The Iced Coffee Hour - “Most People Are Broke!” America’s #1 Wealth Killer NO ONE Talks About! | The Money Guys

Episode Date: August 10, 2025

Bizee: Start your business with confidence at https://Bizee.com/ich Cook Unity: Go to https://www.cookunity.com/ichfree for Free Premium Meals for Life. Pipedrive: Get started with a 30 day free trial https://pipedrive.com/iced Shopify: Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at https://shopify.com/ich Follow The Money Guy Show: On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/moneyguyshow On Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/moneyguyshow/ Website - https://moneyguy.com/ Apply for The Index Membership: https://entertheindex.com/ Add us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jlsselby https://www.instagram.com/gpstephan Official Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBQ24VfikOriqSdKtomh0w For sponsorships or business inquiries reach out to: [e-mail] For Podcast Inquiries, please DM @icedcoffeehour on Instagram! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:59 - Early podcasting & wealth management 00:03:00 - Why people should listen to you 00:05:07 - Can anyone make it in America? 00:06:52 - Excuses for financial failure 00:07:51 - Dumbest financial mistakes 00:16:57 - Sponsor - Bizee 00:18:05 - Traits of financially responsible people 00:23:07 - Worst tax mistakes 00:26:44 - Adjusting advice by financial position 00:30:00 - Balancing risk with income 00:34:50 - Sponsor - Pipedrive 00:36:22 - Optimal amount of money to have 00:42:10 - Are we in a debt bubble? 00:44:55 - Dollar-cost averaging 00:47:09 - Best money-making opportunities today 00:53:31 - Downsides of AI 00:58:08 - Most criticized money opinion 01:00:05 - Who should hire a financial advisor 01:03:10 - Sponsor - CookUnity 01:04:09 - Sponsor - Shopify 01:05:36 - Biggest account managed 01:06:10 - How much financial advisors earn 01:18:15 - ChatGPT as financial advisor 01:22:09 - Preventing high-risk investments 01:24:30 - Giving bad advice 01:28:35 - Personal income goals 01:30:49 - Future of the U.S. economy 01:32:08 - Thoughts on government spending 01:33:56 - Is now a bad time to buy a house? 01:51:33 - Matrix conversation 02:00:27 - Are credit card points a trap? 02:00:54 - Should those under $100K net worth buy crypto? 02:01:16 - Is debt for investing ever smart? 02:01:41 - How many income streams is too many? 02:02:14 - Most irresponsible money habit 02:07:16 - Using AI to get deals online *Some of the links and other products that appear on this video are from companies which Graham Stephan will earn an affiliate commission or referral bonus. Graham Stephan is part of an affiliate network and receives compensation for sending traffic to partner sites. The content in this video is accurate as of the posting date. Some of the offers mentioned may no longer be available. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How is TD making banking more human? Easy. With less bank talk and more real talk. Less your call is important to us. And more, how can we help? Less confusion and more clarity. It's things like being able to buy partial shares with TD direct investing and tracking your spending and saving with TD My Spend.

It's getting more of what you want and less of what you don't. That's how TD is making banking more human. What if you were the world's worst investor? And all you did is you built up cash and then at the very peak right before every bare market you invested. So I invest at the top of 2007 and then right before fourth quarter of 2018. Even that investor over a 30, 40 year period, still ended up with a huge portfolio. Because if you can give it enough time, you don't have to be right.

You just have to be in. Not everyone is upbeat about the future. So can anyone financially make it in America? News media is telling everybody the system is stacked against you. And I get it. We have a lot of headwinds right now with inflation and housing and so forth. I think most young people don't realize their most valuable resource is the time, the decades, and letting that kind of do the hard work for them.

The longer you wait, the more the pressure builds on your own shoulders. For anyone watching who might have money to invest, where would you say are the best opportunities today? Right now, today, if you want to make a lot of income. Thank you so much for coming on the ice coffee hour. I got to say I've been watching your podcast. for years. I think since I started watching YouTube videos, you have pretty much the longest running personal finance podcast going on, what, 10 years? Well, it's so funny. We started the podcast in 2006, January 2006, and pretty fresh air there. Not a lot of podcasters back then,

and then we got into YouTube in 2017. I think you got, you beat us on the YouTube side. Wow. But the podcasting, and full disclosure, podcasting back in 2000. We got a lot of notoriety pretty quickly, but I treat it as a hobby. I didn't realize that I had landed on a great business idea. It just seemed like as an educator or a minds of an educator that we had hit something that was going to be really cool, cultural changing. It wasn't until we hit on YouTube that was like, you know what, let's start throwing some resources and turn this into a business. And actually, I think that amplified the message even more. Yeah, but you also have a business behind this doing wealth management with almost $2 billion.

That's right. That's incredible. Yeah, so we have a fee-only financial planning firm where we help high net worth, individuals and families, from everything, from saving for retirement, to investing, to tax planning, and everything in between. We want to serve as our personal CFO. And so what we love is a lot of the folks who actually come to the firm are fans of the show. They're like, hey, I want to know more about money and how to make wise decisions and the things I don't know. And so they'll get to listen for a while and they reach that point where they're like, man, okay, I think I've been listening for a long time, man, I'll really

had someone to help me navigate my financial life. And so that's kind of what the business behind of is. Well, I mean, I always talk about the abundance cycle because, as you guys know, the more success you have, you know, complexity just naturally shows up. Yeah. So I tell everybody, all of our content is try to help you make your life as simple and easy as possible. But we can give it away because when you reach success, more than likely, you're going to say, what do I do now? And that's when we're kind of waiting there, open arms, leave the porch light on and turn you into a client. So why would you say that people should listen to you? Well, I think there's a lot of information out there where folks want to like sell you something, give you some get rich, quit,

give you some advice that may not actually be what's best for it. There's a lot of people out there that just want to put stuff out there to get views and eyeballs. And what we think is unique about what we do is we're trying to share information that actually helps people better their financial life. It's not going to be like the super sexy, exciting, hey, here's how you can get rich in the next 30 days. But it's like, hey, here are a truck. and true things that you can do in your financial life to improve your financial circumstances and ultimately build towards financial independence because that's what our people really want. They want to be financially independent to live life on their own terms, doing what they want,

when they want, and how they want. And there's just a lot of bad information out there of people telling you the wrong way to do that. We want to be the voice of reason, tell you the actual right way to be able to do that. I think the purity of the desire and the passion that kind of started this whole thing. It really when in 2006, they only read. reason I even started the podcast is always wanted to be a school teacher. And I felt nervous or guilty that people couldn't get good advice. You know, because you came to me and you said, hey, I have $10,000 to invest. People were having to go to the high commission at that time.

Index funds. Now we think index funds, everybody has access. Back in early 2000, it was not as easy to get even mutual funds. And I always felt guilty that people are having to pay such high costs, not getting good education. There's a lot of gatekeepers to the information. And then when the first iPod came on the scene, I was like, this is going to change the world. And I think that that intent to educate has continued to be the passion that drives the show. And hopefully people see that. I know we get a lot of comments about, hey, you're financial advisors. And we can talk about that too. But the big thing is, is that we really do want people to be better with their money and actually take an interest. And I always say, you don't even have to give us anything. Because if

you're successful enough, that's when the product actually is. You can come to us, watch us, absorb, use, apply this for years, and there's no ask until you've reached a level of success that it's kind of proven itself. So can anyone financially make it in America? Yes, absolutely. I do believe that. I mean, we both come from humble beginnings, Bo even more humble than me. And that's one of the things I would, if I could give any message to the audience is so much on social media, news media is telling everybody, the system is stacked against you. And I get it. We have a lot of headwinds right now with inflation and housing and so forth. But there have been times in my life where I've also felt like the system was stacked against you. But if you, consistency and then making small steps today,

little small behaviors can actually have huge ripple effects in your long term future. I think most young people don't realize their most valuable resource is the time, the decades, and letting that kind of work, do the hard work for them, just doing, little something. It's kind of, we were talking earlier. A Roth IRA is a superpower if you're in your early 20s. I mean, very little turns into a lot without much effort or hassle. I think one of the things that we've done very poorly in this country, though, is educating people around the basics of finance. Like a lot of people graduate high school and get into college, even start their careers. And they've had no base level foundation. I know when I was come through

school, there was no like personal finance class to say, hey, here's what you need to know about money. And so a lot of people, if they don't have parents who teach them and they just get out into the world, they're hit with all these people that want to sell them stuff. We live in this like consumerism society. So they're not taught the basic fundamentals. So that's what I love about our show is that whether you're someone who has $100 million net worth or you're someone who has $100 to your name, there's value you can discern from the show about how to make sound financial decisions through all walks of life. So the more people that get that, I think the more people are going to be able to have financial success. So is there

any excuse at this point for financial failure. I don't want to minimize the fact that there are hard circumstances, right? Like there are certainly people that are in a situation that might be more difficult based on whatever factors that may be, unknown unknowns. But the basic tenets on living less than you make and saving for the future and putting a little bit away and saving an emergency fund, you can implement those pretty much no matter where you are. Now, that's not to say that some people don't have an easier path to that based on their education

or acumen or skill set than others. but it is something that's possible for everyone. I think you choose your heart. I think for anybody who's watching this, who's under 30, I mean, you should, without a doubt, be successful, even with minimal financial income, because you just have so much value with your time. I think somebody who discovers this in their 30s and 40s,

it's a little bit harder, 40s and greater. It's still you have a lot of opportunity, but the longer you wait, the more the pressure builds on your own shoulders. So what are the dumbest financial mistakes? that you've seen that we've seen or that we've done ourselves could be both okay uh i'll start with you know one of the very first things and i've seen some people do this when i got my very first big boy job you know i came came out of college i did not have a lot of money got my first job had my first

salary i decided well obviously now that i've made it now that i'm successful i need to go buy the faints i had a paid for a truck that ran just fine but i decided you don't need to do i need to go out and buy a card i went now i still remember about an accurate t-l it was a super sweet ride but I financed it for like five years. The interest rate was nine and a quarter percent, and I had to have my parents co-sign on it. And looking back, I was like, what was I thinking? That car payment that I was spending every month could have done so much better.

But I found the same trap that most people fall into. Like, you know, I wanted more than what my financial situation was ready for. And it was a dumb bozo decision at that time. I quickly wrote down a few of them because I love picking on myself. First of all, I was in high school driving the $1,000. Chevy Cavalier with $2,000 worth of subwifers in it. I mean, think about what that could have been worth if I'd have been opening up a...

Or buying Nvidia. Or buying Nvidia. I didn't buy anything. I didn't, that's the good news. You don't have to start when you're 16 years old. I didn't start until I actually graduated college on saving and investing. And then I think about when I bought the internet fund.

Y'all have probably never even heard of that. In my first Roth IRA, this is, remember, the internet came around. You know, this is the, like a 2000. that a lot of this stuff is kicking in 99, 2000. I put $2,000 the Internet fund, and it turned into like $4,000 or $5,000. I thought I was genius. Got all my buddies to load up in it, too.

We all thought we were so smart. I think I eventually that fund, I sold it out at $3.75. So, I mean, I got crushed on it. It went all the way up to $5 or $6,000. Sold it out for $375 because chasing the hot dot, those sector plays, it's boom or bust. It's just not, if I'd have bought the S&P 500,

probably be in a lot better place. And then I also think about because Bo is a CFA And I loved rag about the Bo as a CFA Because that's a very exclusive club to be in But when he was going through the process Of becoming a CFA, we had this thought that We ought to start doing some options trading Yeah, I had it all figured out

I had the education, so I knew how to know. So we were buying calls And then we were selling puts on things And here's what I quickly learned about options trading. You can be accurate and correct with your assumptions, but your timing can be crap. And timing is... I mean, because we short...

I didn't say short. We sold puts on our bot puts on Netflix. And we were spot on. It was way overvalued at the time that we were doing the puts, but it all, you know, matured. And then it was two months later that the bottom fell. I mean, we would have made an absolute fortune on this strategy, but we were two months off. And it just showed us.

And by the way, this was my... first time screwing up options because I bought options on Apple years ago where I turned a thousand into $4,000. This is, Bo was involved in this too. So he doesn't get off the, but of course, we bought the next contracts and we turned it all into $300. So I mean, that's what I've made the mistakes of chasing the hot dot just like we talk about. And that stuff feels so good emotionally. But I've learned that it's really the hassle factor and then the focusing on small things instead of actually creating behaviors that change your life, it's not worth it because all it does is leave scars and some carnage.

Unless, you know, we joke about NVIDIA, we joke about Apple. But as we talked about earlier, even if you hit those, those licks, you're still likely going to sell when it doubles, triples or quadruples. You're not going to be there when it goes 10, 20 times your initial investment. So what about other people, though? Yeah, I think what's great about our stories are these like, I'm going to say small mistakes. They didn't see small at the time, but there were small mistakes early on that we're able to learn from and rebound from. A lot of people that we've seen in our experience have ended up making mistakes, but they make them later on in their life and they make them to where they're unrecoverable, right? Like, it's one thing if you blow a couple grand on options.

It's another thing. In the community that we moved from, where we started the business originally, there was a family that had been incredibly successful. They were real estate developers. They owned all of their real estate, all of their property, a lot of commercial property outright. The father was like completely independently wealthy. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep.

Flip. Or that and enjoy. Via rail, love the way. LaSan was trying to make a name for himself and kind of continue the empire. And so he said, hey, dad, I got this great idea. We're going to go develop this neighborhood. But I don't have the capital to do that. So we need to mortgage and put up as collateral.

all of our commercial buildings. And we're talking about like eight figures worth of commercial buildings so that we can go do this development but it's a sure thing, communities expanding, it's advancing,

and then what happened, 2007, 2008, 2009, the entire thing went belly up. So they ended up going bankrupt, losing eight figures worth of real estate, all of it getting foreclosed on. And there was no reason for that. There was no excuse for that.

He had already, the father, had already won the game, but he was trying to be a bridge and provide an opportunity for his son and they ended up completely belly up, which is just devastating to see that kind of stuff happen. I mean, things I've dealt with that I always, you know, I used to work with professional athletes.

And I can tell you that we've had cases where, you know, these are guys getting multimillion dollar signing bonuses and other things. And then you find out that they financed a pool with 15% interest rates instead of paying cash. We had accounts full of cash that could have paid. I've also had professional athletes driving around cars that, you know, the dealership wanted their likeness, you know, so they use an advertising. So they give the athlete the car. And then they don't have insurance on it. They don't do anything.

They're just doing whatever. And then also personal guarantees. I mean, I think about, you know, we all know about the Michael Vic type case study when, you know, got the dog fighting and all those deals kind of they call the banks and everybody called the deals in. I've seen a lot of professional athletes and I've seen a lot of business owners. We've even, because we do commercial real estate, personal guarantees is a scary, scary thing. So that's why you always have to tell people, be very careful before you're signing on to these deals because a personal guarantee means they can come take whatever they need to to you to make you hold. I have a horror story when it comes to a personal guarantee. I had a friend get a business and his dad was the personal guarantee.

For the business. For the business. Everything was fine for the first year or so. COVID hit, the business was shut down, someone went after his dad and after their house because of that personal guarantee, because the son didn't have the money for that. The dad ended up losing in that lawsuit?

They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. That's a nightmare. Just to try to get a settlement. I mean, it was awful. It seems so innocent when the banks put this stuff before you to. Oh, it's just, you know, because you assume everything's going to be great. That's why we always tell me, and it doesn't even have to be mistakes. I mean, I've dealt with clients who were prospects who were coming on board, interviewing us,

and then I've reviewed the deal. And this is right after the 2017 tax legislation. If you all remember, that tax legislation made it where attorney's fees were no longer deductible. And we had a client getting this, our prospect that had just signed up, was getting a huge multimillion dollar payment from this, this lawsuit. It was like a high seven figure deal. It was a big, deal. And as soon as I looked at it, I was like, you guys have structured this all wrong. I was like, none of these attorneys fees are going to be deductible. The client is going to end up with, because they're going to pay it all to the government. They're paying all the attorney's fees. They go pay all these taxes. And you're not going to be ending up with what you think you are.

They went to their attorneys and they're like, no, that's not true. And then I was like, seriously, this is all new legislation. I know that a lot of people have not taken this in. Go look at. And so they took two or three phone calls with them. And they came back and they oh my gosh he's right and and they re we were fortunate to be early enough in the process restructured the whole deal with the the insurance companies and everything and it really did result in this client getting millions i was like three or four million dollars i didn't want to give it but it was it was a turn a delta of three to four million dollars so that's the thing it doesn't have to be a mistake it just could be things you don't even know when you're dealing with

big transactions and we see it with account structures think about setting up a business you know a lot of people are self-employed and they don't have an accounting background so they don't know what's the account structure i mean should i be a or how should i do my business s-corp should i be a c-corp because these qualified small business things that i hear people talking about you know or should i be an l-lc that's the type of stuff that you know if you just don't know who tells you this stuff i mean you've you've you've experienced with any type of success i've always felt like wouldn't it be nice if somebody was out there just tell you so i don't have to go figure this out because i feel like a lot of times i'm figuring it out or we're having to to navigate that. And that's what I think we play a key part

so you don't have to go through this like it's your first time. So we've talked to so many entrepreneurs on this show, but one thing we haven't really covered is how do you actually get started? Like, what's the first step? How do you even set up an LLC and where do you even go to set one up? If you're asking yourself these questions, I got good news for you because we've actually partnered with Bizzy to sponsor this episode and I got to say I've used them myself and it could not have been easier. Setting up my LLC took less than 10 minutes and I knew everything was getting filed properly and professionally, it's actually so simple. Busy's helped over a million people start their businesses, and their entire process is super simple.

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I highly recommend it. I love the process. Busy.com slash ICH, B-I-Z-E-E-D-E-E-D-H, or link down below the description. Thank you so much to Busy for sponsoring this episode. But then if you take the people that are good with their finances and the people that are bad with their finances,

what would you say are the main traits that distinguish those who are financially responsible and irresponsy? Yeah. So the first one I would say is dis-examined. Generally speaking, those that are financially on the right side of the equation tend to be more disciplined. And in all walks of their finances, they understand on living less than they make. They don't like fall into consumer traps. They don't like that kind of stuff.

But the other like big differentiator is I think the people that end up staying in a sound financial place, they really understand the emotions of fear and greed. And they understand how to recognize when they're being too too fearful or too too greedy. We even see this all the time. And it is, it's a mistake that we see a lot of. of times, a lot of things seem like they're sort of insignificant, right? Like, oh, I'm going to sign this personal guarantee. It's insignificant or probably never happen. And then you hear this horror story of that happening. Or someone saying, hey, you know what? I'm going to claim a deduction on my taxes for this thing. Or I'm going to implement this tax strategy. We actually have this going on right now

where folks that did some, like, very, very aggressive tax strategies around conservation easements are now being called at the table and they're now having to pay back years, hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax benefit that they took along with interest and penalties. And so it's understanding it's, it's okay to be fearful when others are greedy. It's okay to be greedy when others are fearful, but it's never okay to be too fearful or too greedy. And if you fall in that camp, you often get yourself to a really bad spot. What makes me sad about some like these conservation easements is a good example is every decade, because you think about oil and gas, you know, partnerships and every decade seems like they have situations where even the advisors who are supposed to keep you safe,

the attorneys, the accountants, they fall into the scope and prey to this as well because they get all frothy and excited because they usually are getting a cut. And so, you know, whenever you get the money involved, it changes motivations. And so we knew a lot of CPAs that were out there pushing this stuff because they were, they were profitable, but it never passed the sniff test. Can you explain exactly what these are, conservation easements, oil and gas? And the recent one that we've been hearing a lot is investing in movies. Yeah, I was trying to. Yeah, I was trying to. Yeah, I was trying to. trying to get to the bottom of this. Well, film credits are investing, because film credits are different than the actual investments. Is it film credits? I don't know. I don't know. We're from the state of Georgia, and it's not uncommon. By the way, it used to be even better. Film credits, you used to, because realize these film industry gets so many credits from the states, because they're trying to incentivize these films to be, you know, filmed in their state, because it's very competitive. It creates tons of jobs. Creates jobs, a lot of economic stuff.

So it's not uncommon that you can, they have so. They have so. so many credits for making these movies that they sell the credits out on the market. And this is all completely legal. And usually I've seen that it's changed over the years. Last time I was buying credits, I think I was getting a 5 to 6% discount. So yeah, instead of paying dollar for dollar on your taxes, you pay 95 cents on a dollar. And if you're paying enough in taxes, that 5% delta can be a pretty good thing. That's not necessarily scam. You might be thinking about private placements or people investing in films because we've dealt with that too. Those are like most things. They could turn out great or they could be moon shots and they

could turn out bad. But conservation easements, because that was your initial question. What these things were doing back in the day when they came on a scene is that part of the tax provision was you could go take property, put together a group of people, and then you would put it in a conservation. And the government with raw undevelopment. Raw and developed land. And what was in the brochure was, is that the government is going to take the best use of this property. And since you're putting an easement, we'll give you the tax deduction, like a charitable contribution for this higher value. So it wasn't uncommon that you'd see people putting $100,000, meaning an investor would put $100,000 on a conservation easement, but then take a $400,000 charitable deduction on their taxes. You quickly probably are doing the math in your head. And you're going, wait a minute. That means they're getting a bigger tax benefit than even. and what they economically put into the deal. But they were they were leaning very heavily on that the government was giving you a deduction on the best use. So they would go put together.

They would have all these consultants who would go do all this analysis, create these packages of paper, supposedly be all protected where they'd have attorneys and accountants. And they said, no, this property, we could put apartments here. We could put, you know, all kind of crazy made up. You know, meanwhile, it's just land. Or it's swamp land or watershed land that you can't actually develop on. and they were saying that, oh, you can. You can imagine the IRS has had an issue with this, and they've now come, the chickens have come home to roost,

and then they're now going after a lot of these deals and making people pay back. The deals we're kind of having to look at for some clients that kind of did these things, is you have to pay the, you know, you get to take the charitable contribution on what you put in, but you're having to pay taxes and then a 10% pill. So what are the worst things to do on your taxes?

Hmm. Lie would be a real big one. Don't do that, right? Like, if you actually have something on your taxes, don't try to not report income that you had, right? Like, you've had income, make sure you report it. And then be careful taking all these crazy deductions. We'll see people who say, oh, well, I went and bought the Range Rover because I need it for my business.

And you're like, okay, well, what business are you? And, oh, well, I'll work from home. Oh, okay, well, do you go see clients? No, no, no, no. And you start going down this line. They're like, well, that's not a justifiable business expense. You don't actually operate in a business where that should have been deductible. So you see people getting super, super gray or even spinning up businesses that aren't actually

businesses at all. They're just things that are running expenses through trying to create losses. Well, if those losses are material and you don't actually have a profitable business, then that's not a business. It's a hobby and you're not going to be able to deduct those things. So people who get so aggressive doing that, so aggressive trying to reduce their tax bill illegitimately, that's the big thing that you don't want to do on your taxes. I look at it in terms of like big mistakes that I see. honesty is a big part of it. I mean, because I will tell you, I used to work in public accounting.

I've represented clients before the IRS before. And working with clients on audits is one of the most humbling things out there. Because you're scared to death. I mean, because that's why, let me give us some general advice. If you ever get a full audit, I'm not talking about just a letter sent to you. I'm talking about, no, the agent actually wants to come down and see your business or see the property or whatever. You don't represent yourself. If you represent yourself, you're in a heck of a situation because the agent can ask you any

question and if you're supposed to answer because you're the taxpayer if you hire somebody please hire somebody i would hire somebody for myself is because if they ask a question of your attorney or your CPA that's representing you if they don't know the answer they're going to say i'm not to go back to my client and ask the question and it stops the question right there for follow-up later but if you don't answer it you can imagine that looks shady and they you know and audits can mushroom you know they they go three years back unless they find fraud that they can go even further but they can mushroom from your business to your personal taxes and all kind of others. So you're in a very danger, danger situation. And that's why I always tell people, be honest on your taxes. I mean,

I'm all about maximizing deductions, but don't do it so gray or so shady that as soon as you get the notice that you're under an audit, that you start crying. I mean, and that's the, because they can take your stuff. I mean, very few things do you have to worry about just straight up your ability to function. That's why we are always nervous. IRS, SEC, other things, we want to be as compliant as possible because they take away your ability to do business. Take away your livelihood. And your livelihood. So you need to take that with seriousness.

Now, let's take away the scare stuff. I do think most people, if you're a business owner and you start having success, really do spend some time understanding business structure. That's a big no-brainer because there's ways you structure your business in a really good way that legally and honestly can have some long-term benefits. I also tell people that I would focus on, you know, all the different, like real estate. You know, at some point, if you have enough success that you're even going, we always talk about step eight of the financial order of operations, like we own commercial real estate. I think anybody who's like a service provider, like a dentist, an attorney, a CPA, at some point, you're probably going to buy the building that you have your business. It's crazy to pay rent to somebody when you go buy your own building and then you pay yourself rent. You do cost segregation.

take a salarated depreciation. There's all kind of cool things. That's all completely legal. But if you don't know how this stuff works, you don't know how to maximize those opportunities. So you mentioned that a lot of people, when they start making a lot of money, get the shiny object syndrome,

and they want to go invest in oil and gas or movies or this sort of thing. They want to do the rich person thing because they just became a rich person. How would you recommend someone adjusts their approach to finances when you take someone who's a low earner and they're just starting their journey? and then you take someone who's comfortable

and they're like halfway through their journey and then you actually take someone who's wealthy by most definitions and they're at that point now where they can afford whatever they want. Well, I think one of the things that happens is I think the mindset is people do this like Apple Cart turnover. Hey, I used to invest in my 401k

and my Roth IRA and I built up to a million dollars but oh man, now that I'm here at a million dollars, I've got to do something completely different. I got to change my strategy. I got to pursue something else. And we always say, don't forget to dance with the one that brung you. The thing that got you,

you from zero to 100,000 or from 100,000 to a million and from a million to 10 million can be the same that it continues on. You may just start adding stuff to it. I may have a really healthy, diversified portfolio across low-cost index funds, but I want to get into real estate. So maybe I go buy my first rental property. I go buy raw land or I go buy a commercial property. It's not like I'm changing the strategy. I get to kind of add onto the strategy, but the same rules apply. I want to be disciplined. I don't want to over lever. I don't want to get too far ahead of my skis, I don't want to take on too much risk, you just do those same sort of things, whether you're at the beginning or kind of at the, I'm at the middle point or even at the end, it's not about

changing strategy, it's about adjusting and altering strategy. I mean, I think it's a great question, but it's also more of a philosophical on money in general. I mean, one of the things, that's why, that's one of the things when we were designing financial order of operations is that you're going to have a changing your journey just because we could apply this to expenses, too. Is it, you know, if you have a, you have a, you know, if you have a limited net worth of say under $100,000, a 1% on that $100,000 is just, it's, you know, for on $10,000, it's $100, on $100,000, it's, and check my math, I'm doing $1,000. It's $1,000.

You know, your expenses start changing drastically because, you know, when you're, when you're under $10,000, every dollar you spend matters. When you get to $100,000, now you, okay, you can go on vacation and it's okay, you can need out, you know, and you get to your first million, okay, now your car can be a little nicer. Well, it's kind of the same way on your tax and your investment journey as well, is it doesn't have to change all at once, but you just see that your journey will change. That's why I'm telling you, you can start off simple, but complexity will naturally find you because as you have more and more success, at some point, you've got to look at your estate plan. At some point,

you're going to have to look at, you know, yes, you're going to be maxing out, look at four employer plans. How often, we've even had some content creators, they know who, who they are. They're going to watch this because they're friends of both of us because they've called us and gotten some advice. And then they follow up and then they never hire us on it, but they get the free advice from us when we start talking about, hey, what's the difference between like a solo 401K and then when you graduate to a traditional 401k? But then, hey, how about when we bolt on a profit sharing plan? And then what's this thing about a cash balance plan? These are all things that are just, you don't start there, but you grow into them as you have more and more

success. And then what about balancing then risk and speculation? versus capital preservation, when do you kind of slide along that scale to really look into asset protection, at what dollar amount? And then when you are in the phase of your life, maybe you're like very young, you're 18, 19, you're starting to make a little bit of money. You could maybe scrounge up an extra $200 a month. Could you just put that in a 3x leveraged ETF instead of doing something else? There's a problem with those triple leverage. You could do that. You could. And you could argue, hey, oh, yeah, you're young and you've got plenty of time. You can be. is aggressive, but I would argue one of the big things is, while you might think that might be being aggressive, what you're really doing, if you take that extra $200, you scrounge up and you're doing the 3x triple levered, instead of just buying S&P 500 inside your Roth IRA, the time that you're missing out on those dollars compounding over the next 40 or 50, 60 years can be huge. Because, yeah, maybe the triple levered thing works. But because of time decay,

if you don't actually catch it on momentum and catch you the right time, you're not actually going to make any money on those. They don't work. You don't think, oh, okay, S&P 500 makes 10% annualized per year, I'm just going to go buy a triple levered ETF and I'm going to make 30% per year. It doesn't work that way. The mathematics don't actually work that way. So how you approach risk can change and don't miss here. So there's nothing wrong with speculation.

A lot of people think, oh, you can't speak. You can, but it should be with a small portion of your portfolio and not at the beginning. Like when you speculate, you want to speculate with vacation money, not with grocery money. Because if you start doing with grocery money, you get yourself into a really bad spot. So I think that having really real. riskier investments is okay, so long as you have the foundation built out and you're doing the things you're supposed to be doing on the baseline, and then you want to add in that more aggressive stuff. And I'll even take it to life. I do think young people, I mean, when you're when you're in

your 20s, that is the time. Take some risk. Because, I mean, if you fail, you're already so close to the starting line, how much are you losing, you know, on that? There's a lot of endeavors and other things. And I think that you can, I don't want you to go crazy with it, but if you have something that you think you're world class in, I do think people. I mean, that's how we've ended up here. I mean, it's an oddball thing to start a podcast in 2006. It's an oddball thing to go out and start a business. So I like those things. But then I will tell you, I do like just small decisions. I'm not talking out both sides of my mouth because I say go think boldly in those terms. But I think in terms of your money, I love just index funds because it's so simple. You don't have to put a lot of effort into it. I do believe in this. of law of accelerating returns is technology is accelerating faster and faster. And as long as we don't create the robots that kill us, we're going to make more and more money. So if you can

start investing, you don't have to try to pick the winners. You just buy the market. Buy the market in general because the expansion is naturally going to create success and opportunity. But I do think as you get older, I'm unfortunately the oldest person in the room. I'm now over the 45 age that I talk about in a lot of our content is that, I think it's okay to be completely debt-free post-45 because you just don't have the multiplier effect on your money like you did when you're in your 20s. And also, now if you've won the game, meaning you have enough money that you could do what you want when you want, why run up the scoreboard? Why not dial down some of the risks? Because if you're not, if you're not missing on it. So I paid off my mortgage, you know, so it doesn't mean I'm debt-free.

Paid off a 2.75%? No, 2.5%. It was down to $42,000. Last week. Last week, yeah. It's down to $42,000. I mean, my monthly payment, look, at the point, at the beginning of the year, I was at like $100,000. But literally, my monthly payment was knocking this thing down. It only said I saved a few months because, I mean, the monthly payment was just crushing. I understand that.

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Not as much as I love tapas. Maybe, my Yorka. We could hit the beach, then go hiking. Hiking? Or how about a seaside stroll in Sicily? Ooh, I do love canoes. Wait, what do you think of? With a world of destinations to choose from. Good luck picking just one.

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I was like, you're right. What am I doing? The hassle factor at some point, if you do the multiplication on two and a half percent on $40,000, it was, the squeeze of the fruit just wasn't I did that with my car. Yeah, I had a three something percent interest rate, a 3.3 percent interest rate on the Tesla. And it got down to a point where just even filing that like little tax interest pay,

it just wasn't even worth it. I just paid it off. It's so annoying. But I do think early on in the journey, 20s, 30s, 40s, you don't have to focus on capital preservation. I don't think you have to have like a super conservative portfolio. If you've done the right things, right, if you have an emergency fund that can cover three to six months of your living expenses, if something were to happen in your work

life where you didn't have an income coming in, I think it's okay to be a lot more aggressive with your portfolio. You can have a super heavy equity portfolio. But once it gets to a critical mass, once it's a million, million and a half, two million dollar portfolio, it is a lot less about how much money you make and it's more about how much you get to keep over the long term. And I think that's where the shift begins to happen. Although really quick, before we go into that, something I've noticed with running the podcast for more than five years now is that staying organized, especially with partnerships, is a full-time job and a and of itself. Like you've got notes, emails, conversations, follow-ups. It adds up fast. But that's

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So you mentioned a million, million and a half, two million. On the topic of capital preservation, I have a friend who's selling his business, and he's probably going to sell it for like low-eight figures. He wants to take all of that money, all of it, and put it in Bitcoin. He already owns a lot of Bitcoin. He's made a lot of money in Bitcoin. And I told him, I'm like, realistically, I feel like, I mean, I don't have this amount of money, but I feel like life doesn't change that much after like four to five to six million.

And like, you should probably focus on capital preservation. if it's, if you're going to take a massive risk, do it with money over $10 million or something like that. And he's like, yeah, but I still want to put it in Bitcoin. What would you say is the optimal amount of money to have? Is it $4, $5, $6 million? After what point does it really start to like degrade? Well, we have, so we have a client who is really good friends with a billionaire. And he was out having, he was having some adult beverage. Drinks with this billionaire. And he said, hey, man, you've had so much success. You sold your company last year for like $900 million.

dollars, uh, what's rich? Like what, I mean, here you can have anything in the world, any sort of private debt, anything you want. What do you consider rich? And he said, honestly, 10 million bucks. Because once you have 10 million bucks in the bank, even if you're not very good at managing and you just make 5% on that, it's half a million dollars a year can make every year. And it's kind of hard to spend half a million dollars a year if you're debt free. Right. So if you have 10 million bucks, that's kind of the threshold. Now, that's from the perspective of a billionaire. I think most folks, if you have a couple million dollars invested, a lot of people just don't have have lifestyles that are that big, right? So if you have $4 million, $5 million, there's a pretty

good change you're going to be financially independent in most parts of this country and most lifestyles. Now, for your guy, I don't think it's as much about capital preservation or maybe it's a flavor of that. It's more about diversification. It's concentration risk. What if, what if Bitcoin doesn't work? What, what if something happens and there's some shift and all the hype doesn't pan out? And you had all of your net worth tied up. And then not just a couple millions of dollars you already on, but a couple of million plus the 10 million. You've already won the game. If you haven't won the game, you've rounded third and you're coming close to home plate. Do you really need to start showboating between third and home? Or is the risk just

not worth it? Why not diversify across real estate assets or income producing securities or diversified portfolio or just have money sitting in a high yield money, whatever that thing may be for you, putting it all in Bitcoin is betting all of your Wad on this one outcome, then if it doesn't happen, why? Why take that risk? Before I went out on my own, I worked at another firm, and we worked with a lot of Lucent technology executives. And a lot of people probably don't even remember what Lucent was, but Lucent was, it was the high flyer of the 90s.

I mean, if you go and look it up, it was a Fortune 500. I mean, it was, you couldn't lose with this investment. And I've unfortunately dealt with executives who have won the game, but because they were overly concentrated, they've watched that wealth turn to pretty much nothing. And that's what I would ask your friend is, have you thought about, because some of this is systemic risk you have for going back to poor? Why, if you won the game, is it a responsible thing to even leave that risk sitting out there? is that at a minimum, carve off what you would need for a safe withdrawal rate to keep that diversified and safe, or even liquid. I mean, if you don't like traditional investments, that might even be something you want to consider just keeping liquid. That would be a better play because I think he's not thinking about the emotional toll it would take to go from winning the game and having tremendous success and taking it down to zero.

That would destroy you. Kevin O'Leary said on the diary of the CEO podcast that he keeps $5 million in cash. At all the time. I don't always have $5 million. And that's it. And he says he doesn't touch it. But that mentally for him, no, that no matter what happens, I got this cash. If everything would depart, that's my.

And I think. And always. And even if you're not a billionaire, I think a lot of us can, it's why we tell, even retirees who have now are in financial independence and they're living off of their assets, if you can just keep like 18 to 24 months of your living expense and liquid cash, what you've done is you've giving yourself a 24-month runway that no matter what the economy throws, no matter if there's a global pandemic, a real estate crash, tariffs, you know, stuff in the eurozone, whatever that is, you've given yourself enough time that you can give your portfolio time to recover. You can

weather that storm if you have that cash there. It's the same sort of idea, just on a smaller scale. So again, I don't, I think throwing it all in Bitcoin is just, oh, that's insane. I think at Kevin's level, that's probably just a nice safety net for him, for peace of mind. But I will sell, and I cover this and Millionaire Mission, too, is that I think cash, excess cash, now don't mishear me. For anybody who's just starting your journey, just get the steps one and four, which is basically an emergency reserves, and that won't you get in the Roth and everything else? But I think once you reach a certain level of success, right around step eight, there's nothing wrong with having extra cash, because cash can be a tremendous wealth builder, too, because if you

keep some excess cash, what happens when everybody else is out of cash? Think about every time we've had a collapse or market downturn because people cut it so thin. Most people are not walking around with the right type of emergency reserves. They're not, you know, protecting their levered assets, right. So as soon as the oxygen leaves the room, meaning cash, people all of a sudden, the deals, that's when the deals are out there. How did we get this building that we're filming this in was right after the pandemic? The owner was second guessing because he had gotten an offer the previous year and he was like, man, I should have sold it. And we were able to come in. And we were able to come in, And now it looks like the deal of a lifetime.

But it's because there was enough fear in the marketplace that that cash, if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have been able to do the deal. And that's what a lot of people will look at success and think it was luck. But I'm telling you, it really is that intersection of opportunity and preparation. And sometimes cash, you can buy assets that you never thought possible because nobody else has cash. Do you think we're going to have another instance like that in the near future? because a lot of people are talking now that we're in a debt bubble. The only reason the market's going up is because interest rates have been going down.

We've been printing a ton of money. How long could this be sustainable for? I'm willing to say I don't know, but I'm willing to say it's happened enough in my lifetime that yes, it will happen again. Because also, like I was detailed already earlier, I have a buddy. We bought Apple in the Great Recession only a few thousand bucks that in his portfolio never sold it. It's worth close to half a million dollars now. that is and so we always see when markets get detached from value there's tremendous opportunity to make money and that's going to happen i don't know if it's going to be in real estate i don't know if it's in the stock market but having drop out or money after you've kind of won the game and other things can be very rewarding but where do you tell people who say the market's too high right now i shouldn't be investing because i'm going to wait for an opportunity like that that's scary especially if they have no financial foundation well And we do because you don't know when it's going to happen, right?

I mean, we know that every decade, there's about two downturns roughly. But we do know that as we sit here in 2025 right now, we just had a major bear market in 2022 where the market was down. So we just came through a pretty big correction. And that was the longest correction that we've seen since the Great Recession. So 2008, early 2009 market was down. Pretty solid run. I mean, yeah, we had fourth quarter of 2018 bare market. We had COVID, but it was like a very quick blip.

And then we saw 2022, which is a down year. We're only a few years removed from that. So, yeah, there will certainly be another downturn. But if you look at the layout, and First Trust has an amazing illustration on this that shows from the 1950s all the way till now, and every bear market and every bull market that we've seen. And it shows how severe the bear market is relative to how robust the bull market is. And it shows the tenure of the bear market, which on average is like 11 months, relative to the tenure of the bull market, which is like four years.

And it doesn't even compare. It's not even close. And so what you don't recognize, is that more money is likely lost trying to avoid the next downturn than if you were to actually just participate in the next downturn and stay through it and just kind of drive through it. And I think a lot of people who sit on the sidelines, they wait and they wait and they wait and they wait.

And finally, right when things feel good, right when they finally say, okay, now I have an extreme level of confidence. Market just hit a new all-time high. Now I'm going to go to work. And then they invest and then the downturn happens. Well, ooh. And if you automate time, man. I've gotten reamed in the market.

Every single time I put money on, I get absolutely rinsed. Do you know how we solve for that? I'll tell you our biggest secret in the world. You ready? Then I don't know if you know this. We know how we can solve that that will not happen to you again. Dollar cost average. Always be buying.

If you automate the process and like I said, when you're building the financial foundation, when you're loading up the Roth IRAs, maxing out your 401Ks, what I love about an automated process, there's no emotion in it. You just automatically know what's happening. I always dollar cost averaging. The problem was that I had been dollar cost averaging a certain amount for like a year and a half, two years, and my income continued going up. And I was like, okay, cool. Like I get to build my savings.

Like the rates were decently high over the past couple of years. Okay, nice. That's fine. And then the savings got to be at a certain point where I was like, this is, you know, dumb. I shouldn't have this much money in cash. And so I dumped it all in January. Well, again, here's what I would have done differently. Let's say, I don't know your number, but let's say you were dollar cost averaging $1,000 every month.

But all of a sudden, your cash built up and you need to put it to work. Okay. Increase it from $1 to $10,000 a month. Right? No, I was like, I did five, like, just deposits. And then I literally like, I mean, I bought at the, like the day. My average cost was the peep. And see, that's where I think.

Like down to the hour. You could, by the way. But also, at your age right now, you are young enough. All of us are. Still going to be a winner. Most of us in this room are young enough that even if you get at the very high. Three of us are young enough. Even if you get at the world's worst time.

Oh, I'm up since that. You don't know what I'm doing. Exactly, right? Like you, we do an exercise. We show in the show all the time where we look at what if you were the world's worst investor? And what that means is that you started in like 1980. And all you did is you built up cash, built up cash, built up cash. And then at the very peak right before every bull market or every bear market, you invested.

So I invested at the top of 2007 and then right before fourth quarter of 2018. You build up in cash and you just dump it in the world's worst time, world's worst time. Even that investor over a 30, 40 year period, doing it at the absolute worst time possible still ended up with a huge portfolio because if you can give it

enough time, you don't have to be right all that often. You just have to be in. You just have to participate in the market and it's really hard to not be successful.

That's good to know. We spoke a lot about obviously high amounts, large sums of money in investments. I mean, we're talking about four or five, six million dollars. This is all, of course,

contingent upon having some sort of an income. Sure. Where would you say are the best opportunity today for anybody watching right now, they could be young, they could be middle age, they could be a little on the older end, any opportunity to make a lot of money. Recently, I actually had an air conditioning issue, and I called over this guy, and he just

runs a small little operation. He's been in it for about eight years. Eight years. Eight years. And he got into it because of his brother. Two years in, he got a job after some schooling and doing some small internships, and he was making 80K after two years. And then he started his own business. And now he said, as if you're really bad at installing air conditioning units and running a small little HVAC company, you're going to be making 50K a year. If you're okay and you know what you're talking about, you're going to be in the six figures. Well, I can tell you just from working in public accounting that some of our biggest clients were service businesses. I'm talking about people because

if you're really good at servicing air conditioners, you can go set up a crew and then a second crew and then a fourth crew and then a fifth crew and then all of a sudden you have a business is worth a lot of money because it scales. And so definitely, I mean, those are good behaviors. I would look, we have this whole AI thing coming. And in this, Bo, I don't know if it's going to. It's here. I don't know if Bo is going to agree or disagree. I think that what it's going to push is it's going to commoditize some forms of intelligence. It's going, but it's going to make value in community that much more. And I think it's also going to put a lot of value on emotional intelligence. You were talking about earlier cells. I completely agree with that. I think if you are a person that likes people and you like being around,

to people and you're good at networking, that is going to be amplified in this new AI world because, yes, it will be able to write letters. Yes, it will be able to answer your question on the fly, but nothing is going to be able to create human connection and community like those skill sets. And it's like you said, just Jack, with the heat and air repair. All those type of behaviors are always going to be somewhat valuable until we get robots, which I don't think we're there yet. We might have artificial intelligence, but still the execution of the heat and air repair. I would be mindful that stuff. I wouldn't go run up a bunch of student loan debt on some of these majors that I'm worried if they're going to be as viable as they've been in the past. Yeah, I think if you can do services, that's going to be a viable, valuable, valuable place to sort of plug in. But I do think artificial intelligence is changing things. It's changing what's valued out there in the marketplace. So if you had a kid 15, 20 years ago and you told them, hey, you need to get into programming, you need to get into coding, there's a only good chance. they did really well. Like they got placed, they got into a really great spot. I don't know now that I would tell someone that that's the place to go forward because these tools that we have at our disposal have now made them it's so much easier to do those kinds of vocations and trade. So like I have three young kids, I'm telling them, I really want them to focus on interpersonal skills. I think that one of the things is going to be so viable with them growing up is if they can communicate with another human being and meaningfully connect with that other human being, I think that that's going to be a skill set that's going to be a little bit lost. So if you can teach them how to interact with them, you can communicate with.

other folks, I think that's going to be something moving forward that would be very valuable. Now, right now, today, if you want to make a lot of income, anything that even remotely touches artificial intelligence is super huge. I mean, we had an amazing guy who came and he was in that world and he came and worked here because he really wanted to be a financial advisor and he was unbelievably smart. He started with us. He was a fantastic employee, but his former boss kept calling him every day, hey, you got to come back, you got to come back, you got to come back, you got to go back. And because of a number of different reasons, he finally said, hey, guys, they made me an offer. I couldn't walk away. I mean, it's silly what they're telling me that they're going to pay me to go do the job that I was doing. But that's how valuable, how marketable is right now. Well, Zuckerberg, it was he offering, $100 million dollar packages. I thought it was billion dollar. It might be, I think it was $100 million to a billion to a billion to a billion. Someone said it was a one and a half billion dollar contract.

That's insane. There's a phase out period of that in stock. But still a compensation. package of one and a half billion. It's interesting times. It really is. And I think you need to be very well. We're all, I am, I know we make fun of my age, but it is interesting. I've been around for when the personal computer came on the scene, the internet, then podcasting, YouTube and all that stuff.

And what's funny is that every time I've lived through all these big seismic shifts, I've often, you know, the first times I just lived through them. I lived through the personal computing internet. I was at least old enough now to where I was like, Hey, there's money being made right now on this whole internet concept. And it seemed like anything with dot com on it was crushing it. And look, there's a lot of, you know, bad things that happened there. But there were opportunities.

And then I saw the same thing. That's why I jumped on podcasting. And then when YouTube, we've seen these seismic shifts. I think there's a lot of money potential to make money off of these technology changes that are coming. How would you do that? Well, I think one of the things that we're talking about is don't try to fight against it. Don't, in our opinion, don't be the person that says, oh, artificial intelligence is not going to touch me, it's not going to affect me, I'm inoculated from that.

We think the people that are going to come out on the other end of this are people who recognize how to utilize it and use it as a tool to basically expand and increase your scope. So I don't want to be someone who says, oh, no, no, I don't need AI because I'm so good and it'll never replace me. I'm trying to figure out, how can I use artificial intelligence to expand what I can do from 100x to 1,000x to 1,000x? And I think people who figure that out are going to be able to capitalize. I mean, complex systems are about to get a lot more easier to set up and structure because you're going to have this agent through the artificial intelligence that can kind of work on that.

So I don't look, if I had all the products figured out, I would, you know, I'd be doing that myself. We do have one product, some things we're working on. It's not really for public consumption yet. But we're thinking about it. And I think the thing that I'm most proud about is that we have so much data for, because we've been in this since 2006. And that's what a lot of your app creators are probably realizing, like, think about if you're Salesforce, there's a good chance that the CRM might not be as valuable, but the data that has been gathered for these decades is going to be the product that the AI is going to be able to

become much more. You've got to think in those terms, because I think applications and other things are going to not be what the value point is in the future, because these agents can make that for your entity because of the artificial intelligence doing it for it. Or what do you think the downsides are? Well, I mean, it's always, always, you know, you think about when Elon was talking about the semi-truck and you think about how many over-the-road truckers are, if we priced out, I mean, and when you started just robots were driving all the tractor trailers across

the country, there's a whole group of people that you worry. What do they do from a labor? I remember when Andrew Yang was talking about this personal, you know, um, income that everybody ought to be guaranteed for I thought that stuff was crazy and I still I'm not a big fan but I'm starting to get why these technology and these really smart people we're talking about this because there is risk that some of these things are going to be so disruptive that there's industries that what happens and that's the part that I'm not smart enough to know the answer but it's something we all ought to be kind of thinking about because I do worry about whole broad industries being

impacted my worry is more so that critical thinking goes out of the window. Oh for sure. And even for me, I've used chat GBT probably 10 times a day. I really enjoy it. I'll have conversations with it. I'll get its opinion on things. But when I'm doing research, when I go and look at those independently,

a lot of times I'll find that it's just like flat out incorrect. It's not accurate. It's stating things as fact. And then when I go and do my own research on that, I turn out, wait a second, this isn't true. And I'll tell chat, GBT, hey, this isn't true. This thing never actually happened. Oh, yes.

You're correct. That didn't actually happen. Which is scary. Which is really scary. No, we had the same problem. One big beautiful bill. The Trump accounts. Yeah.

So we, you know, we're creating content on this. And if you use any of the GPs, you take your choice, they all screwed up the Trump accounts because a draft of the bill initially had that education, homeownership, and starting a small business was going to have some favorable treatment. And some big accounts have come out. and they put that in their car. If you actually go read the bill that got signed into law, that stuff's not in there. And we kept having the, when we were, because we were fact checking it using GPT, you know, chat GPT and stuff.

And it was like, no. And I was like, give me the actual language. And then I put that in Google and it went back to the draft bill. And I was like, son of a gun, this thing is not using the real legislation. It's still going back to a proposal. So let's set the record straight because that was my assumption that you could use that towards qualified expenses. and then that's taxed. It's basically going to be an IRA.

Okay. That they're going to, you can put up to $5,000. If your child's born between, what, January 2020, 25 through 2028. Okay. They're going to put $1,000 in. But it's going to be treated like an IRA. There's no capital gains tax treatment. No distributions until 18 and after 18.

So all those age stratifications, they didn't make it into the final bill. So why not just do a normal taxable account for your child? So what's going to end up happening? is that if you have a child in that window, take advantage of the $1,000. No-brainer, free money. Take advantage of what the government's putting together. But there's a better way to probably structure those accounts with custodial accounts, 529 accounts.

That's what I thought, because then if they're under the capital gains limit, anyway, it's going to be 0%. So I would just be continually every year. You just harvest those gains. You nailed it. That's exactly right. I think, you know, when they're negotiating tax legislation, there's a lot of horse trading it goes on, and that obviously somehow there was a funding mechanism that they were trying to just got cut. and everybody in the financial community missed it.

I missed it. Yeah. And you asked another downside, I think, to artificial intelligence is I think that criminals are continued going to be unbelievably enterprising. Oh, for sure. And so I think the ability to protect your information, even protect yourself, is going to become more and more difficult. I mean, it's already hard now to, you know, remember when like fishing emails used to

be really bad and it was like broken English and not good? Well, now you look at the type of emails that are coming out. And it's, they're pretty compelling. And I think that AI is only going to get better and better. and better at deceiving and being deceptive when criminals use it in a nefarious manner. So I think we're going to have to build system. And generally speaking, when advances in technology happens, the nefarious folks are always a little bit ahead of the folks that are on the up and up.

So it'll take a while for companies that are trying to combat that to get out and catch up to where their criminals are. So I worry about some of that stuff, even just changing the way that we protect ourselves from the world around us. Yeah. Those voice calls, they're able to fake them. It's really wild. I've heard stories where the scammer will pretend to be like the daughter and I don't call the father.

I need you to send me 100 bucks real fast. I'm in a bind right now. I just needed. I'm kidnapped or something like that. And they'll send the money. It's terrifying. Yeah. Terrifying.

I'm curious, which opinion on personal finance and money has gotten you guys the most criticism? Well, it depends on from what group of people. Like, you know, there's some folks who they have their guy and they follow their guy and they love their guy. And if you say anything counter to their guy, they're going to kind of like fight and argue against that. And I think what's really interesting is a lot of our views, I don't really think are like super, super controversial. It's just like, you know, some people say, hey, you can't use credit cards ever, no way, no how. And if that's the way you want to operate in your personal finances, that's totally okay. We're not going to fight.

We're going to say that's acceptable. Our view is that credit cards are something that can be used if you're responsible and you don't carry a balance. You understand what you're doing. And so it's not really something that like is controversial, but if you fall on the other end of that, you don't like hear us say that that that's an, okay thing for you to do. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything that we've done this super controversial other than we battle the line in the sand because, look, there's, we're kind of in the middle. You got Dave over here who's kind of a debt crusader. And I'm not, I'm not against that because I think if you're somebody who's at the beginning of your journey and you have tremendous

amounts of debt on your, on your net worth statement, if you're even tracking a net worth, then yeah, you should watch every dollar and you probably, if you have a bad relationship, If you look at how many people don't pay their credit cards every month, those people, if you're carrying a credit card balance at 20 plus percent, you shouldn't be using credit cards. But then on the other side, and I'm not going to give their names because I don't want to give them, you know, the, but we have the leverage bros that are out there, you know, is telling everybody a lever, lever, lever, lever to the cows come home. And that's just not our game either because there's personal finance is very personal. So we try to give everybody the best path, but also tell you the... There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life.

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so that you can make the best decision. That's why we always say it depends a lot. I hate saying that, but I know that everybody's structure or their accounts are going to be a little bit different. So who should hire a financial advisor if it's really as simple as just buying an index fund consistently? Yeah, I think, well, that's, so it's interesting.

Even the way you frame that question, hey, well, watch to hire a financial advisor if it's as easy as buying an index fund. Well, buying an index fund is just one part of the financial planning process. It's the investment part. And I think most of we would be surprised here. We don't think that everyone needs a financial advisor. With all the information out there on podcasts and YouTube channels and books and blogs,

there's so much great free information out there that a lot of people can self-manage for a long time. They don't really need to pay a professional. Generally, when a financial advisor begins to make sense, are generally one of three things begin to happen. One is the gravity of your decisions become so big that you begin to feel uncomfortable. Okay, if I make a 10% mistake on $10,000, it's not going to change my life. If I make a 10% mistake on a million dollars, well, now I'm starting to impact my livelihood. Now that might be more than I save in a year, more than I make in a year.

So the decisions become really big. Or maybe life just becomes complicated, right? Like you used to have a two-page tax return and now you have 100-page tax return. or you might have options and RSUs and ESPP, or you are wondering about what your estate documents should look like, and you have all these different questions, and you just don't know what you don't know. You're an expert in your field and your vocation,

but you don't know all the financial planning stuff, and so you want to make sure you're talking with someone who does know that, to make sure that all of your eyes are dotted and all your T's are crossed. Or number three, and we see this all the time, maybe you're super, super smart, and you can do it on your own, and the complexity doesn't even really frighten you, but what you found is you just don't have time to put, put the energy and effort and attention into it that you would like to. And so naturally, because

you have all these other things going on, personal finances falls on the back burner. So most of our clients, most of the folks who listen to our show that reach out, they find themselves in one of those three places. And they say, okay, I'm at this place. And yeah, I've done it great on my own. But man, I'd really love a second set of eyes. I love someone who's navigated this next stage that I'm going into and hasn't just done it one time. I want someone who's done it a hundred time so they can tell me, hey, what are the things to look out for? What are the pitfalls I should have? But if you're a brand new person starting out in your career, it's not super complicated to figure out, hey, I need to make a good income, live on less than I make, follow the financial order of

operations, put my money to work. And every dollar that I can save is going to be way more valuable going into my portfolio or funding my financial goals than paying a financial advisory fee. Well, I mean, even in this interview, we've covered quite a few things from a tax policy standpoint, from estate planning standpoint, retirement structure. I mean, these are things you just don't know if you don't know. And then I also think about the brilliant people. We've had quite a few clients that are just geniuses, brilliant, big portfolios. They're bringing us on just because they know that if they pass away, who's the backup?

Who's their spouse go-to? So they've actually brought us in as almost like the insurance policy so that they can start introducing the relationship so they have coverage for the loved one. What's the biggest account that you manage, like for a single person? person. Now, I'd notice that one of the hardest parts about eating healthy is just having the right foods available to you when you're hungry. And that is why our sponsor, Cook Unity, is an absolute game changer. For those unaware, they deliver fully prepared meals by award-winning chefs, like legit Food Network stars and James Beard winners. I just got a box with a mission-style

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You could also use code ICH free at checkout. Thank you so much to Cook Unity for sponsoring this episode. Fun story here, but when Jack and I first started the iced coffee hour, we had to figure out everything ourselves, from the best cameras to use, the best editing equipment, how to source guests, every day presented a brand new challenge. That's why if you run your own business, you know exactly what I'm talking about, and why today's sponsor is so relevant, and that would be Shopify. Shopify is basically your all-in-one business partner. They power millions of businesses worldwide from major brands like Mattel and Jimshark to entrepreneurs just getting started. And fun fact, if you've shopped online in the

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You guys can change your life if you just create that business idea you've been sitting on for the past few years. It's just $1 per month to get started. You will not regret giving it a shot. Shopify.com slash ICH or a link down below in the description. Thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. What's the biggest account that you manage, like for a single person? I mean, we have clients that are worth over $100 million. I mean, you'd be surprised to see that, yes, we have clients with over $20 million

and we're still buying index funds for those type of clients. I mean, because I think that a lot of people, there is a level that where you get into family office planning and things like that, because we're not bill paying and doing other unique things like that. But we are reviewing tax returns. We are making sure account structures and everything are right and making sure people are protected from just the things that they don't know. And how much do financial advisors make? And how are they paid? Well, it depends because there's a few different business models, right?

So there are generally three distinct business models inside the financial planning world. There are commission-based advisors who are paid a commission based on some product they sell. So these are generally like people that do you sell commissioned investment products. They sell insurance types. And basically, the company for whom they work or whom they represent pays them for selling their products out to the consumer. Then there's the other side, which is fee only. And that's where we are. The only way that we get paid is directly from our end client.

So if you have a problem or you have some solution that you need, we'll present to you, solution one, solution two, solution three. And we don't care which solution you choose because we want you to choose the one that's the best for you, the one that's in your best interest. So the only way that we're getting paid is directly from you. Well, even inside of the fee-only world, there's a few different ways to get paid. There are subscription-based models where you pay it like a gym membership. There are retainer-based models where it's like a flat fee every year on retainer.

And there's assets under management models where the advisor gets paid based on the assets that they're helping you manage. And we work under the assets under management. And we're unapologetic about it because I think that what I've experienced when people are doing just project-based is it can be good, but the people, they're trying to hurry the process. They're trying to hurry because they know they're on the clock with getting it done. And then we've also seen things where how often we have prospects come to us. And it looks like a quilt work. I can say, hey, you made this decision in 2017 because this is what was popular back then.

Or even I've seen where family and friends have come to me and I give them some structures. And then they disappear for four or five years. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. You know, we changed that whole process in 2020. And yet you're still stuck on. There is some value. you to an ongoing type of relationship. And so we're unapologetic that we like that structure.

That's why we put minimums on what you need to have because it's no different. I have a concierge doctor. And I pay a lot of money for this concierge doctor. But for me at my level of success and my health, it's important to have some, to know I always have access to somebody who's going to get me good guidance and keeps me from what I don't know. How much is that? I pay over $10,000 a year. I don't want to give too many details, but it's, I. I thought you about to say 10,000 a month.

And I was like, oh, wow. There are a concierge. There are concierge. There are consigneurs. Not bad. Like, when I look at my own health insurance, I pay like $700 a month with a 17,000. I don't want them watching this and then be like, that's actually pretty soon. Graham just said we can raise it.

How do that? Well, the concierge doctor thing just. How does that work? Exactly. You still have to have insurance outside of that because they're an outside the insurance model. So you pay for that out of pocket. But what they are is they are a personal concieres. Like, if I need to, if something happened to Danny to get.

I could text him right now and go to his office and I'm in and I'm in and out in 15 minutes. Or if something happens, I need to call it. Hey, I need you to call in this prescription because I got this going on. That's really nice. Or even if I have something happen and I go in and I see the doctor and I'm like, hey, I've got this going. I'll like, you know what? Yeah, this doesn't look good. You need to go get an MRI and you see the specialist. I'll have my assistant call and make the appointment for you. And then I'll be at the MRI tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. And I'll be in the specialist two days from me. cheaper to pay for things like the MRI just out of pocket and cash. We still have insurance, so we're still, you know, so we're paying this on top of our insurance.

And the insurance, they still go, since they know you have insurance, they go running through the discount platform of the insurance company. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I just recently went to the doctor for the first time in a very long time, just for a normal checkup. And they told me that my plan doesn't have telehealth. Could you believe it? So I'm doing blood testing as like a preventative sort of thing.

And they say, okay, for your results, we could call you. But you have to make sure that your plan allows for us to call you. And I said, well, why wouldn't it's a phone call? Say, well, they might charge you. I looked at my plan. Believe it not, they charge you for the phone call. You have to go in person and it's free, but a phone call costs money. That's why.

The whole system's crazy. How does that make any sense? Well, and if you, our doctor is a good friend of mine. And one of the things says is a lot of our health care system in this country is set up to be sick care, not health care. We're really good at triaging sickness. Something goes wrong. I got to come see. You just said, hey, I haven't been in a long time, but I want to go for this checkup.

I have my blood work done every quarter. So that way I can actually see that and be proactive about my health because there's no point in having all the success and trying to save money and building towards financial independence. If you don't stay healthy enough or long enough to live a really, really good life for a really, really long time. So we're kind of taking the approach that when it comes to health care, we want to be. forward thinking on that, not reactive. Hey, I want to know what's going on at this stage of life so that not only is this decade great, but am I setting myself up so the next decade and the decade after the decade after are amazing.

So I just look this up. I pay $25,100 a year before insurance kicks in and pays a dime. Why are you on such a high deductible plan? Because I wanted it for the HSA. Yeah, but you don't have to go that high. Holy cow. Well, he's probably counting his insurance premiums, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

He's counting as premiums. Yeah, I'm counting the premium plus the max out-of-pocket deductible. But I'm thinking for 25,000 a year. It's a discount platform. I'm better off just investing it for 20 years and just paying out of, I would gladly just pay out of pocket if I weren't concerned of like a catastrophic loss. Yeah, just a cancer scare and then it's a million dollars. That's right.

That's the only thing I'm afraid of. Or a really bad car wreck or something like that. You know what I mean? There are other things that could happen. It's the unknown, unknown. So you have to have the catastrophic coverage. But so long as you have a solid enough financial setup, you can do the high deductible plan. I would rather, I wish I could just pay 300 bucks a month.

And that's it. And just be covered if it's over $100,000 and like X amount of years or something like that. I'll give the perspective that I think that there's a lot of correlations between health and wealth. You know, if you think about a lot of the same things you can say about what you ought to be proactive with your health is the same thing with what you're going to. you take care of your wealth. And I know, look, not to get all weird about it, but I'm only three years from when my dad passed away. So you can imagine when you're that close to when your father passed away, health is very

scary for me in a lot of ways. So that's why the concierge doctor and the investment, that's why a lot of people have noticed I've lost weight and other things because I had a pastor when I was in my 30s. He said, you know, when you turn 40, start paying attention because, you know, it's a fork in the road moment that if you're not, because he was a close friend too, and the fact that he was like, your body doesn't do everything unless you start exercising it, working it. And so I've been trying to continue to stress myself to work, to stay healthy. And that's why I think we do the same thing for our clients on the financial side is that we're trying to give them the best version

of themselves. So you're not just having to make desperate decisions, you know, because we want you to be proactive and plan accordingly because at some point we're all going to pass away. I mean, I hate to ruin it for everybody. But, you know, and so you need to plan accordingly. And I'm just trying to make sure I'm as proactive as possible to extend that as long as possible. That's a great idea. I like the concierge doctor. If there are any doctors out there and you're licensed in the state of Nevada, even if you're a specialist, if you're a dermatologist, if you're a dermatologist, if you're any ologist or anything, please DM me because I would love to talk to you.

Jack is sick in the head, though. I honestly need a doctor. You're not going to be able to help this guy. Like, I remember I had some, like, skin issue or something. I just posted on my Instagram and, like, does anyone know? Oh, God, that's got to be scary. And, yeah, but it's good because the thing is, the biggest cheat code is if your neighbor or a close family friend is a doctor. Yeah.

That is crazy. Absolutely. Because then it can be a Saturday, a Sunday. You have no idea what's happening, especially if you're a person that's like a little panicky with health stuff. Yep. That right there could diffuse any concern. Well, that's why the great thing about concierge medicine is if you do have a relationship with a doctor, it is 24-7, right? So if something happens late at night on a Saturday, you send.

to text, you get an immediate response from the doctor in the office. It's on call. So it's like a, it's an amazing. Dude, you be just texting all the time. It's an amazing accident. I just sprained my ankle. How bad is it. I got a hang nail. I went in from my last blood draw. He's like, hey, everything else going good. And, you know, I sat down for like two hours, just kind of like going through. And he's like, hey, when was the last time you had a dermatology screening just to check any mold or whatever? I was, oh, man, it's been years. It's like, okay, great, I'll have you an appointment set up tomorrow. And literally called, set up appointment at the dermatologist, go in and say, it's just that kind of service. Now, again, you pay a premium for that, but it's about being proactive because I'm

like, I don't want some weird thing that I ignore and don't pay attention to to be the thing that takes me out. So if I can get out in front of it and do the test and stay on top of it and watch what I eat and exercise well, I'm going to do those things. That's genius. Also, Chatsby-T, great for medical stuff. Generally speaking, you upload photos. But anyways, that's besides every doctor in the eyes. It's great to take your doctor. It's great to take your doctor. It's But go see a professional. It's funny. I've used it for the same thing.

Oh, I read it too. But anyways, that's the size of, Reddit is R slash dermatology questions or whatever. It's pretty good if you have like a questionable mole or something. I don't know. Do you don't remember when you usually go on WebMD and you start reading the symptoms? You're like, oh my gosh. I thought I had early onset dementia for a while from WebMD.

That's the problem when you go unfiltered in the internet and chat GPT. Again, because it says things so definitively, oh, well, you said this and this and this, that means that, ah, you have tuberculosis. You're like, no, no, no, I just have a sore throat, right? Like, and it's a really hard thing that you want to be careful. But I ask it odds. What are my odds of this? Oh, okay.

And then it gives you- 100, like, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, got it. Because it could give you well, the statistic is like 4% likelihood that you have this. And that makes me feel about that. But haven't you heard, like, some people are like leaving their spouses because of chat GPT is given them bad advice on, like, relationships and stuff?

There's articles out there about this, you know, where you have to be careful. I had not thought about it. You have to be careful because a lot of people are using as counselors and other things. I've used it as counselor. But then again, it's pretty good. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's able to see things in a way that I would never have seen myself and reframe it. And if you, it's a, it wants to make you happy. Have you not noticed how it wants to make you happy? But if I tell it to be objective, take me out, take out any bias, look at the situation objectively, give me the harsh reality. It's still gentle. Yeah, but sometimes it'll say you're overreacting. You're doing this. Or sometimes it says, no, this is true and this is it. And again, you ask for its conviction level. But then again, if someone's leaving their spouse because of what they read from chat GPT,

I think that signals bigger problems. And maybe the spouse is better off without the type of person who would leave them because of chat GPT. So I would argue it's a net benefit at the end of the day. I still go back to the one beautiful bill and how just definitively it thought it was accurate. And I was just like, come on. I'm telling you you're wrong on this. And it kept me saying, nope. And I was, you know, so we do all need to be a little careful with it.

Can I tell you a really interesting thing? A good buddy mind, he did this is one of things he used his chat GPT for. He said, hey, I want to create a board of advisors. And I want to create a board of advisors across a number of different subject matters. So I want, hey, here's all the people who I really value what they think from a financial perspective and from a medical perspective and from a faith perspective and from a psychology perspective. And so we had these six different things. And he spent like 200 hours refining these six different proxy individuals. So now whenever he goes to make a decision, he'll say, hey, Chad, I want to ask my board, what do you think about this?

And he will get six different responses based on these proxy individuals that they met. So he's created a board of advisors to help him get a well-rounded, like, hey, I want to know what, this person, this person, this person, this person, all consolidated with the same ideas. What do they think about this? And so he's using that to solve a lot of his business problems and a lot of like the hard, higher level creative thinking things that he's doing. It's fascinating. I've seen him do it. It's, it's pretty wild. I also am curious how chat GPT could compete with you guys as financial planners or advisors. A lot of people, when you think about you are the CEO of a seven, eight figure enterprise. If you think about what your 401k and everything was, there's a lot of successful

people out there, what you pay to kind of expert, you know, and give you a CFO or somebody who's going to, you know, help you bounce ideas off of. It's just, it's better than you thrown up against the wall and asking the computer to give you the answer. Now, maybe it keeps getting better, but I still think we're at the point where most people at that level of success, they're willing to pay that slight, you know, headwind to make sure that they're in good hands and that they have access at all times. That would be a phenomenal YouTube video, though. If you guys got questions and then like a couple people that wanted to come to you guys for free financial advice, like three people, And then they had a conversation with you and a conversation with Chad DPD.

Oh, that would be fantastic. That would be a phenomenal. I would love that. Yeah. Yeah. Because financial planning on. You know, when it first came on the scene, we tried it, but it's gotten much better. So that would probably be better than it was originally.

Yeah, a lot of it, like you said, really just comes down to the prompts. Like, there are certain things that I've asked it where I've run the numbers myself and realized, oh, wait, I forgot to tell it that I'm in this tax bracket. And I have to take this into consideration. And I'm like little nuances that it then. And now you're getting to the bigger problem. When I used to do taxes, I did tax prep for 16 years. I used to compare and contrast. Like if you went to, now there's a bunch of brands that you show up with, whatever you

show up with, you're going to walk out without a tax, with a tax return because they're just, they're kind of burn and churn. You come in there. You know, you give them much. Here's what I got. Whereas I used to go through. And one of the things I prided myself is I was trying to find enough deductions for my clients that I was preparing that I was.

that I would pay my fee. You know, I would ask them questions. I would probe. That's not, that's the thing, because you're making a great point, Graham, is that you don't know what you don't know on the questions you should ask or the prompts you should put in there.

And it's just not, it's not to that point that it's replaced the experience level. I give it, but I would give it like three years and it's going to start asking you questions to give you a more correct answer because it's going to see these mistakes. But again, there's still some,

all right, you can go ask, chat, GPT. How do I replace a radiator in my automobile. And it can give you, like, step-by-step instructions. Here's how you do it. Does that mean that you feel prepared to go take apart your automobile, pull the radiator, and put the radiator in? There's something about a professional who knows what they're doing, a mechanic who actually understands, hey, if something goes wrong in this process or something is unexpected, I know that I have someone that can help me navigate and guide that so that I don't

ruin this automobile or in your financial life, so that don't make some cataclysmic mistake that I didn't recognize. There's not some blind spot. I didn't account for it. Well, I mean, you make a good point. The consolidation, like if you, if you talk to our administrative team, bringing assets over from other custodians or moving 529 assets, consolidating 529s, it will drive you mad dealing with all these different custodians trying to work on the actual transactions. And I think that's why sometimes when you see the one-off advisors that will pay a flat fee to do, if they don't actually execute or handhold the actual transaction, does it actually happen? Because that's a part of what we're, it's just,

Like we were talking about, like you get into real estate. How long does it take a real estate person to define the good plumber, the good electrician, you know, all the service providers, it takes a while to build up your book of Rolodex. I'm old school, say Rolodex or your contact of all the different people. It's the same thing in the financial world, too, is that we actually execute the, not only give the implementation ideas, but how do you actually execute it? And by the way, also shepherd the process. I mean, because that's something that I don't know that.

I don't know that I think that the machines are, they're going to be able to tell you, but are they actually going to execute maybe down the road, but I don't think we're there yet. So when you manage your high net worth clients, do they ever think, like, or act in such a way of like, okay, you know, I have $10 million with you guys. I'm just going to take like $500,000 over here and put in like Pepe coin. Or do you stop them from doing that? Do you ever see anything like that? All the progress we made, it's all gone. It's all gone.

Again, a lot of the folks who actually come and work with us, us listen to the show. So they're like fans of personal finance. They love this stuff. They live and breathe this stuff. So a lot of folks like the idea of having this little play account. Hey, I want to go invest in Bitcoin or I want to go do micro strategies. I want to go buy individual stocks. And we're totally okay if you want to have that with a portion of your portfolio and you want to have that be a play account. We have no fault with that at all. Where it becomes an issue is when that becomes a large part of what you're doing because now you're putting your actual financial plan at risk. So it's not uncommon for clients of ours to have.

have like a side play account where they're still able to get the utility they get from trying to implement those strategies. How often do you say no? When us saying, I'm sorry, when us saying yes would breach our fiduciary duty to the client. So if a client says, hey, I appreciate all this guidance you're giving, but what I want to do is I want to take 75% of my portfolio and go buy Bitcoin. What we'll say is, hey, at the end of the day, you're the CEO, this is your money, you're in charge of it.

We are the CFO that you employ to help you make, help you navigate your financial strategy. But I cannot in a fiduciary capacity say, hey, it's in your best interest for you to take 75% of your portfolio and put it in Bitcoin. So perhaps it does not make sense for us to work together. And that's okay. And you'll break the. Yeah, because we, we are not going to do something that's not in our client's best interest, even if they tell us it's what they want to do. Or hey, I want to, I want to sell all of my portfolio. I want to go buy, you know, a $20 million.

dream house. Okay, you can totally do that. But if you're going to do that, you're not really following our guidance. There's no reason you should pay us for advice that you don't want to take and you don't want to implement. And how often do they actually sever that after that conversation has had? Again, our clients are pretty astute. So we don't run into this a lot. You know, this is a fairly, we'll have clients ask questions, then we'll walk them through why we think it's not the best thing. And normally they're pretty pragmatic. They'll arrive at that same place. We tell people you vote with your feet in the fact that nothing keeps our clients here every year they don't they don't it's not like they have to stay with us we have to add value or they don't stay have you ever given any bad advice

well it's looking back in hindsight it's an interesting when you say bad advice what do you mean like advice that the client did not like because like advice that maybe turned out to be incorrect well you can't say like because look we all could look I'll just spot check something right now yeah if you if you sold if you got a client and they had a fully concentrated traded portfolio of NVIDIA. That's the one I was going to say. I mean, and you tell them, hey, the right thing to protect your long-term net worth is let's start diversifying this. Is that a bad decision or is that the right decision? You know what I mean? Because it is, we all know what's happened now. I mean, the last three years have been a rocket show.

Does he ever call you and just be like, hey, remember that time he told me to sell NVIDIA and now it's 20x? Every time I meet with him, we have that conversation. But we put together a plan to slowly divest. We still has a lot. of exposure there. Yeah. Just not as much as he would have had. And yes, he likes to remind me of how much he missed out. But it's back to that. But he's still with you?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But you think about those loosen executives I used to work with, we've seen the other side of that. We all, you know, it's easy in hindsight. It's kind of, we reacted to a video where they put up every fang stock, you know, was out there. Plus, and, you know, they added everything that's been a high flyer and said, why would you buy the S&P 500?

And the guy loved his response. is like, and if you grew wings, you could fly. Because nobody knows hindsight always looks one way. All we can do is take the variables we have, give you the best advice, and we make the decision together. But of course, things like that where a concentrated portfolio, you always run the risk that that concentrated portfolio could do very well, but you're helping the client protect the core that they're not going to go broke and go back to poverty because they were overly concentrated.

I have a very, a very dear client. who he began working for this startup. And early on, as part of this comp package, he was given options for this startup. Startup ended up doing very well. This is before he was a client. Startup ended up doing very well. He ended up with those options being valued at over $5 million.

But he was like, man, this thing is going to go to the moon. This is only the beginning. This is only the beginning. And he held them a year or two later company ended up tanking, ultimately went out of business. Options expired worthless. So we went from $5 million with office. options to worthless. And he recognized that's, he hired us after all this happened. He recognized

that, man, I'm never going to do that again. I recognize it even though I had won the game. Had I begun to diversify, had I begun to liquidate, I would be at the financial independence point. But because I didn't do that, now I've got to start. I've got to go retrace that. So even like with the client in invidia, if you would have left it all in invidia, yeah, he'd be 20x 30x right now. But if it didn't work out, he would not be financially independent. Whereas now he's still, that balance of fear and greed. That's right. The fear and greed is a legitimate thing that humans struggle with immensely. So that was kind of alluding to what I said early in the conversation. It's like at what point would you say the law of diminishing return really hits?

You said $5 million. Would you say that's about winning the game after that amount you really shouldn't like? It depends on, it depends on. So we have clients who are financially independent, who live and who do everything they want to do the way they want to do it and they have less than a million dollars invested because that's where their lifestyle is. Think about teachers. Think about people with pensions. I mean, you don't have to. to have a huge portfolio and have an incredible life.

But then there's other people that they just spend a lot of money. I mean, I know. We have clients who have $10 million with us who are not yet financially independent and are not close based on the lifestyle that they want to live. So it's very much subjective and is very much personal for that person. So what we try to figure out with our clients is, okay, what's the standard of living that you want to live? Like when you think about financial independence and where you want to be, what standard is

that? Is that 15 a month, 20 a month, 10 a month? What's that number? okay, then once we get to that number, what we're beginning to approach that number, we kind of lock in, okay, at this point, there's no point in taking excessive risk

that could potentially derail the plan and us not be successful. What would you guys say is your kind of number that you want to hit in monthly income if you're fine saying it? You're talking about for us personally? For us personally, yeah.

Is there like an amount that you'd feel comfortable with? We're building more, not so much in the pursuit of financial independence, we're building because of the impact we're able to have both through the show as well as through our employees, you know, and it used to be there were three of us, right? There was, you know, the us too, and there was an admin, and now we have 40 folks and eventually we'll probably have 100 folks. It's really fun. You already alluded to this,

getting to see our people buy houses, start families, advance in their careers. So for us, that's more of the motivating factor now and being able to help more clients and more people to the show than like personal financial independence. I don't know. sharing that I don't have to work anymore. I mean, I'm kind of at the point where, I mean, I've paid off most of the debts. I've got everything on a good place. But I think about the fact of how much joy I get from life from my people. I come in here, but everybody knows I'm the vortex of Slack, meaning that when I show up in your office and I talk to you, productivity just goes to the tank. I mean, I just love walking around talking to the folks here.

I love watching, like I said, when people get married, when they have babies, when they're by houses. There's something really good about that. And how often do you hear about, I mean, what was it? All over my social media feed is this thing. I don't even know if it's true, but the guy who invented Minecraft and he got the billions of dollars. And now he's, you know, he supposedly went through some depression because he got two and a half billion dollars and then didn't have the thing that brought him so much happiness. Money is only a tool.

And that's one I always, I try to. And I think that's why we're good shepherds or good stewards for people is that when people think that the number is going to be what makes them fulfilled, I've always. always there to be the counterbalance and be like, I think you really need to focus on what you actually get value out of in life, what's happiness? Because if you're just doing it for the number, I can tell you once you reach that number, if that's all it was, you will find it's very empty. And I don't mean to make light of that, but it's one of those things where for me, the enterprise of watching to see what we can create and the impact we're having gives me more fulfillment than beyond the dollar signs at this point.

How do you feel about the future of the U.S. economy? I mean, it's back to that law of accelerating returns. I really do believe, as long as we don't create something that destroys us all, there's going to be opportunities. Because everything I've ever experienced in life is that the pot's not getting smaller. It's actually expanding. I mean, that's why it's not a zero-sum game. There's actually opportunities out there. I mean, 20 years ago, 20 years ago, there wasn't an iPhone or an iPad.

And think about now, there are like a billion-dollar businesses that are running. run off of iPads or that are run off of iPhones. 10 years ago, artificial intelligence was not what it was now. Three years ago, AI wasn't what it was now. So it's just, it's moving so rapidly. I think that there's going to be a lot of opportunity. I mean, yeah, the world is getting smaller. Now, you know, it used to, the way that we're able to interact in a global economy

and transact with other people and other individuals and other businesses all across the world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and easier. But I still think the U.S. economy has bright days ahead of it. I think, I mean, one of my favorite. Hobbies is reading Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholders. You know, it's going to be sad whenever we don't get those anymore. But I'm like Uncle Warren. I mean, don't bet against America.

I mean, if you look at all the things that have happened over the last 20 years, it is amazing the resilience. And then the V-shaped recoveries and the opportunities that have come from that. Now, what do you think about government spending? Do you think local news is in decline across Canada. And this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors. and misinformation fill the void,

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Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my out of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth Advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center.

Find your advisor at IGPrivatewealth.com. Think that we're on this unsustainable path where there's really no turning back. Well, I mean, I come from a unique perspective. was actually worked in government too. I mean, because there was a period of time where I was a school board chairman and then I was a county commissioner.

And so I see how you have to be careful with government is because government is powered by the taxes. And property for when I was a county commissioner, it was the property taxes. And there was always this thing where expansion was, I would love to do more parks and more things, but what people never understood. And this is something I had to explain

with the accounting background is we go set up this park. It's going to be great. But then now somebody's got to cut the grass on this park. Now we've got to put four employees that are going to be full time there to kind of be at the park at all times. There's great cost to this. Yes, now we have to just weigh to make sure that we have the tax revenue and we have the ability to fund all this versus the fun thing is to go put a park and then name it after yourself and feel all really good. But I want things to be sustainable. And so there's an equal balance.

Their government is very important to the economy. We need to have guardrails. We need to have, you know, to make sure that the game is fair to make sure people's rights are protected. But there is a balance there. And the good news is, as everybody knows, the Money Guy showed doesn't do politics and we don't do religion. Now, unfortunately, because tax policy is a very political process, but it's also a very financial process. We do have to cover tax policy, but we always try to stay true. So no matter what your political affiliation is, you can watch our thoughts because we're going to try to back.

out that take so that you once again get the balance of how much government do we need versus how much growth or the economy so that this thing stays healthy. And what about when it comes to real estate right now? Do you think today is a bad time to buy a house? I think it's really, really hard to buy a house. Now, when it comes to house, primary residence, we think that that's more of a life decision than a financial decision. Should you buy a home right now? Well, is it part of the plan and part of your financial goals? Are you trying to establish roots? Are you trying to start a family? Is it something that you're it's going to be part of your longer term plan, well, then yeah, by all means, go out and buy a primary

residence, but it's difficult. House prices have kind of run away from you. Interest rates are super high. It's really, really difficult to be able to do that. So I would approach it less from, is it a sound financial decision? Is it one of my top financial goals? Now, from an investing standpoint, again, I think it's really, really hard because if you look back four or five years ago, prices were much more muted than they were now across residential, commercial, all types of real estate, and interest rates were a lot lower. So it was a lot easier to, quote, unquote, make money a few years ago. That doesn't mean that there aren't still opportunities to buy real estate. I mean, we bought a commercial property here recently, but it happened because we had a really good opportunity at a really good price, and we had the capital to be able to do that. So I think for folks who are in that position, they can, it's just a harder path than it has been a story. Tom is your friend, though. This is not, if it's, if it's, if it's a lot, if it's, a three-year decision, you know, a few, because one of the things I had a really smart attorney come visit us, and he was asking for career advice. I was like, go find who does what you want to get into because it was a very specialized part of law. I was like, and go let them mentor you.

And he's like, well, that's, I just bought, I'm house hacking. I just bought, I was like, you know, you know, maybe, because I love house hacking. It is one of my favorite things. I know that's one of your, part of your success story, too, but you can probably even admit that somebody who's like in a very specialized. thing like a specialty of a in a law, that's probably the earning power is going to outweigh the house hacking benefits. So I always tell people if you're making a decision, if you know you're going to move in the next three or four years, that's probably not going to be as easy for buying a house. But if you're 10 years and you've got kids and you're trying to set down roots, I think that

spreading out that timeline or if you know you're going to be in the property, we'll smooth out that purchase price. I could be totally wrong here and feel free to push back on this. But my recent hot take when it comes to real estate is that it's going to be the new like college in a sense that we're going to look back 30 years from now and say, I wish I didn't buy a house. And I think a lot of people now are realizing that they didn't need a college degree to get the job that they wanted, but now they're saddled with like $50,000 of student loans. I could see there being a case in the future that people are saddled with these mortgages and these overheads and these expenses that they never needed when rents right now are.

pretty attractive compared to buying and you don't need to buy a house when you could be as mobile as you can be today. I agree with you on the economic sense, but you don't, you didn't realize probably that you're talking to two guys from South Atlanta. So we didn't even know you can make money on real estate until we moved to the state of Tennessee because I mean, my first house that when I sold moving up here, I basically pre all the prepayment I made was to pay all the negative equity because we lost so much money on the move. Um, is, But I still look back. I'm glad we lived in that neighborhood because my kids made memories with a lot of the neighbors.

And, you know, and I still go on annual trips with a lot of those neighbors. So community was very valuable. Now, if this was such a big financial transaction that it derailed my entire life, that's one thing. But I think there are some benefits to homeownership outside of just the financials. Well, could you say the same about college, though, that there are benefits to going to college and socializing and, you know, figuring out what you want to do. It's the same rules, though, as long as it doesn't blow up the corpus of what you're trying to do. And a lot of people, and that's why we always give the guidance on, like, student loans if you're transition, if you're talking about that. Don't run up more student loan debt than you're going to making your first year salary because how many people are out there running up $100,000 a debt in there, and they're in these majors that they'll be lucky if they make $50,000 coming out of school.

But then I think it comes down to just being intentional about it. And I worry that a lot of people now have been told that buying a house. house is what you need to do. That's where the problem is. I do agree. Yeah. I think your analogy holds. And I think it's a great analogy that there are a lot of people that went and got a college degree and that college degree was incredibly valuable. You know, I went and got a college degree in financial planning and it's worked out swimmingly well for me throughout life. So by all means, it was the right decision. But if you're someone who went out and got a college degree that was way too expensive in a field that you do not work in was not the most prudent, pragmatic decision.

It's no different than someone who goes out, okay, I'm going to buy my first home. simply because I want to be in a home and it's more than I can afford and it doesn't make sense for me, then yeah, they probably are going to look at it the same way. But there are going to be a lot of people said, man, I wanted to go buy that first home and I got in the home and I started a family or I set up roots and I established that. I was there for seven, eight, ten years and I built equity in that house and I was able to sell that house and go to the next house. I think that that's still going to work, but I agree with you completely. The idea that you have to buy a house to be financially independent or that it must be part of your financial plan, I think that's completely wrong. Just like I

think the idea that you have to go to college is completely wrong. I think there's a lot of folks who do not need to go to college and are not going to need to go to college to be able to have tons of success in life. You said taking an active role. What was the way you termed it, Graham? You just said intentional. Intentional. Intentionality. Because let me tell you this, I'm talking about education. If you look at the percentage of people who work in their field of study, we found, if you just go look at the population of student loans and others, 72 percent of people come out of college not working in their field of study. We survey our millionaire clients every year because we create content off of it. And you can't make up how close this stat came up.

73% of our clients work in their field of study. That's intentionality, the definition of intentionality. So that's why I think it's the same thing with the house. Do the math. And you have to weigh, and that's what personal finance is personal, is that, yes, there's going to be an economic and a math side of an analytical side, but there's also going to be the decisions of what's best for your family. What's also interesting is that when you look at college tuitions, they've risen alongside government subsidies. Oh, yeah. And when the government is providing all of this money, colleges figure out, well, I'll just charge more.

I'm just going to charge more. But a similar thing to a certain degree is happening with housing. When you see FHA loan limits increase and all of a sudden you put zero to three and a half percent down and the government's willing to give you $800,000. Well, what do you think the seller is going to charge? They're going to charge what they can get. And I'm not saying the appraisals always come in at whatever. It's exactly the thing. Now, for the appraisals, it's technically that's the market value of the house within a certain degree because

that's what's all in. You know, your appraisal come back other than $1,000 of the sale price? Great recession you did, but every other deal I've ever dealt with. Yeah, for the most part, you're always within a few percent. Right there, spot on. But I agree with you. It is a problem. And that's why, and for most people, the single largest financial decision they will ever make is purchasing

a home. Like it's the largest thing that they will ever spend money on. So you better make sure you're making it right. And you're being wise about that. And you're only doing it if it actually makes sense. I'm just starting to see all these stories crop up, especially on Reddit, of people saying buying a house was one of my worst financial decisions. And we did everything correct. We went and we were told buying a house.

We got a house. We saved for a down payment. But we're underwater from what it's worth. They're in Austin and values have dropped 25%. And they had to come out of pocket, 70. grant and they're asking, what can we do? Because I don't have the money to sell the house. And it's not going to cash flow if I rent. And I'm stuck here. That's right. And the common advice is just, well, you either have to take on a job to pay for the, you know, a second job to pay for

the house or rent out rooms. Or prepay the negative equity. Believe me like I did coming out of South Atlanta. But I think that story is going to be a lot more common. And we were even talking to someone recently who believes that housing prices are going to come down so much because of artificial intelligence and from robots being able to build a property at scale really cheap and really quick. You're going to be able to automate the entire price. But how far away from that do you think? 10, 15 years. I think so. But when you think it's going to be the expensive thing. Yeah, but but, but the cost of land could also be cheap because you don't need to be physically in an area anymore to make a ton of money. Like I could I, I, I, I, we could theoretically do this anywhere anywhere in the world. Like,

it helps to be in person. We've always said, look at your house as a use asset. That's why when people build their net worth and always, we even caution people, if you're, if you're, if you're have a seven figure net worth, but it's all in your home equity. Do you really have? Because you can't eat that house in retirement. So that's why, I mean, we're highlighting the point that yes, I think home ownership can still have an element in there, but it doesn't need to be the economic driver of your success financially. I'm seeing it now, almost like a good collectible car, like buying a house where you might make some money off it. And if you do, it's going to be probably alongside inflation. But that there's also a chance that might be going down in value for the next 10 to 20 years.

He says all of this while he looks at me. He's like, buy the house, Jack. Right before we even turn the cameras on, he was telling us about your new place. We completely forgot about the strongest leading indicator of a bad housing market is Jack buying. But it's funny. But in Jack's case, it makes it because he's able to buy this property for business use. And, you know, with the podcast and everything, take bonus depreciation. And his savings, as long as the market doesn't drop 30% or more, his savings are going to outpace any potential downside in the housing market.

So I see this. And it is a use asset. There's a lot of values of that. So I would see this is asymmetrical. upside where yes, the downside is there, but the upside is so much greater than the potential loss. So I see that is a good. I don't disagree with your premise, except for the fact that, okay, am I not going to make any money for 10, 12, 50? Because I do those things, even if we were to see some reduction in home prices, like what you've seen in Austin, by and large, real estate,

homes are likely going to keep up with inflation. They may not make a ton, but they're going to likely keep up with inflation, two and a half, three percent. So if you have a long enough time horizon and you can be in the house. You know, we say we want you to be in house for seven to eight years, but maybe because of where prices have gone, you might have to be in the house for 10, 12, 15 years.

I don't think it's always going to be a loss. It's going to be something where you always aren't going to be able to get your money out. I think when you account for 7% mortgage rates, 1% property tax, another 2% between insurance repairs. But surely we don't think mortgage rates are going to stay at 7, right? Like, we're going to see some reprieve on that at some point.

Now, hopefully what happens is the house doesn't take in value and you can't refinance. you have some sort of optionality there, if you've been paying, you know, and again, if you kept your house in the affordability range, you had an appropriate down payment, you inoculate yourself from some of that. But there are likely going to be things down the road that if you are in a home, you're going to have opportunities so that it can become more and more affordable as you live in the home. And ultimately, again, maybe it's not going to make you a ton of money, but you're not going to likely lose money over the long, long time. I like to bring it back to the historical location, location, location, because, I mean, it's one of the reasons we wanted to own this building. is that I couldn't believe they even let us have access to buy this building because it's right in the middle of the square. It's a beautiful location. I mean, so no matter what happens, it's it's a good spot to be. It is like the fifth avenue of Franklin, Tennessee.

I mean, this is going to be very valuable property. And that's what I would tell anybody, because I made the mistake when I bought my first two homes in South Atlanta is I remember I was working in Marietta, Georgia. If anybody knows anything about the city of Atlanta, Marietta is here. and then I bought my first house in Stockbridge, Georgia, which was outside the perimeter, South Atlanta. And the reason I did was it's so affordable. And I was like, you know, that 40-minute commute, that won't be that bad.

I can handle it because I'm getting such a great deal on the property. No, that's horrible because the location was not great. I ended up. And then I doubled down. I started my first business down in Laucas, McDonough, Georgia. And I bought another house. And that's the thing is that the location does matter. And I think that that's something that,

Everybody should think about, I mean, we've seen here in Williamson County, Tennessee, now beautiful homes are getting torn down because the land is worth, you know, if you've got an acre property or three quarters of an acre property, people will pay over a million dollars just to tear your house down and then put a brand new thing. So the land does have some value. So I would just tell people to focus on where and then the functionality of the use. I mean, because are you getting then don't, don't bet the farm literally on the farm. If that's not how you make your living.

Because I think that's a problem. A lot of people who have, we've seen it with the Fred data. The Federal Reserve data comes that the only way Americans are growing their net worth right now is through the equity in their house, which that's, we're trying to get people to get outside of that and build up wealth and value outside of their equity and their homes. How much of all the gain that we've seen, though, is simply because of loose monetary policy. And I do see an argument that ever since the 80s, that they've started really lowering interest rates. everything has slowly gotten more expensive. They've printed more money. And that's somewhat the reason why the market's gone up consistently for the last four years. And we're not the only, America is not the only country that is, all the central banks have gotten with this loose money.

And that's what we're all kind of interconnected in this, this strange game that we're doing. And that's what, you know, it scares you if you start thinking about, I mean, I was, look, I don't mind being transparent. And Bo knows what I'm going to say. Because it's good. I was wondering how long is it going to take for this to come for their story. Where to come up. First election I ever voted in, I voted for Ross Perrault. The reason I vote for Ross Perrault was because, what was that, 1996, 1996.

That was George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot was out there every day telling everybody, our country is in debt for $6 trillion. And we are straddling our children with the debt of our country. And I remember thinking, oh, my gosh, I don't come from any money, but I don't want the debt of, you know, my parents and grandparents straddling me at $6 trillion. And then here we are. Decades later, he wasn't wrong, by the way. I mean, now look at our, where's the, where's our debt now?

Aren't we getting close to $47? Yeah, we're getting close to $40 trillion. It'll get $50 trillion in 10 years. In my lifetime, we were, all the hundreds of years this country's existed, we got up to $6 trillion in 1996. And now think about where we are. We've gotten way too comfortable with debt. I mean, that's concerning when you think about just in my lifetime what's happened. Yeah, we've only ever had one surplus year in the last 30.

Yeah, it was. I remember the clock, they cut the clock off. That was, I mean, they cut the debt clock off. And it was just like a little bit where they just didn't lose money. And actually encouraged them to go spend more. And by the way, that's bipartisan. Both parties have spent money. It's equal.

It's not one. It's not like one is a hawk on the budget and the other one. When's not, they equal opportunity on running up the debt of the country. So is there any solution or is it we just have to hope that if you were financially advising, let's just say the treasury. It goes back to your original question. What happened? It created inflationary pressure.

So, I mean, what do you do to protect yourself from inflation? You own stuff. I mean, that is the cruelty of the system. This is something I caught on at a young age is I realize, hey, because I grew up in a household, My parents were the most disciplined people in the world. We just didn't have more love than money, but they never invested. CDs was what my parents did. You don't really own anything if all you're doing is CDs.

You've got to start buying stuff so that you can curb some of these risks. That then lead over time to a huge disparity between the haves and the haves. That is what's happening. That's exactly what's it. But an artificial intelligence doesn't make this even worse. But over 30 years on that trajectory, you're going to have either really, really, really, really, wealthy people or really, really, really, poor people. Well, that's

what is going on. And then there's an uprising. But even my understanding is the have-nots also technically are living much better than the have like 50 years ago. Oh, for sure. Because a lot of the standard of living is increased. I mean, even technology on construction.

Like, televisions and technology like that. I mean, if you go look at any house built back when I was a kid, I mean, you didn't have open floor planets because they needed to be load-bearing Now we've got, you know, structured support where you can. I mean, there's things. I mean, and Costa construction's gone down.

There's all kind of things where I agree that. And that's what I'm reading some, you know, some stuff right now is that somebody who has, now look, you've got to be able to survive. And then that's the part where you see all these happiness studies. And, you know, and I know it's the whole talk about it's $75,000 a year of that or $100,000. You know, there's all that research on what's the level of happiness. But there's something once you cover the ability to pay. pay bills. There's not much different from somebody who's got a few hundred thousand dollars

in that worth to somebody who's got a few million dollars in that worth on what they can do because you're covering the basics. I just think eventually 30 years from now we're going to be hooked up to some sort of electrodes and there's going to be some sort of like, you know, like gelatin that you just eat that has all your nutrients and you don't need that much money. You're just the matrix. This is a great movie with Keanu Reeves. I could see that being a thing and you just plug in to your whatever you know you basically could whatever reality you're yeah I'm so glad I'm the age I am I mean when I hear stuff like this this is when I'm glad that I have one foot in the analog world and then one foot in the digital world how do you know you're not in uh did

you know a whole digital yeah now you could be you could be right now and not know it because it's that good and I think if we get to a point in the future where you have people they could basically just live whatever life they want to make sense I bet a lot of people would take it. It's interesting. It's an interesting thought exercise. But what I do know is right now, right? We got to invest in the best.

I have. Somebody will make money off of that structure. A hundred percent. And that's why if you just buy the S&P, you'll be part of that. But then you don't even need money at that point, because as long as you have the $100 a month to plug into your reality and play the video game. But so while that could happen, right, like that's certainly a viable outcome. And I'm not to, who am I to say that it's not a viable outcome?

if it doesn't happen, I probably want to do things today. They're going to set me up probably going to eat my vegetables. I'm probably going to exercise. I'm probably going to save. I'm probably going to do all these things until I get the gelatin and the hookup so that if it doesn't happen, I'm still going to be in a good spot. Even if I'm a brand new young person starting out, I'm going to figure out, okay, how can I increase my income through my vocation? How can I live on less than I make? How can I save it for a down payment?

How can I get in that starter home? How can I house hack? How can I get on the other side of the equation so that I can start. benefiting for some of the crazy stuff that's going on. Would you want the hookups? No. I would want to do a trial. I would try it out and see just how great this thing is.

Have you ever had a cast on your foot? A what? A cast on your foot, like injured yourself. No. Do you realize how fast you lose your ability to walk once you put on it? Because your muscles and everything. I mean, it atrophies very quickly. So I would be scared.

Oh, no. I'm not signing up for that. Here's the thing. In a dream you can live like, you know, years. You could live like so much. longer than the actual time that's elapsed in real life. And so you could probably say the same thing. It's like you tune in for two seconds, but then you live 20 years. I want to be honest, guys, I don't think I'd do it. And here's why. Life is pretty good. I'm kind of enjoying this spin right now.

I don't need some dream reality. I think things are pretty good. But what if you had a mega yacht? That'd be cool, but a mega yacht and a John boat, you're still floating on the water, sun still comes up, sun still goes down. But it would be so good that it could give you the right amount of a challenge the right amount of push pull. No. I mean, that's why I don't know if I want a mega yacht either. Because I always think about the things. Have you not seen that Netflix?

What is it? The cruise ship that broke down and they couldn't get off of it. What happened? They were stranded at ocean, in the ocean for how, I don't know how long. Well, you would think that when a cruise ship breaks down that they would probably pull up another boat to let all the people off? No, they dragged it from me. They dragged it for four days.

So these people, I mean. And it filled up the. Well, Plumbing wasn't working. They couldn't evacuate. None of that stuff was going on. I don't know that I want to, yeah. It's a lot of main news.

I'm just saying that you could have your own in this, you know, fantasy world that we're talking about. It doesn't back up. Yeah, because that doesn't back up. You don't even use a restroom in this fantasy world. When you look in the mirror and you flexing the, you see a stronger bicep peak that your genetics won't allow for right now. You could have everything you've ever wanted. No doctor's on call that you have the, I don't know. I just, I'm not signing up there.

I would rather build the life today that's the life one day I dream about. You know what I mean? I'd rather do those things. No, I agree. with you, yeah, because in a perfect life, then you don't have anything bad to compare to, so you're probably going to be less happy. I'm just pretty grateful. Life has turned out.

That's the key. It started out. Oh, man, I would have never guessed that the end, that where I'm at now would be where I started. Ah, I'm pretty happy about it. I mean, to be the old man in the room, I do think it's interesting. We have all this technology, but yet loneliness is probably at the highest levels it's ever been.

When you look at national surveys on people that feel separated and lonely, I get nervous about things like that. because I think human connection, and it's back to, I'll bring it back full circle to kind of some of our conversations. I think at the end of the day, even when the AI and everything gets better, there is something about the human connection. I mean,

I will tell you, one of the greatest gifts I got from a, like, I'm trying to remember why my wife gave it to me, but she knows I'm a big Hans Zimmer soundtrack thing, and they did this candlelight service up in Nashville at the Parthenon. They did it at the Parthenon. And there is something about the human condition that when you hear live music and you're there with other people, it touches something that is outside of you that I don't think the simulator can do.

And I've experienced that when in college, I got asked to go to a concert for a singer that I just had no interest in seeing, but seeing this person in real life perform and play this instrument and then sing, I left a fan. And I think that it's that X factor that makes us humans different, that that's why I want to talk to my doctor. That's why I think successful people are going to want to talk to us is because, yes, the box can probably give you an answer, but there's going to be something in the human condition that wants more. I feel that in my soul, and I think that that's probably the answer, is that, and that's why we can get all this free stuff. The machines still need our soul. They need our humanity. and we ought to really think long and hard about what that is. I love that.

Yeah. I like these discussions because for me, for me, it's the banter that Jack and I have back and forth. Yeah, what if this and what if this, would you do that or how much? Like,

how much? I got to tell you, a little part of me was getting sadder and sadder hearing some of those things because it just, I don't know, and I am a sentimental person at the stage. I've watched tons of hallmark movies. You know,

In the Hallmark movie, the dad walks in from work from a long day and the kids run up and jump on him. And as much as I love watching that, it pales in comparison. When I walk in my front door and my kids run up and jump and hugged it, I was just never going to be able to replace that. You know what I mean? No matter, I don't care how good the simulation is. There's something real, real awesome about that. So I'm going to enjoy that for as long as I can before I plug in. I know we're probably coming closing on some of the time of things.

But I did want to bring it full circle back to operations. And I know a lot of people are feeling like the system stacked against them or whatever. But I did a stat that comes up every year. And by the way, this isn't, we're not the first ones to talk about this stat. I think about millionaire next door. 80 percent, millionaire next door when Dr. Thomas Stanley and Danko did that. It was like 80 percent of millionaires are first generation. You're like, wow, that's an interesting stat.

Because I remember when the high school teacher told me about the $100 a month could make me a millionaire, that's kind of what lit the fire. And then Dave Ramsey has his survey of millionaire. and he's right around there. I think it's like 79% of millionaires are first generation without inheritances. We survey our millionaire clans. It comes consistently in the high 70s

every year that less than $10,000 of inheritance, it's all first generation. And that gets me excited, and people should be optimistic of opportunity because also, I'll bring it back full circle in addition, for that stat to be true, second generation has to squander, third generation. And we know that stat's true, too. Second generation, 70% of the time,

they squander the money. If you're born into money, there's a, you know, you're a good chance you go squander it in second generation. By third generation, that stat goes up to 90%. So if you're somebody who feels like the system is rigged against you, there's a natural cleansing process that's just happening. I just say, don't get caught up in the negativity. Figure out how to be an optimist, because that's the other thing. The majority of Americans, if you survey America, Perkins pessimist rule. The majority of people are pessimists. If you then survey to say, how many are successful people in it? You might say, well, this is because they're successful. They're optimist. And I think that that's always tell people don't get caught up in how bad things are.

I try to figure out if there's little small decisions that you can chisel out that actually create some positivity in your life. And I know that sounds so hokey, but I am in this this decade of my 50s where I'm sentimental and I'm just trying to get out as much information as possible because I see what's worked for me. And I don't like that. all the negativity that I see out there. I want people to actually experience and feel that they can do this. And yes, maybe it's real estate as the headwin, but that doesn't mean that that has to be what defines you. There's going to be other ways to make money and create success, too. We've got a few rapid fire questions just to wrap up the podcast. Our credit card points are trapped for broke people. Yes, for broke people, for people who know how to use credit card points and can do rewards, not a trap can be a hugely valuable tool. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly, I mean, I wouldn't let that be why you use a credit card is just for the points. But, I mean, as a person who's got over a million American Express points that I plan on using, yeah, I mean, I would be a hypocrite if I said that I don't pay attention to points.

Should people with a net worth of less than $100,000 be able to buy crypto? Yes, free market. Well, I mean, yes, but is that the, I mean, I still stand by the financial order of operations? Should they know, should they be able to? Cryptocurrency would probably be a step eight thing for people. And so there's a lot of one through seven. There's a purpose there. Is there ever a scenario where it makes sense to go into debt to invest in the stock market?

I don't like, I mean, no. I mean, I think about the fact that if you're starting a business, you'll run debt sometimes to start your venture. And that makes it risky as a whole. But to go buy the S&P 500 on margin or something like that, that's something that I would. not tell the typical person to go do. No, never a necessity. How many income streams is too many? Oh, that's...

It's no such thing. Because you can hire... We're the perfect case study and you can hire somebody when your life gets so complicated from all the different streams. Just if you've got resources, hire somebody to help you manage it so that you have more diversification

and more income. No such thing is too few or too many. Well, there can be two. I mean, you can be concentrated. No, income streams. If you have one income stream and you make like, you know, a million bucks a year, you're doing pretty good. If you have 100 income streams and then a million bucks a year, you're doing pretty good.

What's the most irresponsible thing you do with money? I just, I don't ask questions on how my spouse uses her, spends the money. I treat it all as one. You ask no questions. I mean, I'll let her do, we do whatever we want because I think that, you know, we've created this and I just, I don't, I just let it go. Would there be a certain, you know, point where you'd be like, oh, if she's buying crypto, maybe? I've been married 27 years. So it's not like there's any surprises. But if, you know, if there was an expensive designer purse or so, I don't, there's not, it's not like that stuff blows up the system anymore. So go, go have at it. So that's probably the most irresponsible because it's just, it's, it's just out there. We just did a large renovation on the back of our house and added a really nice pool. And it was very expensive. It was not economically just. Justifiable, but lifestyle justifiable. It's amazing. We're in every single.

How'd your answer is so much better than mine? That sounds so much better because now mine's, my wife's go see this and be like, why'd you say me? And that is not what I'm saying. I hope nobody mishears that and that doesn't come back. We heard it crystal. No, that is not what I'm saying that basically here's, let me try to, let me try to clean this up. We don't talk. We, you know, what is mine is hers and what is hers is mine. There's no, there's no limits on that. And that's, that's, that's, that's, can be seen as irresponsible, but I think it just shows commitment. Do you believe in the man paying for the first date? Yeah. Yes.

I mean, look, I'm at my age. If somebody might, I mean, yeah, for sure. I mean, I have a college-age daughter. And I should have asked. She was on a date this week, and I should have asked if he paid for her coffee. You should have asked that, you think. What would it tell you?

Well, just out of curiosity, because then he could give you the anecdote here. Well, here's what the young kids are doing these days. I don't know what the, I mean, it's always, because look, even though I was, I was poor. I was still trying to pay for, I paid for all my dates. But it's not a, would I pay for the first date? Absolutely. Is an absolute necessity? Not necessarily, but I think it's a great touch. I've been off the market for a long time, though.

I'll tell my son that when he goes on his first date, hey, you should pick up the bill, son. And what if she wants to split the check? Well, if she wants to, then that's fine. I mean, I would, again, I would encourage him, hey, don't, you know, try to do it. But if she says, hey, this would make me feel good and I want a value paying half of it, all right. That's okay. You don't have to, but that's okay. This is no different. Credit card or a firm and then. Hey, let me get this one. It's no different.

She's going into debt. You put out cash. There you go. I like, you know, you'll be out with a couple and maybe somebody picked up the rounds or something and you try to buy the mill. If you can tell that there's discomfort, you back away from that and you let them, you split the bill. And I think that's the way I was, if I was giving guidance to my son or daughter, I'd say, look, you know, yes, try to pay the bill. but if you can tell there's discomfort or the person doesn't appreciate

what you're trying to do because you're maybe breaking some feeling they have, then yeah, just split it. What are some things you're still surprisingly cheap on? You're asking, you should be asking my wife. She'd probably have a lot of, I don't like, I drink water at restaurants when my kids order. But when the kids order sweet teas or Cokes,

and I'm like, they're paying $4 for that, for some reason that that bothers me i'm trying to think of because my wife just recently says you're so cheap about some of the weirdest things and i'm trying to think of what she meant by that um do you know you're practically my daytime wife so uh what's some things i'm cheap on if he wants to buy some i'm actually going to answer if you wants to buy something online he can never just pay flat retail he always says to figure out is there a way that i can get some sort of deal is there i'm using a out is there something i can do i just and i'm like brian it doesn't matter it's 20 bucks just pay the 20 matter of fact pay them 25 bucks we're literally losing

money trying to wait for you to pay for this thing just let it go but he has to he has to always feel like the journey is half of the fun of the preparation and the thing i think that's why i'm a good planner is i love actually it's like vacation what's what's more fun the actual vacation or the preparation for the vacation so what's the most of time value you've ever lost spending like copious amount of time researching something to save a few dollars is there anything that you just think back on you're like okay that was too much. No, because I just keep repeating it. I mean, I'm researching dehumidifiers because it's so humid here. And I still haven't bought the one because I keep going and price shopping and trying to figure out what's the best way to do this. That's 50 bucks. Yeah, I mean, it is, you know,

so it's not worth it, but there's, that's what I would tell. We see this with our clients, too, by the way. There's a reason one of the biggest things we do as financial planners is it's not the Susie Ormond saying no to everything. We actually try to encourage our clients to unleash or release and actually enjoy what they've built because I'm guilty of this too is that you know you get caught in your ways because you're rewarded for all these decades for being tight

and there comes a point where you probably should to focus on the memories and what your money can do as a tool. So how do you use AI to get better deals? You can if you, I mean like if you want to like... He just got excited. No, if you want to, think about this.

Like my wife, we found a pair of shoes that I saw. They were like these Disney shoes that they did it. run Disney event. Well, you can't buy them anymore. The only thing you can do is buy them on Stockex or eBay and all these. You can go on AI and have it actually be the filter to start looking for all the different places that are selling it by the size. And then I've even looked, used AI for coupon codes. I've used it for coupon codes. I've even said, I've even asked it.

I've said, because some products are price controlled. You know, you know when you buy, I'm trying to think of something that is like a Sono speaker or something like that. You know that it's going to be no matter where you buy it. It's going to all. be the same price because I think that's how they're structured. But you can go on AI and say, hey, I know this product is price control, but who's offering like coupon codes or discounts or rebates or gift cards? And it's kind of good. It's really surprising at how you can use AI as a shopping agent. You can say also what's the cheapest way to buy this item. Oh, I know. I had a Patagonia rain jacket I was trying to buy. And I said, hey, this thing is the same price everywhere. And it said,

hey, go to RIA and here's some coupon codes. And I was like, hot dog. You know, so I ended up. And then when I logged in my, because I actually have it because an RIA down the street, when I logged in the account, I also had like $15 that was just sitting in the account from a previous purchase. So, yeah, you can use like that hack has worked on Vioria, if I were you saying that right.

Viori. Viori, yeah, whatever. I'm old. You know, all these brands that are price controlled, Patagonia and all these things, you can sometimes find sellers that didn't have coupon codes. And AI can help be your agent on that. Do you see how excited we get on little things? Do you think that moves the needle, but it does from an emotional standpoint?

It's just this is why we're good at what we do. Do you think that'll never change? No, it will never change for him. Never too. Even if I was in the jelly vortex that you're talking about, the Matrix. You'd program it the same way. I would be looking for a deal. I'd still spend like 30 minutes of your precious time.

I'd still be drinking water in the Matrix. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on the show. It's a really great conversation. Thank you to the team. Also, for helping out with this. Very nice of you all. Thank you very much.

And we'll link to all of your information down below in the description, by the way. I highly recommend check out the channel, subscribe, hit the like button, do all the things. Guys, we've had a blast. Thanks for having us along. Until next time. Until next time.