Now COVID, now this latest drawdown, nothing is perfect, but we've actively added defense to our portfolios and it has paid off. So we'll bury the lead. We'll put that on hold for a second because now I got to know the 9-11 story. So the week of 9-11? Yeah, so I graduated college, you know, June of 2001, did my licensing over the summer and got through all that.

And I think the Saturday, Friday or Saturday before 9-11 was like my first day in the office, my stack of leads and cold calling. And then I think it was a Tuesday, it was 9-11 and basically shut everything down for the next month or so, brand new to your career. And you're basically cold calling. It wasn't quite pretty darn close. And nobody's interested in talking about their portfolio. So it was definitely a very interesting time

to start your wealth management career with that thrown into the mix. Who was that with? I was with American Express Financial Advisors at the time on Ameriprise. Yeah. Yeah. So that was kind of cold calling.

But they were fee-based, so they were transaction-based. A little bit of both. They've had a planning focus to the firm, which is what was attractive. And they were just moving into more of a fee-based world, but still relatively transaction-oriented. But they did have a planning focus. So it wasn't just investments. It really was an overall holistic planning approach. Yeah. And so we buried the lead there, but so that tweet thread and this adding defense, and you mentioned like, hey, all weather and generations of wealth. So talk a little bit, like which came first, your clients saying like,

I want to protect this generation's wealth, or are you saying, I think this is a better way to protect this generation's wealth? Yeah, good question. I think it came about, I mean, as I've, my approach to wealth management in general is, you know, what we call a family office practice or family office approach. So we're working with our clients to, you know, think beyond just the investment world and really how do we optimize their entire financial picture and look at, you know, what outcomes are they looking to create both for themselves and then in future generations, if that's important to them. And so that was a big part of what I was already doing from a planning perspective. But, you know, when you've got an older generation and then maybe G2 and G3, their investment goals or how they think about investing might be completely

different. And so I never really thought about, okay, would one solution kind of make sense as a core for all of them? And it really was reading Chris's paper where he talked about the hundred year portfolio and why it made sense to think about it that way. It really kind of connected the dots. Like, okay, this can be the core kind of a portfolio concept for any age of investor or style of investor that this should be the core. And thinking about it from a combining the offense and defense together perspective. And before that, what was the core? What was the idea there? Like,

hey, we're going to diversify stocks, bonds, real estate, some other... Yeah. I mean, I definitely, I'm not unique in this, I think prior to that, but I was mostly of the idea that, look, you can't beat the benchmarks, actively managing the fund. And so don't overly try. And so I would say we were more, if you looked at our entire book, we were probably pretty close to 60, you looked at our entire book, we were probably pretty close to 60-40, although we did it, you know, different allocations based on age and risk tolerance. And so we had 80-20 and 60-40 and those.

And then we also did some, you know, additional pieces. Like we were using some vol targeting algorithms and groups that helped us with that. And, you know, it was working relatively well in that strategy until COVID hit, you know, and, and it worked at the beginning. So it pretty quickly de-risked and got out of the way of a lot of the downturn, but then because of kind of the high levels of volatility that persisted for so long and never got back in. And so at the same time, that's when I read Chris's paper and I was like, I don't like what's happening. I don't, the feeling that what was going on in our portfolios wasn't good. And I didn't like the idea of having to go in and out of the market based on some

targeting. And I really liked the idea of having this core portfolio that could be not static, obviously rebalancing the huge component of it and how that worked, but at least as a core concept of how we would build a portfolio and construct portfolios for clients. It really hit home. You said you're talking to clients about second and third generation. How many say no? You said if they care about that. How many say they don't care about that?

Just out of curiosity of like, no, they're fine. We're just going to spend it all. It's a good mix i would say really there's i would say most have some desire to create some level of a legacy and and pass the wealth down um there are definitely some that you know interestingly enough as you get into that space you know there's lots of conflict between generations often or within the generations. And so, you know, there can be some consternation on exactly whether they want to leave everybody with all the money and what problems that might cause and we'll World War three breakout, you know, right. So they're just saying it's easier to say, forget it. None of you it's all going to charity.

Yeah. So there's some that are definitely thinking that route. And we obviously try to help and get involved in some of that family cohesion planning and try to bring it all back together. And it's difficult, but yeah, it's a good mix. You would think everybody would be looking to set up that multi-generational wealth and dynasty planning, but not everybody is interested. Well, if you want to hire me as the poster child for protecting multi-generational wealth, right? My great-grandfather was Walter S. Davidson, co-founder of Harley-Davidson. And then my father took two companies public back in the 80s. And here I am working on a Friday afternoon. So it's if you're, it's real protect that wealth. Most of those

problems were getting divorced and the motorcycle business going back to zero after the second world war. But, uh, no, we talk about that. A big part of our planning is, uh, in asset protection is, is we talk about divorce and especially in future generations and how do you keep the wealth in the family, especially, unfortunately, given how common that outcome is these days. So yeah, it's a big part of our conversations. And then you mentioned the 60-40 and people doing those portfolios. I'm always like, is it really a thing? So how many people are really actually just 60-40, right? We love in our old space to compare to it. But part of me thinks like nobody's really doing that. They're more of a, like you said, 80, 20, or they're around the edges doing different things.

I would say as an, as an aggregate, so I was talking to another RAA recently on some other topics, but we brought up the investment component because, you know, in general, when you're an RAA and you're in the planning space, like we are in family office space, we really do believe that the investments aren't necessarily going to be the most impactful part of what we do. It's the tax planning and the estate planning and all those other things. And so he was talking about that in the sense that he tells clients it's like the 30th or 35th thing on the list of 20 things that he's going to talk to them about, something like that. And he made the comment that his, his aggregate of his book is basically a 60,

40 portfolio. Now clients are going to be 80, 20, 60, 40, depending on their age and risk tolerance, some less aggressive mix, but aggregately he basically does it 60, 40. And so I think that's, that's my sense is that that's where it ends up. If you look at the total portfolio construction for an RAA, it's probably looks pretty darn close to 60, 40. Right. All right. We'll keep, we'll keep using it as a, as a benchmark. Yeah. I think it's pretty real. I think in all the, a lot of the advisors I talk to, that's when again, maybe individual client by client will be different, but their aggregate book is, is going to look really close to 60, 40. And how much, either talking with other RAs or

talking with clients, how displeased are they with the 40 portion, with the bond portion? Yeah, this year, I'd say quite a bit, right? I mean, we've been so used to having that be the part that at least is steady and stable. And for this year to have everything go down at the same time, COVID, obviously, you saw that for a very short period of time, but then bonds pretty quickly recovered. Here, we had a very extended period of that. And so I think for the first time, and I talk to clients about this a lot, it's been 40 years plus since we've had any sort of real inflation that could have impacted the bond market like it has. And there's probably very few, if any, financial advisors

that were advising clients the last time we saw this. And so most advisors haven't ever had to think about it and build a portfolio around that. And so most of them still have not, right? And so I think most of them have just kind of had to grin and bear it and hope it recovered. And, and, you know, obviously a little bit, it has recently with rates coming down a bit, but clients have been very frustrated that, you know, new clients that we've spoken to that thought they were in a very safe conservative portfolio, not that the advisors

overly sold them on it. Couldn't go down, but but just it's hard to, I think, estimate the kind of risk that they were putting themselves into because we just hadn't seen it as an advisor group in most of our careers. And so I think it's really difficult to set that up when you haven't seen it. And back tests would never show it. And so it has been a very interesting eight months, nine months as we've gone through that. Right. I think the general like, well, it's possible. Look at the last 30 years. Very unlikely. Yeah. Right. That one little sentence can can switch you to like, OK, and then boom. So talking about the clients, how how have they been of you getting them on board with a more holistic all-weather approach versus this 60-40? So tell me a little bit about how the clients came on board, whether they were brought dragging and screaming or

whether they intuitively got it, or I'm sure it's a mix. Yeah, I think timing matters sometimes and by accident. I think as we were doing our research on an all-weather approach and maybe backtracking on that a little bit, when we first looked at this two years ago, our first answer was we can't do it. We can't build it because of when you're building a defensive portfolio, you got to take away from your stocks and your bonds to add in managed futures or whatever defensive strategy you might want to put into the mix. And so all that looks good when the market goes down, you know, most of the time it doesn't. And so, you know, your clients are frustrated for a longer period of time. And so when we first tried to start building it and find solutions for it, it just was too conservative. You know, it was too defensive.

And so we didn't use it for like the first year. And it wasn't until we, you know, through relationships like Jason Buck and Rodrigo Gordillo at Resolve and Corey Hofstein at Newfound and Mike Green at Simplify, were we able to kind of really construct something that looked so once we could actually show that this thing could still have the performance to the upside or that we think it could, you know, obviously backtesting and all of that, that we could, you know, have a portfolio that we felt could keep up on the upside when the market was going well, but still have a lot of that protection built into the downside. We finally were able to, I think, put together a compelling story for clients. And so, you know, I stole a lot from Rodrigo and, and from Jason and their presentations, they obviously allowed me to, but a lot of what they were doing and really thought about how can I present this to a client in a way that they're going to, it's going to be approachable for them. And so, you know, actually we did most of the initial work about a year ago. So it started in about the fall of, of, of last year. And so the market hadn't really taken its turn yet, but I think a lot of our clients, you know, being in the

business owner world, they could sense things were weird, right? A little frothy. Yeah. And so I think the story, you know, we weren't trying to tell them that again, I think it was a Chris Cole thing. And he said, you know, he's talked about, you know, we're not trying to tell them that. Again, I think it was a Chris Cole thing. And he said, he's talked about, we're not trying to predict the future. We're just being prepared for what might come. And that was a lot of the general theme of how we talk to clients about this is we don't know when this major secular shift might occur and when inflation is going to really become a problem. But it looks like there's something on the horizon and we want to be prepared for that. But we have things in here that will do well, even if that's wrong. And if equity is still raised to the moon, you'll be okay. But if it doesn't, you're going to be protected. And most of our clients built their wealth, very concentrated

in real estate or their business. They'd had that liquidity event and they don't want to lose it. And so it was the conversation really was pretty, you know, I look back, it was relatively easy. I don't think we had any clients at the end of the presentation be like, no, they're always like, yeah, that makes it was like, basically, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. But part of me is like, they made all their money in these concentrated positions. Do they sometimes be like, like, come on, this is you worry, this is too conservative. And this is like, they made all their money in these concentrated positions. Do they sometimes be like, ah, like, come on, this is, you worry, this is too conservative. And this is too, right. Like let's take a little bit more risk. Let's do this.

Yeah, we have, we definitely have clients that are the opposite of, of trying to protect and one want to grow and still want to take their shots. And so we, we still have components of the portfolio. So we're not like a hundred percent in like an all weather model. It's, you know, for those clients, we have, you know, satellite positions or core positions for them that are going to be still, you know, doing those moonshots and taking, taking the risks for them. But we try to walk them through the idea again and doing a holistic planning. Like, you know, what if we took this

chunk that basically was what you needed to live off of for the rest of your life and made sure that was in something like this and protected, and we could take all the excess money that you don't necessarily need. And that's where we could take the risk. And that, that conversation seems to work pretty well. Yeah. And so with the portion that can take the risk, are you buying a Bed Bath and Beyond collar? YOLO. No. Easy answer. No. And it's funny to me, right? If you, if you thought of this 10 years earlier and you're like, Hey, we want to, we're worried about inflation. We're going to be doing this stuff and it doesn't come for 10 years.

Like would you have been fired? I mean, a lot of this is no because it still participates in the upset. So it's going to be good, but right. It's, yeah, it's just a weird concept to think like, Hey, if you, if you are early to this, you may have been not wrong, but not proven. Right. Right. Yeah. 10 years ago, I think we would have been fired for sure. Cause I don't think the types of funds and managers were around retail space that we could have built the portfolio we have today and so you know the capital efficiency and returns stacking concepts weren't prevalent enough to have enough managers doing it so we we couldn't we definitely would have been fired

because we would be using the crappy model we created at the beginning and decided not to use and so yeah you would have put like 30 in in AQRs managed futures fund that had a terrible decade. Right. It went up to 18 billion and then down to like four. Yep. So I think a lot of people did that and, and got burnt and pulled it all out. I remember coming out of 08, 09, you know, all of a sudden, you know, the, the managed futures private funds were, you know, that's talk about bar did i mean i remember how many of those came out and how amazing the returns were in 0809 and and how attractive it was and thankfully i didn't the timing you know probably a lack of understanding of what it really

was at the time and and you know being focused more on the management of my you know part of my career i didn't really get involved in it, but yeah, it definitely had its moment. And then for 10 years, did nothing. Listeners of the podcast have heard me joke that I tell my son, we've been in drawdown his whole life. This podcast is sold. That used to be true back when I first started. Now it's not true. It's out of drawdown.

It's new equity has. So you mentioned return stacking. That to me is a fancy way of saying leverage, right? So how do the clients understand that it's leverage? How do you get that point across? I think they've done a great job of explaining that you're stacking these things it's not necessarily the bad kind of leverage like in crypto or some of these places but how do you bridge that with the clients yeah i mean we're very careful obviously compliance and the use of leverage and all of that we we have to you know we spend a lot of

time with our compliance group going through the concept and and how it works. And so as the best that I can, I help walk them through the idea of how a managed futures fund works and how really to get allocated to all of the different types of investments they want to be playing in. They might have 80 different markets they want to be playing in. They really only need maybe 10 cents, 20 cents of every dollar that's invested to get that allocation. And most of the rest of it sits in bonds or cash. And so they've had this money just sitting there for years and not doing much. And recently, groups like Standpoint and Resolve and others have figured out, hey, we can take some of that money sitting there in cash and we can overlay S&P 500 or other allocations to get back

some of that money that we would have allocated away from equities to get into that. So we walk them through those examples and we're not, and we walk them through, look, we can't be as aggressive as the institutional space where they might be two, three times levered through the return stocking or capital efficiency. I think our portfolio gets to about 1.4, 1.5. But we do, we walk them through what that means. And, you know, which is important because, you know, the funds that we use in this strategy are not necessarily your low cost Vanguard ETFs.

Yeah. And so helping them understand that, yes, there's higher fees in the space. You get what you pay for. But also the capital efficiency actually helps with the fee conversation because you're getting more dollars allocated for that fee. And so we're obviously from a compliance standpoint, very careful how we explain all that. The fee is the fee, but in our view, they're getting more for what they're paying in for those types of strategies. And it's, it's helped them understand that concept. Yeah, for sure. I'd look at it, right. You could speak in a standpoint,

you can look at it like you get the managed futures for the normal fee and you get the equities for free. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely, it's, it's, it takes a few times. We walk it, you know, we walk them through it a number of times for them to get it. And we've kind of been doing our, a lot of semi-annual meetings coming up now

and re-explaining it and reminding them exactly how it works. And it's been good because the returns comparative to the market, well, if I can talk about returns, but I would say the volatility and of the portfolio has been smoother than what they might've experienced in the markets. And so

it's been, you know, it's never fun to talk about volatile markets, but it's been a lot easier to have those conversations given the construction of our portfolio. Yeah. And I would, I would argue, you know, you had that tweet in May of like, Hey, I haven't slept so well, but I think the more powerful piece of it is now, right, of like, and it sounds like you pivoted away from this a long time ago. It's like, hey, things are looking scary. We're going to lighten up. Right. And went to a more systematic model, which I think a lot of people appreciate.

But the whole power of the return stacking or the cockroach or any of those is, hey, we can have that equity piece always on. So we don't have to try and time it of when is the bottom and when are we going to get back in? So to me, like even better than sleeping well back in May was like, hey, we never had to decide when to get back in. We've been back in. Yep, absolutely. Very true. Yeah. So, you know, again, it's all relative to the level of risk we're taking.

But, you know, we've our portfolios have gone up along with the market in the last six weeks as well. So it's not like it's just a defensive portfolio. So it's it's doing what it's supposed to do. Exactly. And so speaking of your clients, one last thought on those, like, what have you seen up there in your sort of tech world? Would you consider yourself tech world there? Sure. I mean, to some extent, yes, Seattle. You know, we've got Microsoft, Amazon, a lot of tech in this area, for sure.

So with this huge crush in the NASDAQ, all those unicorns losing 80% arc going down, have you seen a lot of people, like, has wealth evaporated? Or is the wealthier wealthy, they've been just fine? What have you seen in that area? Generally speaking wealth evaporated or is the wealthy or wealthy they've been just fine what have you seen in there generally speaking i think people have been fine i i say our client base you know i work a lot in private business owner space but it's more um founder-led more i wouldn't say brick and mortar necessarily but but not necessarily startup tech companies. And so they have seen much less impact from that. They definitely feel it in the economy. They see it in higher wages.

And a lot of our clients are definitely in that baby boomer space that are now at the time of recognizing, hey, we need to do something with this company and look at selling it. But for our clients in general we thankfully haven't seen it because we don't have even in this i think the seattle area in general though our clients are kind of all over the west coast um it's not as concentrated like it would be i'd say in the bay area yeah in terms of the impact of that so i think with microsoft amazon having been pretty steady through all of this it It's kept things pretty frothy around here.

Although, you know, you're definitely going down the streets, you know, before you wouldn't see a real estate sign last more than a day. You know, you're starting to see them stacking up now in the bigger neighborhoods. So, you know, we're seeing it slow down a little bit, but I think people are hanging there pretty well for the most part. And this just popped in my head, wasn't my notes, but talk a little bit about dealing with these ultra wealthy mortgage rates have any impact on their real estate decisions whatsoever. No. Right.

Right. So I see all this, right. Mortgage rates, the world's going to collapse. Like, well, and maybe that is creates a problem. Like the big, the more expensive stuff will just keep getting more expensive and the bottom in in the middle get priced out yeah they um it's more to them it's almost an opportunity because you know they have the your capacity to add real estate and make those investments and you know one of our clients has a a kid that moved to another state and a few months ago they'd made an offer on a condo that was below the listing price and were rejected pretty outright. And two months later, those sellers are coming

back begging for that offer to come back on the table. And they're now in a position to say, no, how about we wait a little bit longer? Because they're seeing that stress coming, because they're coming in with cash. They don't have to worry about financing. So yeah, so not, I would say at this point, no, they's, they're more now, you know, sitting back and waiting for opportunities and for, you know, because of the rise in rates versus being impacted negatively by it. And then similarly, how do they, how do they view, which we're making mass big generalizations here, but how do they view like tax arbitrage between states? So if you're in all those West Coast high tech states, are you seeing a lot of clients like I'm getting to Texas?

I'm getting to Nashville. I'm going to these. I'm getting out of this game where I'm getting taxed to that. Yeah, I work a lot in California and I have a lot of clients in California. And I would say it's on every one of their minds. It's very hard for many of them to leave family connections. They just love the weather or whatever it might be. But I would say it's been rare that we've not done at least a high level analysis of what it would look like if you were living in Nevada versus California for your business transaction or for your retirement and the income stream you would generate during that timeframe. So yeah, it's a big deal. The tax planning around a transaction to sale is really, really important in California. So yeah, the tax arbitrage of

residency is huge. Washington where I live is different. We don't have income tax, but we have one of the most punishing estate taxes from a state level. And so the kind of the joke with clients always is the best strategy is just don't die here. Retirement's fine. There's no income tax, but just make sure before you die,

you have residency somewhere else. So yeah, there is a lot of planning that goes into that for sure. So you got to call my guy, Adam Kachup that I had on the pod here who helps structure some of that stuff. I talked to Adam before. I like, yeah, he's a smart dude. Yeah.

So moving on from clients, wanted to talk a little bit about just the RA business in general. Like I've long said on this pod and to personal friends, like, it doesn't make sense to me that this guy I met golfing in Racine, Wisconsin is the single best person in the world to manage my money. So like, how does that work? Everyone seems to kind of get a relationship with a somewhat local person. Yeah. It doesn't make sense that that local person is also the best person to manage their money. How do you think about that? Or how

do you, do you ever get asked that? Yeah, that's a good question. When I started my career, that was kind of the conversation, like find people that do what you like to do. And then you can build your client base, like going out to the golf course or whatever hobby you might have. And, and, you know, I do think there's some merit to that. I think there are some people who are just very social and, and they can, you know, build trust that way. I'm more of an introvert. So, you know, I'm like the guy that goes into a big room and kind of finds the corner and, you know, maybe has one person and I try to talk to them the whole time. And so that never really would have worked for me. So the way I look at it is in the space that we work in and the clients we work with, they're not looking for friends. They've got their friends, they've got their family. What they have is an issue or a problem that they're looking to have solved, some tax issue, an estate issue, an investment issue. And we get hired to solve that problem. And if we do really well and, and we bring meaningful value

over time, we develop friendships with our clients because we are an integral part of helping them achieve all of their goals. So, um, so that's the way I look at it. I mean, when I look at all of the top client relationships, I am very close and have really, really close relationships with the client and their family, but I did it by helping them achieve the outcomes they were looking to achieve. And, and so, um, yeah, I guess that's the way I look at it. And what about that guy in Racine, Wisconsin? I'm sure he's a good advisor. Uh, you know, I'm sure a 60, 40 portfolio will, you know, hold up well. Um, but I think it leads itself to the whole RA business is shifted more to passive indexing and all that stuff of right like hey i'm not trying to be the best investor in the world we just do these index funds for that and what i'm providing you in the estate

services and tax and all this is and maybe correct me if i'm wrong but kind of the same advisor advisor it's kind of it's law we're just like helping you navigate the law. So if that piece isn't as hard and basically anyone can do it. Yeah. That's definitely the messaging that I think has, has gone out there. I think, you know, 10 years ago, you know, a lot of the RAs were investment focused RAs, right? So they did have a story around their money management and it has shifted to the big RAAs are now planning focused on that. You know, the planning is the lead, the investments are the, you know, we're just a passive, you know, we just build you a passive portfolio. And, you know, I think in

general for a lot of clients, you know, most clients that might actually make a lot of sense. I do think though, as you get into more complex scenarios and complex client situations, you know, when advisors say they do tax planning, estate planning, my experience is it's limited. You know, they still really are building an investment portfolio, you know, maybe helping them do a Roth conversion here or there, but they're not really getting into really complex, sophisticated retirement plan solutions or, or different tax mitigation solutions, you know, for a business transaction, those, those get more complicated, but, but,

but I do think it has shifted quite a bit to that story. The story now is we do planning, you know, the investments aren't that important. You know, the problem becomes, it's I think for clients that, you know, we all sound the same. It's very difficult to, to tell the difference between an advisor from advisor. So I think that's why probably that model of, well, I met him at the golf club. You're a nice guy. I like being around him. It still works because it's, it's hard to tell the difference. Right. I can't tell the difference by all of their narratives on their website. So this seems like a good guy I'm going with him yeah or her um the and that

kind of led into my like what so that seems like we answered like what is it like now versus 10 years ago in the RA business um anything to add more there like what it was like 10 or 20 years ago or. Yeah, I'd say the only other thing I can say to it, because I wasn't in our space 10 years ago, I was more in the broker dealer world. But the narrative in the broker dealer world was, you know, the RIA space is the wild, wild west, you know, no compliance. And, you know, it's you're basically taking all this risk by being in the RIA space. And, you know, maybe there was some truth to that. Maybe it was less regulated than the RAA or the broker-dealer space was.

But coming into this space and living in this space the last few years, my belief is, and whether this is right or wrong, but my biased view is there's much more sophisticated planning going on in the RAA world than in the broker-dealer world as a generalization. But I think there are independent advisors that have the flexibility to go find the right solution for clients and can go anywhere

and find the very best outcomes. It's just going to lend itself to more sophisticated solutions. Versus like, no, you're a Wells Fargo client. You have to use the Wells Fargo, yada, yada, money market fund or something. Right. And it is the whole world of like, hey, you're my client. I'm going to call you up once or twice a month and we're going to sling some. And, um, you know, while I'm not there anymore and glad I'm not, I do think that learning under a planning model was helpful because I didn't

start my career in that methodology. And I think that world was kind of shifting away from that. And, and, and they were a little bit ahead of the game on that. And so I think learning in my career very early to, to, to not, to basically intentionally tell clients, we don't do that. And if you want that, I'm not the right advisor for you. Thankfully, personally, I never had to really do that for any clients and shied away, steered away from it. And so, but yeah, and in general, I do think, I don't hear any clients expecting that anymore. Do you get those sort of like, Hey, what's, what's your hot stock pick for this month?

We have a couple, we have a number of clients that, you know, as we spoke earlier, still like to take some risks and we'll definitely help them with that. We have a great research group and we will have some of those ideas from time to time for them, or they'll bring us ideas and say, Hey, you know, my friend's company, this or that, and have an idea and we'll help them research it and implement it. But oftentimes what a lot of times with those clients, what we'll do is set up just their own kind of resource account and say, you know, this is what we'll trade it for. If you want, you tell us what to do, but you know, why don't you just make those picks? And we'll, you know, it's an amount of money that doesn't matter for you. If you lose it all, it doesn't matter.

And again, we'll still help you. We'll still guide you in research and help you with the decisions, but it's kind of your account to just kind of play with. And, and so that's, that's how we do it a lot of the times, but we will, for other clients, we will if they want to get a concentrated account, we'll, we'll pick, you know, ideas that we really believe in based on the research and have maybe 10 stocks and help them try to get some bigger wins. But I would say most of our clients, even our very,

very large clients, don't have much interest in that. And you call it a racehorse account? Yeah. More like a racetrack account. Well, the account is the racehorse of the portfolio, right? Oh, yeah yeah i was thinking more of like that's where you go to gamble you go to the um the track the um and how many clients we've had this was years ago there was some uh lady who had like coca-cola stocks you know and forever and this advisor we worked with called it financial furniture and just it lived over there in the corner you could never touch it it was grandma's you weren't allowed to do anything with it they were never going to sell it like do you see that out of like this is where i made my wealth we're not touching the the microsoft stock or the amazon stuff yep

we have apple seems to be one that's pretty popular with that you know we have a chunk of apple and we do we just set it aside in a non-fee account and that just lives over there and and we talk about it and and you know determine if it ever makes sense to do some tax planning around how we might help them get more liquid from that. But yeah, we definitely see some of that. Yeah. And what are those strategies? If you have some super low cost basis and everyone's like, you can never sell this,

the tax is going to be so huge. Like what are some of those strategies to mitigate that? There's exchange funds out there that allow you to, they'll exchange your shares in a low basis company and give you more of a diversified fund of other equities of people who have also done that.

So it ends up looking kind of like an S&P 500 index fund. At the end of the day, it allows you to defer out the taxes. So that's the main one we do. You know, if it's a big enough position, we'll do some hedging. You know, if we do feel that there's times in the market where that would make sense just to make sure that with to, you know, at least mitigate some of the tax impact of it, especially because it is probably causing an estate tax issue

as well as a capital gains issue. And so, you know, which one's going to be worse for your family, the gain or the estate tax, and let's, you know, mitigate the one that's going to be worse and help them think through that conversation. So how, how do you view like the scalability of the firm in itself? Right. Cause if you have to have like those distinct conversations with each and every client is a hard thing, either you need super big clients or a huge staff to have to, you know, to deal with each client. Yeah. I think scaling in the wealth management,

RAA world is a bit of a myth. I think there's, it only can go so far because it still is such a people focused business. And so to your point, you know, if you're going to be a firm that's going to do the level of planning that we do, and there's obviously many others out there that do it, you're going to need more people and staff to be able to navigate that. So I talked to advisors that, you know, are like one person shops, it's them and maybe a virtual assistant. And they have a, you know, a certain number of clients, but they're limited on what they can do. There's only so much you can do for a client and that model,

and it works for them and it works for the clients they have, but the types of clients we're trying to attract and work with, they need, you know, more, they need, we kind of put ourselves out there as like a personal CFO for that client that's gonna look at every tax, estate, asset protection, charitable solution that might fit and do all the research pros, cons, advantages,

disadvantages, and help them pick the right outcome that makes sense for them. You just can't do that on your own with a virtual assistant. And so we do have a much bigger team than probably the average RIA does for the number of clients we work with. And it seems to me from the outside looking in that most of the growth in terms of assets or teams comes from like gobbling up smaller ones like that, right? And bringing them in house. Is that what you see? I see there's, there's a lot of acquisition world. I think we,

we've done it mostly through organic growth through working with other professionals. So helping CPAs, attorneys, you know, you know, there's a lot of those, obviously every advisor typically works for the CPA attorney or more, and they try to refer back and forth. And we kind of have a different approach where we try to help the CPAs and attorneys look at their top clients, like how can you bring even more value to them and kind of become a partner to them to help them increase the reach and relationship with their own clients and inevitably helping them. That's going to lead back to opportunities for us. So we've seen most of our growth from those relationships. So it is

leveraging other relationships. So there's some scale on that, but it's, but still when there's only so many new clients that we can add before we have to add more people and resources. But even so, like say you're running ads and whatever, like Wall Street Journal, how many clients out there don't have a financial advisor do you think? Like they are your target clients, not just like of the general population population but it seems to me that it's totally saturated right like oh yeah they all have they all have advisors and so you know when we talk to you we've been talking to

the other professionals like the cpas and the attorneys like well they have an advisor i'm like yeah but are they yeah they need a new one are they doing what that client needs to get the outcome they want to get so um So I've never met a client at the level of client we're trying to work with that didn't have advisors, all sorts of advisors. But every time we've evaluated their overall situation, there's always been opportunities to improve. Now, whether that meant on the wealth management side, sometimes it's not. And the advisor is doing a good job. And so it's helping the CPA or the attorney find ways that they can bring more value.

But but they all have opportunities. What just last bit on the whole business, what does it look like 10 years from now or 20 years from now? Right. Will it continue? What are your thoughts on what it'll look like? I mean, five years ago, it was robo advisors going to take over. You guys are all going to be out of business. So, yeah, I remember that. And I remember, you know, really trying to do a lot of research around that and how that was going to work. And clearly, you know, it's not done that yet. I do think technology will matter and those firms that can implement technology to make their businesses more efficient and to be able to do more for clients more effectively are going to be firms that do better than others.

But I think in the space that we work in, in that higher net worth kind of family office space, just the level of complication that they deal with, you know, both financially and interpersonally within the family. And it's difficult to solve that, you know, with a bot, you know, or an algorithm, you know, algorithm really does still take a human touch. And I think that will persist for a while, at least hopefully for most of my career. And so I don't think that that's going to change in the next 10 years. But I do think that as more wealth transfers down to the younger generation, the need to use technology, the need to understand how that younger generation approaches making investment decisions and professional decisions on who they work with. If you're an RIA that's worked mostly with the older generation and you've not

thought about that, I think there is, just like we already see today, I think there's a good chance that a lot of your assets walk out the door because you're not adapting and not staying up with what needs to happen to bring value to not just that older generation, but G2 and G3 on down the road. And what does that look like if G2, G3 are like, cool, I got all this money. I want to put it into Celsius Network. Right. I want to throw it into this crypto thing. It's yielding 12%. It's a great investment. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a good question. I mean, we just obviously have a conversation with them about, you know, risks and rewards and, and again, kind of back to the what are your needs and then what's excess. And so is, you know, if you're going to make those kinds of bets, you know,

how much of your capital should you be risking in those types of bets and what makes sense from a risk reward standpoint. And, and if you're right, how much do you need of your capital to actually make a financial difference? Not much, if you're right, go a hundred, 200 X on that. But if you're wrong and you have 100 in it you know you're done right yeah you feel like that's your main job to just tell people what if you're wrong yeah yeah it's huge the behavioral side of what we do and when i started um most of my clients were younger families when i started you know because i was young and it made sense um and we joked that half

of my job was being a marriage coach you know and not that I knew anything about being married at the time, but it really was, you know, psychology, behavior management, helping them make good decisions. That's a huge part of what we do is just giving them enough information and options to help them make a good decision. That's really the biggest part of what we do. And how much of your job, my neighbor's RA, he said during COVID, nonstop, 10 calls a day was just being a psychologist, like, it's okay, everything's fine. Which I don't know if he had any basis for saying that. But it was like, yeah, right. Right. Yeah, I mean, I, because of my career, starting it right at 911. And then starting my management career, I was helping 25 advisors navigate the financial crisis in 2008-9, I think I was prepared well for how to navigate that with clients and COVID.

You know, I didn't like the idea of just like telling clients, don't worry, it's all going to be fine because we really didn't know. But, you know, our conversation was we prepared you as best we could, you know, given the nature of how we're managing your money. And, you know, we're just gonna have to see how this plays out. But, you know, we did what we needed. We did what we needed to do to prepare you for this. And we were relatively conservative, kind of going into that. So it so it helped. But But yeah, it was a lot. It basically was, if I look back at my calendar, it was just book solid for a couple of weeks of just constant me proactively reaching out to every client. How are you feeling? What are you thinking? And most of them are, you know,

because we've been working together so long and we've been doing a lot of the behavior management and helping them understand how investing works and making good decisions and not being right. Most of them were like, we're fine. You know, this really is ugly and we need to see how this plays out. But they were, they really weren't that concerned about it. Um, at the time they were frustrated, but not, not concerned that the world was going to end yet. They probably had a better, they, I wasn't necessarily showing with them, but I was probably more nervous because I was probably reading too much about what might happen. They might, they might've been less nervous than I was about where it was going.

Not that we let that filter into our investment management decisions, but you start reading a lot about what could come and you start to do the math in your head. So, yeah, it was definitely an interesting time for sure. And so speaking of which, not that you'll let it again filter into your modeling and whatnot, but what's your thoughts on inflation? Has this rally been too quick? All every piece of data that comes across. You know, there's only so much time. But, you know, my concern based on all the data is that this has been just a really big bear market rally that people are maybe giving too much confidence that the Fed pivot is happening and that, you know, they're not going to have confidence to keep raising rates and that there's probably another leg down coming.

So that's our view of it. The beauty of having our clients, you know, having their core investments in all weather strategy that kind of also lends me to be able to say, I don't really care. Yeah, that's what happens because we're good. Like either way, you know, we were capturing the upside if it keeps going up and we're protected well, if it doesn't. So while I do probably lean more towards the groups that believe there's more pain coming, I can, nothing's changed since May and I'm sleeping really well at night, kind of either

way. How much of the job is that of like, hey, and we didn't, I wanted to talk about duration. I forgot, but right. Also like, who cares? It's one month. We're talking about 30, 40 years of returns here

and of structure and portfolio. Like, don't sweat the small stuff. It's just a blip on that long-term radar. But you also have to have that behavior. So it's like, you have to say this nonsense to them. You know, it's nonsense. They know it's nonsense, but like still that job has to be done just to get to the 40 years. Yeah. I mean, I have clients that, you know, when we talk to them, they say, I knew everything was gonna be fine. I just needed you to hear, I just need to hear you

say it. Once we talked, I knew we were good, but i just needed you to say it and so and we the nice thing about too because we also do the planning side beyond the investment side like when we talk to a client during these crazy times we don't just talk about their portfolio return we actually can pull up their entire profile and show them look you're down x here's your outcome 30 40 years from now obviously using assumptions and whatnot but you're still fine. Like your, your goal likelihood of achieving your goal is still a hundred percent. Nothing has changed. And while they don't always feel good about believing it,

but we can show them that we're not just, we're not just kind of pretending and trying to make them feel good. We can actually prove it to them that because of the way we've managed your money, while this is painful, you're still more than on track for your goals. So it's, it is helpful to have that side of the equation. Do they ever say like, Oh, now show it to me with negative 5% per year returns for stocks and negative 6% returns for bonds. They never got that detailed, but they do, uh, they do ask what our return assumptions are and they're pretty darn conservative. We, we keep it pretty low just you know for that reason

so two truths and a lie i'm gonna start it out because every time we talk i get a little uh matt damon vibe so the first of the two truths and a lie is that homer used to be a stunt double for matt dame all right um i'll say another one is i i am the um inspir our firm was the inspiration for the return stacking paper okay and i've got i'll do one more or do you do another one or do i know i i'm not supposed to do any i just was having all right uh two more yeah two more all right all right one of which is a lot i am i'm in an ordained minister and i performed three weddings And then while I was in Hawaii managing a branch for Ameriprise, I won an amateur surf contest. I'm going to go inspiration for the return stacking paper.

True. That's probably too easy one since you're the one guessing. Yes. Yes. More insight on that. No, but the listeners might not have known but um true there i want to say hawaii is false but i'm gonna go ordained minister false and hawaii is true opposite so i am in order universal life church i've done two of my sister's weddings and and

also my uh best friend from college's wedding. And in Hawaii for the three years, I unfortunately was painting my own house when we, when we first moved to the inside and I hurt my shoulder. And it kind of bugged me as like one of those, when you're young and a guy, you never go to the doctor, it'll just heal and it just didn't. And so I only served like once or twice the whole time I lived there, which is kind of weird'd you live we live just outside of honolulu in a part of uh oahu called hawaii kai

yeah um it's it's a nice part because it's you know honolulu itself when you're in hawaii it doesn't feel like you're in what you're you know what should be hawaii and when you live out just outside of town like we did in hawaii k, you kind of go around this corner and it feels like paradise. And yeah, here we are. You don't see the big city and, you know, we lived really close to the beach. It was pretty, it was pretty special. We were just there. Spring break was awesome. I'd never been through those. I think I'd been there as a young kid, like those new highways that go through the center Island,

through those tunnels. Those are crazy. Yeah. And so what was that like in Honolulu of like trying to follow the market, right? The weird hours. It was, I mean, because, you know, it's either two or three hours different from the West Coast, depending on, you know, time of year. So, you know, five or six hours from New York.

So interestingly enough, there was a large, you know, five or six hours from New York. So interestingly enough, there was a large, you know, stockbroker community there, like old school stockbroker. And a lot of them would get up like at three in the morning, do a bunch of trades and then go back to sleep for a few hours and then get back up again. And a lot of them, you know, their day was done at like 10, 30, 11 o'clock because the market was closed. You know, so that was an interesting quirk of being in the investment world out there. It was odd. I mean, your day, you know, the market day, if you, so if we had client trades to get done and you had to, you know, you had to get them done by 9.30 in the morning, you know, 10 in the morning. So it was weird. Like it was, it was definitely a lot know 10 in the morning so it was weird like it was it was definitely a lot more uh stress in the morning to get stuff done and then then there is you know west coast

especially east coast but yeah it was it was definitely a different world uh doing that part out there that's crazy i always wanted to live in bermuda so yeah when i started in the pits in chicago and we had to be there at like 6 15 a a.m. to do the out trades. I'm like, this is terrible. Like I'm going to go to Bermuda and sleep till nine and get there late. But didn't happen. Thanks, Homer. Tell everyone the website, where to find you. Yeah, so we are, my firm name is Convergent Wealth

and it's convergent with a K. The idea is it's the convergence of your business and personal wealth coming together and we help navigate all of that. And C was taken when I went to the RA world. So K worked. And we're in the Pacific Northwest. I was able to fit a mountain into our logo.

And the K helped with that whole deal. So convergentwealth.com is the website. And yeah, this has been really fun. It's been fun. Thanks so much. I want to come out and visit out there. My brother lives out there. So we'll be out there sooner than later. Yeah. Get out there. Well, I'll get to, we have a,

my wife is a chef and we we're, we've kind of built a farm to table bed and breakfast onto the detached from the house. We've got chickens and a few other animals. And so we got, you know, got a place to stay and get out on the pond. I love it. All right. I'm in book me. All right, man. This has been great. All right. We'll talk to you soon. You've been listening to The Derivative. Links from this episode will be in the episode description of this channel. Follow us on Twitter at RCM Alts and visit our website to read our blog or subscribe to our newsletter at rcmalts.com.

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