The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #17 — Jim Chuong (The Lazy Canadian Investor): Real Estate and ETF Investing

Episode Date: May 20, 2025

Our guest this week is Jim Chuong—better known online as “The Lazy Canadian Investor.” With over 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram, Jim has built a massive audience by breaking down investing concepts in a clear, no-BS way. In this episode, Dave and Jim cover a wide range of investing topics—from how Jim first got into real estate investing to whether it still makes sense today. They dig into Jim’s philosophy on using leverage, his take on individual stocks vs. ETFs, and why he prefers US-only investing over global diversification. Jim also shares what motivates him to create content and how he approaches simplifying complex financial ideas for everyday Canadians. If you’re curious about real estate, passive investing or just want to hear from someone who’s built a personal finance brand from scratch—this episode is packed with practical insights.    Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (00:55) Intro to Jim Chuong (01:44) How Jim Learned About Personal Finance (06:52) Jim’s Early Investing Approach (09:49) Getting Started with Real Estate Investing (15:54) Is Real Estate Investing Still Attractive Today? (20:34) The Toronto Real Estate Market (22:12) Is Crypto An Investment? (23:57) Jim’s Philosophy on Leverage and Investing (25:49) Canada is a Wonderful Country  (27:43) Parenting Teenagers (29:12) Why Does Jim Make Content Online? (33:15) US-Only Investing Versus Global Diversification (36:43) Investing in Individual Stocks vs. Broad-Market ETFs (39:56) Why Private-Market Investing Isn’t Well Suited for the Average Investor (42:05) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber and former dragon on Dragon's Den. Welcome to the Wealthy Barber podcast, where we'll be hosting some of the top minds in the world of personal finance. Yes, that's to balance me out. The podcast is about making the subject not just easy to understand, but dare I say, even fun, honest. Whether you're trying to fund your retirement, figure out how to build a down payment, save for your kids' education, manage debts,

whatever, we'll be here to help you do it. Before we jump in, a quick but important note. Nothing we discuss here should be taken as investment advice. We don't know you and your personal financial situation, so we're not here to tell you. We're specifically to put your investment dollars. We're here to educate, get you thinking, and we hope entertain. But please do your own research and or consult with your financial advisor before taking any action. Hey everybody, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber with the wealthy barber podcast. Excited

to be here today with Jim Chong. A little background for our audience, Jim is a finfluencer of epic proportions in Canada. There's no exaggeration in that word. He has a half a million-ish followers on TikTok and on Instagram, and he really hasn't been around doing this that long. I believe it started in 2021. We're dating ourselves here. Yeah, that's impressive. You've gained a huge following. You're an unusual deliverer of the content. You're very blunt. You've got your opinions and they're strong and you come across very directly to the audience. I think people like that. I think the fact that you don't pussyfoot around, etc. has helped you to gain a following, gain a lot of viewers, etc. So we're going to go through your core beliefs in a moment, but let's first

look at your background a little bit because it's an unusual one. You don't come from a financial education background. You weren't in the financial industry. These are probably positives, to be perfectly honest. Walk us through how you got started in all of this. First of all, thank you for having me on your podcast, David. Really appreciate it. And yeah, it was very unusual.

When I was growing up, I was born in the 70s, turning 53 this year. And when I was growing up, there was no information about finance, personal finance, as you might remember, we just went to school and I studied and I followed what my parents said, study hard, work hard, got a job. And I wanted to do better for myself. And I didn't know how it was done. And I asked my parents and they just said the same thing to study and go to school. And I said, I know from reading the newspaper that there are wealthy people.

Are they all doing what my parents are telling me? Are they like, you know, going to school, getting the best grades, going to college? Like, is that how they're doing it? And my parents said, yes, that's how they're doing it. You should follow the same method. And then I got a job as I think I was 14 years old. I was washing dishes at St.

Hubbard's, which was my favorite restaurant. So it was a dream job, dream job, but $4 and 25 cents an hour, because not only that was I getting paid at my dream job. Employees were allowed to buy a quarter chicken meal for two bucks. And I thought that was like, it doesn't get any better. Does not get any better it was the best and then as I was working and studying I was like how is it possible to make millions of dollars on four dollars an hour I couldn't connect the two dogs nothing it's not nothing at all that's

right so I asked my parents and they said, you'll get paid more later. Just trust us. And I said, if this path, like if all of us in this class, and this was the path, why are all the parents complaining about not having enough money? I don't understand. I go to the parties and people talk about food cost is too high. Shelter costs is too... If this is the path to financial independence, why are you guys complaining? You guys should be like, I followed the path and I have no problems. But that's not what I'm hearing.

I'm hearing like, I can't afford this gas is too expensive. And so I was like, there's something wrong. So I went to the personal finance section of a bookstore, which was really small at the time. I think it was called Chapters or Kohl's wasn't Kohl's yet. Kohl's and Smith's books. That's right. That's right.

And I looked through a bunch of books I didn't understand a thing. I was like this is written in English But I don't understand anything and I'm pretty good at reading like I read a lot But I'm reading this it's written in English because I can understand every third word But the sentences make no sense to me, right? And so I said this can't help me because if I can't understand it can't help me Then I bumped into a book that I actually could understand written by Peter Lynch. Peter Lynch wrote a book, One Up on Wall Street, Beating the Street, those two books. I was

like, this is understandable. I can understand what he's saying. And he's talking about stories and what he did and what he went through. And I immediately started consuming everything he wrote, listening to everything I could get on what he said. And then he would refer to Warren Buffett and he would say, this guy's the greatest investor. I said, this guy thinks he's great. He must be really good. So then I started looking for his writings, shareholder letters, anything I can piece

together at the time. And what I found was I said, this is how people become financially independent. It's not working for $4 an hour for a million hours. That's not how people do it. These guys are literally piggybacking off other people's businesses. They're not running the business. They're not managing the business. They're not financing the business.

They're literally just piggybacking off businesses. I said, that's so cheating. And I said, this is the secret right here. And I said- Well, a couple of things. So when you go back to those books, by the way, they've all stood the test of time. I reread Peter Lynch's books once every couple of years. I still enjoy them immensely three, four decades later.

But the problem when you talk about, okay, we're looking for passive income. You've got to harness the power of other people's businesses. You still have to have the initial capital to do that. You still have to have the monthly add-on capital to do that. Don't you have to work at least in the early years to give you cash flow to build up that needed money? A hundred percent. There's only two ways to make money.

You can sell something, product service. You can work for a salary. I tried sales. I was really bad, like really bad at selling. I don't know what it was. I didn't understand how good people sold. I was trying to parse their words and break it down. But as I was doing that, I said, I'll work at a job and then I'll just funnel off,

slice off some of my income to do the Peter Lynch Warren Buffett stuff. Right. Yeah. So that's pretty much it. Yeah. You have to start off somewhere. And if you're great at selling, great, do that. So the product or service doesn't have to be your own,

get the cashflow going and then do the investing. But if you're not good at that, like I wasn't because like I said, like you haven't seen me because I haven't sold anything. I couldn't sell anything. I'm like 53 and I started on the internet, like in my late forties cause I figured out how people did it, I'm like 53 and I started on the internet like in my late 40s because I figured out how people did it But I just basically sliced off larger portions of my income to invest when the opportunity arose So you're right and you basically have focused on ETFs the broad market averages primarily in the US We'll get back to that, but you've also done well

Investing in real estate and your focus has been for the most part state side, if I'm not mistaken, on the real estate. A couple things you've said in the past that I very much agree with and that is if you're going to invest in real estate, look for a landlord friendly area. And if you look at Ontario and BC right now, very challenging on that front with the Tenant Review Board taking so long for decisions to come down. You're seeing some tenants game the system, not all. Many are obviously handling themselves extremely well. But is that the reason you ended up going stateside?

You were looking for a more landlord friendly loss? That's a great question. And that's not exactly how it went through because when I was reading the Warren Buffett Charlie Munger article, they said, your goal is to manage your opportunity cost. You invest in the opportunity that has the greatest chance of a return despite asset class and assuming you understand the business. You understand the business and the opportunity cost is tilted one way, then that should tell you how you should invest.

So it wasn't like I said, I definitely need to go into real estate. What happened was I was investing in the stock market and I started with individual stocks because back in the 80s and 90s, there was actively managed funds at 4%, declining balance eight down to one. It was expensive, it wasn't very easy. There wasn't, you know, the internet, it was very tough.

So I started with individual stocks and I focused on asset, the balance sheet. Like what Peter Lynch did, just take apart the balance sheet. And if you remember in the seventies, the comment was, is cheaper to drill for oil on the New York stock exchange than it is to buy oil on the open market. Right. So I was like, this is a brilliant method of finding cash, real estate commodities that's cheaper on the balance sheet than it hits in real life. So I started there and then I was just doing that.

And then when John Bogle came into my life and started influencing, I said, I don't have to do all this work. I could just sort of get the broad market. I don't have to take this single stock risk or three stock risk. I can diversify across this. If the company doesn't do well, the index will remove it and it'll go on. So then I switched over, that was 2005-ish before the credit crisis. But then when the credit crisis hit, stocks went down a lot.

So the opportunity cost made sense to go into stocks, but then it recovered. In 2009, I don't know if you remember, but it just all of a sudden just shot straight up and then the March of 2009 It started the turn and was quite stunning I think when we got capital out there so cheaply through the different central banks that spurred The equity markets on to levels none of us anticipated happening that quickly and so yeah remember it all extremely well So very quickly it became that quickly. And so yeah, I remember it all extremely well. So very quickly, it became not attractive, right, to keep

investing there. But the real estate market at that time, was the worst real estate market in America for 100 years, and it was still collapsing. And I was having lunch with one of my friends who works in the banking industry on Bay Street, we're just having lunch very casually. And he said, you know, my parents are looking for a retirement home. Now that they're getting older, like some place to retire to Snowbird. And they're looking down South and things are, we're seeing condos for 20 grand. I'm like, you are lying to me. Oh, he's not serious.

He's like, you are so lying, but it was a very offhand comment. I asked a few more questions about where they're looking and stuff like that. And I've been studying real estate for 20 years, but I didn't get in because again, the opportunity costs have made no sense to go there. And also the landlord laws that you mentioned. And then I said, I'm going to check it out. So I just started calling real estate agents in America. I started looking online, reading stuff about foreclosure short sale, just

studying, like I was up until four or five in the morning, just consuming and calling people. And it's great because if you call at two in the morning, someone in Arizona is going to pick up because it's only like 11 and I'm brief for deals because they're getting no deals. And they'll talk to you. It's really weird. Like back in the nineties, you can pick up the phone and get the CEO and the CFO. Like I was absolutely, it was crazy.

I didn't understand. And then I looked through it and I first said, I'm actually, I'm actually seeing $20,000 homes, like the price of a car is a home. And then I thought there must be a catcher. There must be, it must be in a bad area, crime region area, or something. There must be something wrong. So then I went to every city has information on their crime statistics, property and violent. I went through all these cities, I looked at their crime data, went through their crime data

and I started looking at zip codes where it was clean, relatively interesting, not much crime. And then I overlaid the zip codes with the cheap real estate. And I said, there's no correlation here. There's actually cheap real estate in really nice golf course area, upper middle class neighborhoods. It makes no sense. And the real estate agent is trying to explain to me, is me So you don't understand how much debt we went into like right

So these are all for sales of some to some extent either a foreclosure or something along that line And but even then I'm surprised you got them that cheaply it makes sense to me They'd be way down but not to 20 and 30 and 40,000 a unit. That's that's hard to believe Yeah, it's it was it's hard to imagine because I think a lot of, and I was talking to my friends who are Canadian and they were blind to what was happening in America. I would see banks going under, like there was a tracker online

that tracked the number of banks that were going insolvent on a day-to-day basis. And they had all these real estate owned properties that they were just taking back. They just couldn't get rid of it. There's probably one guy at the desk trying to get rid of 10,000 units. And so the prices were in a range. So one bedroom, one bathroom condo in a nice area would be around 20, 25 grand.

Two bedroom, two bath condo in a nice area would be 35 to 45 grand. If you wanted a detached home in a nice area, a nice suburban area, it would cost roughly 50 to 60 grand for a detached home. And of course, for the viewers who don't know real estate that well, the price per square foot of rent that you can get for a one bedroom is mathematically better than a detached home, but a detached home is a lot easier to rent out. So there's a balance there. Right. You can get a whole bunch of supposedly high yielding single one bed, one bath, but you

might not be able to find tenants as quickly when you need to. So I focus on the middle, two bed, two bath and higher to detached homes. And the math penciled out and the dollar was at parity. Yeah, the dollar was a car. That was a huge tailwind as well. The prices had come down 70%. I mean, nationally it was around 30, 35, but in some Sunbelt areas, 60, 70, 80% discounts, parity on the currency. And then I looked at the stock market, which was much more expensive on an earning yield

basis. And I said, this operating yield is far and above, like just based on cashflow alone. This assumes that the properties did not appreciate at all. Based on cashflow alone, it yielded better than a passive index ETF. So that was a no-brainer. I said appreciation would be a bonus if it actually appreciated. And the dollar, if it stayed at parity, if it does not stay at parity, it's a deal. So I had a lot of tailwinds that made me feel that there was a margin of safety there.

And were you buying primarily down in the Arizonas and the Floridas of the world? And were you doing your own property management? I would hope not from afar. You were obviously spinning off such good cash flow. You could bring in an outside property manager. Yeah, I spent most of my time screening property management companies. Once I found one stuck with that. I avoided Florida.

At that time, I don't know if you recall, there was a whole Chinese wallboard issue and then a whole bunch of like shoddy construction. And also number two in terms of the rules, I follow landlord friendly, right? And then number two was the biggest problem with any physical structure is water. Water will cause most of your problems, whether it's a leak, a rainstorm, flooding, any of that. The desert was perfect. It's a desert. That's actually very unsophisticated, but very accurate. Water does cause most of the problems. I think people should think that through more often than they do. I had issues

this year with water in my house, with all the snow, etc. So no, that's well thought through. Now, obviously you couldn't have picked a better spot. Arizona boomed in the subsequent years. You had the currency fall dramatically. It's worked out wonderfully well. Are you still looking at these types of opportunities or have the new price ranges made them not so attractive anymore? That's a good question. And you're right. The stock market bottomed around 2009 before it shot up. What happened with real estate, it continued to go down and it bottomed around the beginning of 212. And then unevenly started to ratchet up.

So as Arizona became not attractive, I moved to Tennessee where the prices were, where the prices and the numbers still made sense relative to the stock market continued there for a couple more years before that again also recovered and then once that was taken out of my hands then it was back to my normal routine. That's interesting so you walked away from real estate at that point didn't feel it offered you the same value proposition that it did those markets did you keep the properties you purchased though? Have you held those throughout the years? You must be earning

great positive cash flow on them obviously with those low purchase prices. Yeah, the low purchase prices for those who are not involved in real estate so the initial purchase price is going to be the highest earnings yield or operating yield that you're going to get because you know your purchase price is so low. But as things appreciate everything is associated with the assessment value of the property, right? You're talking about the taxes the insurance all the costs go up Regularly and then as the appreciation goes higher you have all this built-in equity So then the rent does not grow that as fast quickly, right?

It's not this is another negative of real estate is that unlike a business where you can add a new product line go into new geography and increase your revenue rents pretty much grow at a very predictable rate outside of the bottom of the credit crisis so your revenue is not gonna double or triple or a 30% maybe in the first few years it'll just go up by maybe a bit better than inflation. And then your costs will catch up. And then on top, as the equity grows, the yield on that equity becomes like worth less.

Not enough for me to sell, but yeah, it's good cashflow in general, but relative to the equity employed, I'm waiting for again, the better opportunity costs. Now, when you look at the Florida market right now you didn't get involved in the Florida market but we're seeing some real cracks down there. So many things have come to be there hugely expensive real estate property taxes, home insurance, the hurricane threat, the traffic issues, global warming has led to hotter summers and so on and so forth. A lot of things have come together simultaneously and we're seeing some pockets in that market fall 15, 20 and 25%.

Do prices get down low enough there to ever tempt you or is that still a marketplace that is not something that appeals to you? Yeah, that's a really good question. I have noticed that and I did go to Florida for 15, 20 years ago when things were, when I was shopping. And again, the water, the issue of the water was really tough and I just couldn't get over that. I just didn't want to deal that as someone who's remote thousands of miles

away, so the last thing I wanted to deal with is a water issue, which has come to pass now 15 years later. And I'm not really interested there. No. Now, what about Canada? Do you invest in real estate at all in Canada at any point or have you stuck to the US? I did start in Canada, actually. There was a building in Toronto, like One King West, and what they did was they had

a mixed use hotel and condo. And I said, I wonder if this makes sense. And at the time I was very young, I think I was in my 20s. And I said, the cost is relatively low. The condos at that time were going for, it sounds cute now, but 300 a square foot. Um, and I was like, it looks like it can make money. And then I invested in it. And the short answer is that because it's rated as a commercial property, not a

residential, the taxes were a lot higher, like double, up all your profit. And so now you're only hoping for appreciation in a Canadian dollar denominated asset. And at that point, when I needed money to go into the US stock market or the US real estate market, I said, this is just a drag on everything. And I got rid of it. But I held it for a little while just to learn, I guess. And I learned that the numbers, as I got better breaking down income statements and balance

sheets, this thing just started looking worse and worse. And I eventually got rid of it, paid my capital gains, moved on. Now interestingly, because I agree with all of those points, it probably worked out fairly well, had you held it, you would have done well because that capital appreciation you mentioned ended up coming to be. We had such a robust market for such an extended time you probably fared well but not as well as you did taking the money stateside and looking in Arizona looking in Tennessee etc. Are you following the Toronto condo market right now and all of its challenges? Holy

smokes. I know I don't know as well as some of your other guests who've talked about it and some of the other people that I read regularly on social media. It looks crazy. I know people who've lost their homes in the last real estate downturn from 90 to 96, 89, whatever you want to bucket it. And the home prices didn't come back for over 13 years. And a lot of people forgot about that. They forgot that townhouses around the corner

went from 150 to 70. They forgot that detached homes went from 330. Everyone thinks 330 was cute, but at the time that was a lot of money. And it was high rate. And the whole prices went from 330 to 220. Like people got wiped out and people forgot. And I think that's one of the benefits

of actually following people like Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett is they talk about the stuff that's happened that had happened that will continue to happen. And I think you need to sort of accept the fact that this will happen and not get caught up in this gambling mentality, which is another thing that I stress on social media is that if it's not generating cashflow, you're literally gambling because who knows what the appreciation is going to be on an asset that doesn't generate any cashflow in the future. I don't know.

You know what Peter Lynch said once in terms of like, if you ask us as the CEO of a gold company what the stock's going to be next year, he's going to ask you what's the price of gold going to be next year. That's pretty much the answer. So you don't know. And I didn't want to gamble on if the price comes through, I'm good. I just didn't want to play that game and now the condo market in Toronto is going through with another reckoning. It appears. Now based on those comments, I assume

you're not a big fan of crypto. Yeah, no. Bitcoin's not an investment. I have maybe a harder stance on it because of my influence from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. I see no value in it. I have maybe a harder stance on it because of my influence from Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. I see no value in it. I saw no value in gold. So Warren Buffett talks a lot about habits, right? And habits sort of build up over time, whether you want to or not. If you go down a path long enough, you'll eventually adapt those habits and your behavior will change. The example that people give in crime is that people don't just start killing people right away, they do small crimes first,

and it's like the broken window type of idea where you just build up to that. So my idea was that when it comes to investing, why even start? Like nothing good can come from starting on the path of getting comfortable with debt, gambling on, on assets where only price dependent, no cash flow, no, no cash flow. Like, why should I start on there?

There's no habit that I can build here that would help me. If anything, the worst thing that can happen is I decide to gamble a little bit. Say what people say one to 3% of your. And I make a little bit of money. So I get a dopamine hit, then I invest a little bit more. Then I win a little bit more. And it's gonna be just like long-term capital management. You just get so used to this winning until you lose it all. It's just a path I didn't wanna start.

And a lot of people are like, oh, what does it hurt 1% of this or $10 here, $100? Listen, it's not about the $10. It's about you path I didn't want to start. And a lot of people are like, oh, what does it hurt? 1% of this or $10 here, $100. Listen, it's not about the $10. It's about you borrow a little bit, you gamble a little bit, you're on a path that may not have a very good outcome. So just don't start. I agree with you.

Do you use leverage at all with your equity investments with your ETFs or do you stay away from that? You don't use a margin account. You don't use any borrowed money at all? I don't use any margin. I remember everyone around me told me to use margin. So they were like, I remember when I was buying US real estate and I was buying for stock market,

they're like, you should use your margin balance, you should use debt. Even my wife, anyway, my wife was like, you should borrow more, we can buy double the amount of houses. I was like, listen, you don't understand my perspective when it comes to debt. If I make good money using debt, I am likely to get hooked. It's just not something I want to be hooked on.

Okay, I'm not the richest investor. I'm not the best looking investor, arguably. You know, maybe. Arguably. No, I mean, arguably. There was a key word there. Key word. I always a keyword there. Keyword. I'm the lazy investor.

So lazy means I don't want phone calls. I don't want margin calls. I don't want water damage calls. I'm lazy. I want to invest. I might have less, but I'm happy. And that's all I want. I'm not looking for moonshots.

What do you do all day? Obviously you're producing a fair amount of content, but now that you've retired at a young age, 40-ish, that you ended up taking out of the normal corporate life, what do you do during the day? Do you do a lot of reading? Do you work out? Do you have hobbies that fill in your time? So yeah, social media is something I never was on and I'm learning about how it works.

I didn't expect it to pick up so fast with a million followers on two platforms. So I'm just going to do that. That takes up about an hour of my day because as tick talk is very short form. So I skipped all that YouTube long form stuff. Right. In addition, I, we watched a lot of cooking shows. So my daughter and my wife are watching next level chef. We like watching master chef and I know he's coming out with a new show.

So we love cooking shows. I watched a lot of streaming shows. My dad is turning 90. So I hang out with him a lot. Oh, good. Yeah. We talk a lot about how he grew up. I thought I grew up with disadvantage.

Like when I listened to my dad, it just sounds like, thank you. Thank you for coming here. Like this country is fantastic. Thank you. I agree with you. I say that all the time. If you have the perspective of what the rest of the world lives like and what history has been like, Canada is a wonderful place. Yes, a work in progress. Yes, we need to make changes and constantly seek improvement. But the bottom line is there's nowhere I would rather live than Canada.

And people are always complaining about the taxes or certain policies. And again, we have to address different things to be more pro-growth. But at the end of the day, I'd much rather be here than anywhere else. Plus, there's one thing I love about Canada. It's full of Canadians. And I really do love Canadians. I travel nonstop, coast to coast. Everybody's friendly.

Everybody's nice. Everybody's polite. There's a lot of pride in the country. In fact, that's the big upside of Trump's behavior over the last X number of months. It's pulled people back together. It's brought that pride top of mind. So like you, when you look back on history, in your case, through the eyes of your father, reinforces how fortunate we are to be alive right now and to live in such a wonderful country. 100%. I have nothing to say about that. That is a hundred percent agree. My parents, because I guess I grew up here, felt I didn't appreciate this country or didn't really understand the perspective.

So we did an student exchange program where I went to China in the nineties. And then I literally came home after about a month. I, they came to pick me up at Pearson airport. I knelt to the ground and I literally kissed the floor. Thank you for that experience. Let's not do that again. And yeah, I knelt to the ground and I literally kissed the floor. And I just said, thank you for that experience. Let's not do that again. And yeah, I love it here. I have nothing but good things to say about Canada. Like you said, everyone's friendly.

Everyone's easy going. Yeah, we have our differences. No place is perfect, but I think everyone's working towards making life better for everybody. And I like to see that. I think that's great. Yeah, I agree. Obvious question here.

I think the listeners would want to know what path is your daughter going to take? Do you have one child only? And is she thinking of following your path or is she going to cut her own way? I don't know. Like every, like that's the only thing I can't, I can predict cash flows maybe and like discounted cash flow. I can't predict what teenagers want to do. I'm not even sure they could, but whatever she wants to do, I think how I view my role is to give her the opportunity to explore, to see what she would like to do. And is she into this stuff? Is she doing a lot of reading? Is she like the Peter Lynch books, the Charlie Munger books of the world? I mean, I taught her specifically about certain ideas because

I distilled a lot of information, but a lot of it was wrong because I didn't know what order to do things and I didn't understand things. Right. So now that I read it, I'm just, I'm dispensing the information in the way that I feel that is a better glide path in terms of learning as opposed to consuming everything from a fire hose. And whether she absorbs it or not is really it's up to her and I'm sure as she starts making money, paying taxes, paying for a cost of living, things will become more real. But right now she's mostly focused on her activities, despite our chats on financial education. Now, what does she think about having a father who's a TikTok star? That must be exciting for her.

Fighting. Or does that mean it's another word for embarrassed or do you ever dance on TikTok? Have you ever shown her the moves? Bust out any moves? I have shown her the moves in private and her friends really appreciate it, but she doesn't seem to appreciate it as much as her friends do. Now when you look at your efforts online, and they're very good by the way, again, I like your bluntness. You come across very quickly. You come across with a lot of confidence.

It's tough to argue with a lot of what you're saying. But why are you doing it? Are you doing it just to help people? Are you monetizing it on the back end through some sort of course sales or sponsorship? What's the purpose of what you're doing or is it all of the above? Yes, yes to everything. So the first one was education because I didn't have this, like I didn't have this in the 80s. I wish I had someone to give me pieces of

content that I could absorb on a regular basis. Like it was either books and if the books you didn't understand, it was too bad. No one's there to tell you anything. Like it's too bad. You don't understand it, find another book to read. I'm not speaking necessarily to an audience. I am literally when I make content, I am speaking to me when I was 15. That's what I'm speaking to. Every time I make content, I'm thinking about my 14, 18, 22 year old self, confused, going in different directions, trying to figure things out. I'm speaking to that person and people came along for the ride. I like that positioning. I like that. I think that a really good job of keeping you on the path

that you want to be on and you know exactly what your target audience is. I like that. I think that's well done. Thank you. And yeah, so like a lot of people said, oh, can you do this or speak about that? Listen, I'm speaking to myself

when I was the confused teenager. Didn't know I was in a room in the dark. I just needed a light. That's what I'm speaking to. Number two, when I started getting traction, then I started reading stuff from people who were talking about how traffic is used on the internet. I started learning about how Facebook makes money, YouTube makes money. I was like, can this actually be monetized? I have no idea.

I don't know because I've never been in this area. I've only just sliced off parts of my salary. Can a product or service do that? And then I noticed that it could be. So then I started following this path. And like I said, with the Charlie Munger example, where he was playing around with real estate in the last years of his life because that's the game he just wanted to play. So the social media thing, I'm learning so much about traffic and metrics and

what people watch, don't wash. I kept slurring a ton of stuff and I'm still learning. It's a tough game. And are you monetizing it through a sponsorships or through courses or both? How are you trying to make some money from all these efforts? You're putting it. It's primarily through a community. So people just, a lot of people, you must get a ton of DMs to say,

can you talk with me, sit down for coffee, go for dinner, go for lunch? I've got to point people to the moniker, lazy Canadian investor. I'm not gonna meet thousands of people for lunch. It's not gonna happen. I said, but if you wanna talk to me and ask questions about what I did in the past

or my opinions on certain things, I'll give you a certain slot of time, one hour a month, and we'll go through stuff that I've done and my opinion on why I did them. And then you can ask me and I can tell you why exactly I chose to go left instead of right or why I think black instead of white. And then we can do that. So people, we have a community, so people come on regularly on monthly basis. I give them one to two hours of my time where I answer questions and then that's about it.

And then yeah, I am thinking about courses because that's all recorded and it could be packaged, but I haven't gone to that step yet. Good for you. No, it all makes a lot of sense and that's interesting doing it the community route. We are the only people dumb enough to do all this with no effort to monetize it, but I'm still enjoying it immensely. And you're right about the request. The one thing we've found challenging is we don't have the infrastructure to deal with the number of requests coming in.

It can sometimes be hundreds a day of people looking for guidance, looking for help, looking for specific recommendations, et cetera. And obviously we can't get back to everybody. So managing all of that is a challenge, but it's also fun and it's frontline stuff. You learn what people need to know, what mistakes they're making, it helps you to build better content, to address their questions online in a different form etc. So it's

all been a lot of fun. Okay before we wrap up I want to go to an area that you spend a tremendous amount of time on online and that is index funds, broad market ETFs. One of the things that you do a little differently than a number of the other people in the field is you tend to take 100% American approach. You don't diversify internationally, you don't have monies in Canada, if I'm not mistaken, you tend to have the ETFs be S&P 500 based.

Do you add to it at all with the QQQ or do you just go S&P 500? That's your bet. Your bet's long-term on America. They have a huge cumulative advantage. They have rule of law. They have an innovative society and that's what you're saying is going to work over the next 20 and 30 years.

You have just repeated everything I was going to say, so thank you very much for the time. So you have to understand, when I grew up, my influences, Peter Lynch, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Phil Fisher, Benjamin Graham. And then in addition to that, I would hear people like my parents say, oh, the dollar's at parity. Time to get those US dollars. Get for travel. So everyone valued the US dollar.

It was like, I was like, that's interesting. These guys, these top level investors are saying America can't be beat. Everyone around me is like, I want US dollars so badly. I was like, okay, I'm going to go 100% US assets. Warren Buffett, I pretty much just bought into the, I don't know what you want to call it, the messaging, the rhetoric of don't bet against America. And I just went all in. And with regards to QQQ, I graduated into the dot com bust. Right. I had, I ran a company where I lost like a million bucks in stock because of the company that sort of founded.

And I was like, it seems a little too, I have a pretty good tolerance, but losing 88% watching the QQQ go down by like 80 plus percent. I'm like, I'm not ready for that. I'm okay with what the S&P 500 or the broader index fucks with. So I'll stick with that. Even I have my limits. Now, do you worry at all that because there are a lot of people who think like you do,

US stocks have therefore become quite pricey, you know, whether it's price-sales ratio, price-earnings ratio. Now, some of it's justified because of the new models of tech carrying a lot of the weight in the S&P 500. They have better margins and so on and so forth. They scale more effectively. But do you worry that a lot of this news, a lot of your thinking is priced into the market? But also, in addition to that, are you at all concerned that with Trump and what looks like a new era, we could see more international competition, more protectionism, et cetera, and that all of that could change the tilt and maybe diversification makes more sense? 100% agree with you in terms of what could affect the future.

One thing I want to say is that I don't invest how I used to. Before I used to slice off part of my income, right? And regularly contribute, lump sum invest whenever I had the cash. So now I'm investing more like the investors now where cashflow comes in from rental real estate or business. And if it makes sense to purchase it, I purchase it. If I will allow cash to build up

like other investors have done, it doesn't make sense for me to hit a dollar target just because I need to hit the dollar target. If it doesn't make sense to invest it, I'm not going to invest it. That doesn't mean that I would never go to international and all those things could come to pass, but I'm focused only on US assets. If it's a good deal, I'll deploy the capital. If it's not, I do podcasts. Now, when you say, is it a good deal, are you

measuring that in terms of valuation metrics like price sales, price earnings, or are you measuring it in terms of pullback statistics? So it was at X, now it's declined 20% from X, 30% from X, therefore I think it may be time to dip my toe back in, or are you mixing those two methods? Both. So I think bull markets are the best time to research companies that you like. Because when things are cratering around you, that's not the time to research. You should be buying what you want at that point. So bull markets are great because you have all this time.

You don't need to buy anything. Prices are, everyone's like bidding things up. Prices are expensive. Spend your time. Look at a balance sheet. You know, back when in the 90s, I was looking at King world productions. They made the Oprah Winfrey show Jeopardy. So go through their balance sheet, go through a company you like.

I don't know what companies people like. If they like Nike or if they like McDonald's go through their balance sheet. Look at how much real estate they have on there. Look how much cash they have on there. And then when you know what price you would be willing to pay, you just put that in your back pocket and you keep living your life. When the market just throws up, you have two choices now.

You can go index because the prices are down 40, 50%, and that's a good deal. Or you can buy your favorite company, which is also down maybe even more, maybe 50, 60% because you want to be part of that business, which is what happened with Berkshire Hathaway. I wanted to be with Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway collapsed by 50%. I bought the index and Berkshire Hathaway.

So I think that's a good way to approach it. Again, it's wherever the opportunity cost is. If there is no opportunity, you don't have to do anything. It's a zero strike game or whatever Warren Buffett likes to say. You don't have to swing. You have to swing. Yeah, you can't strike out on three. You could just stand there all day waiting for the right pitch.

I, by the way, I look at all of this and I worry because I found that after doing this for 40 years, most people are just so bad at buying individual stocks. So even if they put the proper research in, they analyze the balance sheet, heck, even if they have an accounting background and a CFA designation, they tend to still significantly underperform the broad market averages. I see it over and over again. A lot of people throughout the years have actually sent me all of their portfolio numbers and we put them into the old Vestrac software.

We meet almost nobody who outperforms the broad market averages. So my argument is it's probably best just to go that route for almost everybody. Any disagreement there? No. Yeah. I think that I like that succinct answer, Jim. No, I like that. I like that.

If okay. One thing I learned a lot about going through income statements and balance sheets is that I didn't expect it to help me the way you would think. You would think that if I went through an income statement or a balance sheet, I would buy individual stocks. But where it helped me was analyzing real estate when the opportunity came. Right. I didn't spend the time- Makes sense to me. Looking at the financial statements and the opportunity came. I wouldn't have even noticed it. Yeah. You're very numbers oriented on the real estate part. We can't get into all the different metrics and ratios you use, but I like the fact that you've got a disciplined

Approach that you know what your numbers need to be before you'll even take a look at the property You won't necessarily buy if it hits the numbers. They're more the more to it than that But I like the way that you do that. Okay last question Do you do anything in the alternative investment space at all or it's a strictly just real estate and your ETFs in the broad market averages? or it's a strictly just real estate and your ETFs in the broad market averages? Right now it's those two as well as trying to learn how to grow a social media platform. Right. I have no experience in the whole angel investing or alternative investing space. I never really had a mentor in that space and I haven't really went there. It's tough. I mean I do a lot of private company investing and I always have and the challenges

are you've really got to have a lot of experience. So your early investing days are not easy. Usually they are full of failure because you haven't had the experience to figure out what to give proper weightings to. But even when you get relatively good at all this, the liquidity challenges are significant. Most of these positions, of course, you're in for years. You can't get out if you don't control your fate on that front so it's tough but it's still been a lot of fun I've met so many wonderful people and been lucky to have some good successes but they're the average person listening to this podcast private company investing is not the way to go for the most part. One of the most important lessons I got from I remember back in the 90s or turn of the century there's an old-school

business person I don't even remember the name. They basically said, your lifeblood is traffic. And I didn't understand at the time what they're talking about. I was like, yeah, okay, whatever. It's shouting at the sky. And then, and then I kept reading stuff like that. And then I wrote a book, but most people write a book this way. It's like research, write for years, try and sell.

Nobody buys. So I listened to some lady who was like one of the most wealthy, self published authors. She's everyone does it backwards. Right. You build traffic, ask them what they want to read, write what they want, pre-sell it, then finish the book. So then you have money then finish the book. So then you have money to write the book. And I said, that's smart. And I went back to the old person who was like, traffic first, then everything after.

So that's how I built my social media. Traffic first, and then everything else will be a lot easier afterwards. And the gentleman was correct, and so was the self-published lady. So it's traffic first, and then everything else comes a lot easier. That's interesting.

Listen, it's been a real pleasure having you on. It really has. We watch your videos all the time on Instagram and enjoy them immensely. Our team tunes into them. Keep up the good work. Hopefully you and I will cross paths at some point. Tell your wife to cool it and the leverage demands just to trust you. Stay the course and good luck to you in the future.

Thank you. I thank you for the opportunity. Really enjoyed talking to you, Dave. Thank you. Thanks, Jim.