The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #31 — Andrew Hallam: “Millionaire Teacher” and Finding Balance

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Our guest this episode is Andrew Hallam—bestselling author of “Millionaire Teacher,” “Millionaire Expat” and “Balance.” Andrew’s journey into personal finance started in an unlikely place: at 19 years old, he met a millionaire mechanic who taught him that building wealth isn’t about earning a high salary — it’s about making your money work harder than you do. Since then, Andrew has become one of the most respected voices in financial literacy, known for his practical and globally minded approach to investing and life. In this conversation, Dave and Andrew discuss everything from the timeless principles of index investing and global diversification to the rise of robo-advisors and the pros and cons of real estate investing. Andrew also opens up about his nomadic lifestyle and shares lessons from his book Balance — on finding happiness, health, and purpose beyond the pursuit of money. It’s an inspiring and insightful episode for anyone looking to build wealth and a better life.   Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (00:55) Intro to Andrew Hallam (01:30) How Andrew First Learned About Finance (03:13) How a Teacher Became a Bestselling Personal-Finance Author (11:59) How one Key Review Led to Massive Sales (15:16) Does the Millionaire Teacher Still Believe in Index Investing? (17:57) All-in-One Asset-Allocation ETFs (19:27) Chasing Active Outperformance (23:27) Robo-Advisors vs. Asset-Allocation ETFs (25:48) The Importance of Global Diversification (29:29) Real Estate Investing (32:23) Andrew’s Nomadic Lifestyle (36:26) Finding Balance in Life (42:17) What Changes Are Needed to The Financial Industry? (47:28) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, The Wealthy Barber, and former Dragon on Dragonstant. Welcome to the Wealthy Barber podcast. Well, 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 this 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, it's Dave Chilton, the Wealthy Barber, here with the Wealthy Barber podcast. I have no idea what episode this is. Thrilled how well it's going over, though,

and very excited about today's guest, an author of one of my favorite books, a Canadian. We'll talk a lot more about his unique background and his rather unusual lifestyle right now in one moment. Andrew Hallam, Andrew, great to see you. Where are you right now? Just flew into Bali from Bangkok about an hour ago.

Well, I'm in Bamberg, Ontario. Somewhat less exciting than what you're up to. Just colder, Dave. Just colder. You know, I don't normally do a lot of background on the guests. But in your case, your background is so compelling, but also it's a big part of your story, kind of how you became a financial expert, how you put out such a wonderful book. You've now got two more.

They're also very strong. So tell us a little bit about your start, your early days and then your early professional days. I was really lucky. You know, when I was about 19, I had a summer job at a bus. Depot in Victoria, British Columbia. So basically I washed buses and fueled them and then back them into the stall when the drivers finish their shifts. And the rumor had it that there was a guy there who was a self-made millionaire. So I'm 19 years old. Rumor had it. One of the mechanics was a millionaire. And I just, I didn't believe it. But the other guys said, look,

if this guy ever wants to talk to you about money and make sure you listen to him. And one day, he sat me down and he asked me, what would you do if I gave you 10, grand. And I thought, you know, the millionaire mechanic was going to give me money. At least I started wondering, like, what's going on here? And really, he just wanted to see how I would respond to that. And we ended up developing a friendship. And he taught me things that I should have learned in school, things about compound interest, cash flow positive real estate. And he just struck a, I guess, ignited that imagination of me. And part of me is kind of lazy. Like, I know My wife hates it when I say that.

But when I saw a compound interest can ensure that I worked, you know, potentially I could work less but have more. This was, this was like, for me, it's like, drew you in. This is the best way better than anything I ever learned in school. So, but anyway, I became a school teacher. So I taught high school English up in Courtney, British Columbia on Vancouver Island. So I taught there for about six years. And then I took a deferred salary leave, which is, it's why he was great. programs that a lot of public school teachers have, an option to enroll in where you give

a percentage of your income. You have the school district keep a percentage of your income for a predetermined period of time. And then at the end, they give you like either year off or a semester off and basically get the money back with interest on a monthly basis. So I used that to travel. And so I went to Morocco. I went to throughout Europe. And, uh, I went to, uh, And it was awesome because you go to an ATM and I'd see that, well, hey, I just got paid. You know, so when I was actually in Morocco, ironically, the principal of the school that I worked at, he had actually resigned and he'd taken a job at an international school that taught mostly American kids in Singapore. And though it had 54 different nationalities represented in the student body.

And he said, hey, there's a high school English president. if you're interested. And so I flew to Boston, met the superintendent. He hired me. And so that sort of started my adventure overseas. So taught at Singapore American School starting in 2003 and worked there. So the background in terms of like how my books came to be, I suppose, was a couple of things. One was that I was writing for like several freelance personal finance articles of writing for

Money Sense magazine. And so... I remember, yeah. A lot of people knew, like when I arrived, there were several people who knew, you know, what my background was to new teacher arrives and you get to see their CV. And so they would ask me questions about money. And I realized that those teachers didn't have a defined benefit pension. And the Americans, they were there, weren't contributing to Social Security because they

were living overseas. So, you know, as Canadians, too, you're not even really contributing to CPP. And so you have to float your own financial vote. And I was floored to find out what the financial services companies were offering to the teachers. And it seemed to me like the school endorsed it because the school invite them in, would have meetings, allowed the one-on-one consultation sessions with teachers. And they were pretty crazy, even though they were U.S. base. So I'll give you an example of one.

My wife, who I met there, she had a. a Raymond James Freedom account. And of course, you know, in the U.S., actively managed fund fees are far lower than they are in Canada, typically. Far. Yeah, about 40 to 50 percent usually. But when I added up her fund fees and then the wrapper fees, the advisor fees, the advisor fees, she was paying 3.75% a year of fees for this crazy account. Oh, my gosh. This was pretty much standard with this particular guy who would come through and basically police the teachers.

So I started to, I thought, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to financially educate my colleagues. So I would buy books. I would go down to Borders bookstore, rest of peace, borders. I'd go down there and I'd buy a series of books on low-cost index fund, index fund investing. And the first time I bought about 40 different copies of John Bogle's Little Book of Common Sense investing. Yeah, I loved it.

Love that book. Great book. It came out in 2000. 2006, 2007, and brought them into my classroom, sent an email out to everybody and said, you know, if you want a copy of this book, it's yours, come and get them. So I figured, you know, this is my contribution to society. Figured it'd be helpful. And books came, our teachers came in and by, you know, 10 o'clock that morning, they're all gone. So like faster than cookies in a staff room. And so I was encouraged. I went back to borders and I bought a whole bunch of other books. I bought

Paul Farrell's lazy lazy guy to investing and bought a bunch of Dan Solan's books Smartest Investment book. And Dan's very good. Yeah, I bought a bunch of Larry Swedro's book. So I had 12 12 different titles and again I bought about 40 copies

40 books, brought them in sent the email out, they were gone. So shortly after that I thought, you know, I wonder how much people actually have digested from these books, right? Yeah, so I invited people people to come into my classroom one day after school. And I had about 30 people who were keen.

So they came in and I guess they wanted to thank me for the books. And I asked them, do you guys understand this? Do you understand the books? And they said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. And what it was, Dave, was everybody was just kind of too embarrassed to admit that they didn't understand lots of stuff. Yeah, agree. And so when you say, you know, or when John Bogle says invest in an index and you'll get market matching returns or you can't get market beating returns. Most people, and these are college educated people, they didn't know what that meant. Right. They don't know what the market is per se.

What does that mean? Yeah. What does market beating returns mean? So anyway, I was though, like I'd spent thousands of dollars, Dave, on these books and I felt pretty dejected. You know, like, it didn't help at all. Maybe it did, but I started chatting with Ian McGugan, who was the editor of MoneySense magazine at the time. And I said, Ian, this is frustrating.

And he says, well, you know, you've got one option. Why don't you try and write your own book? And so, you know, I would already been writing finance articles. I'd written some for the Globe and Mail. And so I figured, okay, I'll do my best. And I found the same thing, though, Dave, like writing for Money Sense. you have a specific audience who is they're already interested in this stuff. No question.

Like there's a base level of knowledge. And then when you're writing for the general public, which you know all too well, you need what. And I found out later, well, what I ended up doing was I ended up bringing people in to read sections of my book who had never read a finance book before. That's the way to do it. I'm amazed more authors don't do that in all nonfiction areas. I think testing with the target demographic is vital. When you test with editors or, to your point, people already know the material, the feedback you get is not nearly as valuable as doing what you did.

Yeah, exactly. And I know that I read when you did the wealthy barber returns, and I read that you did the same thing with that book. Yeah, I did it with the original wealthy barber. The guys on my slow pitch team would read each chapter. Basically 12 beer-swigging illiterate Canadians. I think if they could understand it, I knew I was in a good position.

So I think your approach is bang on. And the proof is in the pudding because your book was excellent and very digestible. And it really did have a broad appeal to people who otherwise weren't reading those types of books. So good for you. No, thank you. You know, one of the things that you accomplished that I think the average person has no idea how hard this is, is you came out with a book when you didn't have a big financial background. You were a teacher to your point.

You hadn't gone through for economics and taking the Canadian securities course, et cetera, et cetera. So the industry is looking to jump you. They're looking to criticize, especially when you're pushing people to low-cost index funds where people aren't making nearly as much money on the sell front. The good news is you got great reviews. For the most part, the media loved the book, the experts love the book, people in the field said very tough to dispute. You took all the evidence. You presented it very well, very logically in a very flowing fashion. And you did it in such a way. It made it very, very difficult people to push back against your teachings. And really, the book became, you know, developed a bit of a cult following for a while there. I know it's a little

bit older now. But again, that was a tough accomplishment. You should be proud of that. No, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. It was just, I guess in knowing that I wasn't, didn't have a financial background, too, was ensuring that references were always bomb-proof. And then to try to find a way, you know, when I was writing it, I knew that I was in flow, and I'm sure you can relate to this, if while writing I giggled a little bit here and there. I'm laughing at some of those stupid stuff I'm putting together, some of which ended up in the book and some of which got cut.

But, yeah, that was actually a fun process. Well, it worked out very, very well. So what year did the book come out? First edition was 2011 and the second edition, 2017. And did the first edition take off right away, or was it like a lot of financial books where it takes a little while to get traction and create that word of mouth, et cetera?

Yeah, that's a funny thing. It was, you know, I mean, I knew nothing about writing books and marketing books. That was a whole new thing. And so I was trying to do something kind of unique. A few years before, I'd written Warren Buffett a postcard. And that postcard, he ended up writing about it in the Wall Street Journal. Because I asked if I could sleep in his garage or on his sofa. And he thought it was funny.

So he's contacted a friend. at the Wall Street Journal, and they were going to write a little story about it. They called it Warren Buffett's Bed and Breakfast. It was just before one of the shareholder meetings. That's funny. And it caught his attention. I thought, okay, you know what? I'm going to try to do something similar because who sends postcards.

So I'm also thinking old school like newspapers, review books. And so I'm finding people who worked at major newspapers across the U.S. and across Canada. and I'm writing the postcards. You know, I'm a teacher from Singapore, and I'm trying to make it quirky in fun so they didn't think I was completely crazy, but I needed to sort of capture their attention. And I got, this was before the book was released,

so it was all, you know, the process sort of working up to that release date. But it was pretty much crickets until a guy named Scott Burns ended up responding. And he really liked the book. So he said to me, sure your publisher's got enough copies because I'm going to write a glowing review. And it was, it was, what the irony here is that he was syndicated in 39 major U.S. newspapers.

Wow. So that did it, Dave. Like when that came out, which was in the first week of the book's release, so he timed it with the book's release. So it hit number one in the U.S. for every money-related category. And it got as high as number 12 overall in the United States, which was kind of cool. But you know where it was usually trailing? It was number two in Canada that Pasky Wealthy Barber Returns was beating me

every time I would refresh the page. This guy's book. Your book was awesome, by the way, and your first book. And your first book. Yeah, thank you. I remember that because Ron McLean, obviously the famous Ron McLean from hockey, it was the three of us going back and forth at the top of the best. seller list at that point. And I enjoyed his book. And of course, you know, I'm a big fan of yours.

So that's fantastic that it broke out of the gate quickly because then, of course, you get critical mass, you get word of mouth and everything else. Did you take much criticism? Did the industry, for example, push back against you at all? Or because you'd use such strong evidence-based arguments, were you more or less immune to that? There was no pushback. Interesting. Yeah, there was no pushback. Occasionally, in a public talk that I would be giving, occasionally it'd be an advisor sitting in the room and once or twice they'd be pushed back and they were uh those were pretty entertaining moments i've been there so i know what you mean i mean they really are now do you do you stand by the advice of book one to this day are you still an advocate for

low-cost index funds do you see any changes that may make you alter your opinions in any way no no it's um if anything i mean most people know that low-cost index funds or each BATFs, beat active management, that part. Most people understand that. I shouldn't even, I shouldn't even say that because we make an assumption often based on our circles, right? So perhaps I shouldn't say that most people do, but let's say a far larger contingent of people understand this. But the important part, and when I look at the introduction of different products and I look at how that could be both helpful or not, is how it's how it's how. it can affect your behavior because behavior is just about everything like this this is going to

sound crazy but i think if somebody was totally dispassionate just completely dispassionate and they bought some actively managed mutual funds that charged 1.5% and they were super dispassionate like they didn't try to play any games they've got a set allocation of u.s and international developed international emerging market a bond in that a bond component and they were like robotic, completely robotic. You'd be okay with that. Well, no, I wouldn't, but here's the point. Here's the point.

Here's what's weird. What I believe is on an equal risk-adjusted basis, I think they would be most ETF investors. And it's not because their funds would do worse. Their funds would do better. Right. But humans chase past returns. And so, you know, when you look at Morning Stars data on the Mind the Gap data,

So you can see how a fund performs during a given time period. Amazing. And then you see how the investor performs during that same time period. And there's a gap. And that gap isn't that substantial when you go through a period of that big bull run. Because investing is easy then. But if you were to look at a period, say, from 1999 to say 2014, you're going to have a 15-year period where you have big market declines in 2001, 2002, big decline in 2000. 2008. You had different sectors that were winning, different points, different geographic groups. So you had the emerging market markets, which were scorching in the early 2000s. While we know in Canadian dollar terms, the U.S. stock market over that decade lost 30%. Right. But the average person chases past returns. And the average person in ETFs isn't that much better. So when we come full circle here to that point of the introduction of great products, you know the all in one portfolio ETS.

Yes, of course. I think they're just absolutely golden products because when people are investing in those, they never have to think about which ETF do I buy this month? No, I couldn't agree more. In fact, I just advocated for them in the updated version of the wealthy barber. But you know what piece of good news is when you look at the data in the last five to ten years? A lot of the younger investors who are using low-cost index funds, ETFs, in the ETF form, aren't jumping in and out.

They are tending to go broad market. they are tending to follow your instructions, think longer term. I love when you talked about staying dispassionate. The best investors I know, the ones who've truly matched the market or close to it, pay almost no attention. My father is a classic example. He never knows what the markets are doing. And because of that, he doesn't get engaged emotionally.

And because of that, he doesn't do anything stupid. And finally, we're seeing some more people follow that pattern just saying, I can't figure this out anyway, that there's no macro forecaster out there who truly adds value. I'm just going to set aside my money monthly. let it go for 20, 30, and 40 years, and that tends to work extremely well. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I think, too, that there are enough people, you and me and several, several other people

who are doing our best to try to educate people on that and that emotional component, because that's the biggest challenge. It's always going to be the biggest challenge because we're humans. We're human beings. You made a great point earlier about jumping in funds. I find it interesting how we can't pick the future outperformers. As you know, there are very few, fewer than 10% of actively managed funds. I'll perform over any 5, 10, 15-year period, sometimes fewer than 5%.

But we are very adept at picking the significant underperformers in the future because we tend to rush into the hot recent performers. And then they were hot because they were in the right place, right time, right sector, regression of the means sets in. And we often underperform by even more than the fee. So if the fee is 2.2, our underperformance is often 3.5 to 4. And, of course, over an extended time frame, the difference that makes in your retirement pool of capital is enormous. So some people say, well, you can have 25 and 30 percent less.

I've seen many cases where I've done the comparison. If people had just gone broad market averages, they would have 40 to 50 percent more than they end up with 60 percent more in many cases. It's crazy. Yeah, you can see that data, interestingly. About every six months, Spiva puts out the Spiva Persistence Scorecard. It's amazing because they'll look at the top quartile performing. funds during a given might be a five-year period. They go two more years to see what percentage of those top quartile performing funds are still in the top quartile. And it usually ends up being between

zero and six percent. That's right. And then you go again another two years on, and those funds, of course, they're not in that top quartile any longer. So yeah, you're right. People end up chasing their own tails. So it's the part that we have to master is that emotional part. You know, I said something and the wealthy barber returns that honestly didn't get much attention, but I think it should have. I talked about how I have this argument with people in the industry, people who push actively managed funds and they try to make their compelling points. And one of the arguments I've made with them that's actually resonated to their credit is I've said, do you recommend the same funds now that you recommend it two years ago, five years ago, and 10 years ago? And that's worked

because almost all of them said, no, I have to admit, I don't. And it's because, again, they're chasing the hot returns to. They're creating the narrative. The funny thing about this is the data is so overwhelming that we can't pick the future outperformers. It's amazing to me that it's still as popular as it is to try, especially in Canada. As you know, we have a larger percentage of our money and actively managed funds than the vast majority of other countries out there. Yeah, it's interesting looking at that study.

It was a U.S.-based university study that looked at two Canadian financial institutions from from 1999 to 2014, and they tracked the, they tracked 4,600 Canadian financial advisors and about 500,000 plus clients of theirs. Right. And they wanted to see, first of all, they found that generally speaking, the advisors invested the same way that they had advised for their clients. So that's good. So it's not like they were, you know, it's not like they were doing something with their own money

that they weren't doing with their client's money. Yeah. But the fascinating part here is that the advisor was also chased past performance. So based on that 15 year period, and I like that 15 year period date, because when you start looking at the mind the gap stuff, and we really haven't had a really challenging time. I mean, okay, we had a one, you had a half year drop in 2020. And we had 2020. But people, I don't think people have really been tested for over the past. No, I think since 2008, yeah, I agree with you. Right. And so that's an interesting thing to look at. So if you take from 1999 to 2014, people were tested twice and really, really tested. They were severely. Yeah, severely.

And the advisors ended up underperforming an equal risk-adjusted portfolio of what would have been indexes by just over 3% compounding a year over that 15-year period, both with their own money and with their finance money. So, yeah, it's human nature, isn't it? to, even with these advisors, to chase these past returns, you've got to be so dispassionate. It's one of the reasons, too, I've liked the idea of robo advisors. Like, you know, if you're a real purest on fees, you can say, ah, yeah, but if I do that, you know, I'm going to be paying an extra 0.5% or 0.6% or however, whatever the asset base is and the correlation of the fee. But if it's the sort of thing that can get you, and you've penned this really well,

you're making it automatic. And that's what's really easy to. So straight from your account. right into your TFSA or your RRSP, which goes directly into a Robo Advisor, globally diversified portfolio of BTF, so that the decisions are taken away from the clients. It's almost like that, you know, I think it was Odysseus, who went by like the sirens, you know, those beautiful women on the island. And he told his guys, like, strap me to the mast.

I want to hear, I want to hear the sirens. And they all put wax in their ears, and he wanted to hear it. He said, no matter what happens, don't, whatever I say, don't release me. for this mast because I know I'll take the ship into the rocks and that's that's a lot of people we're all we're all guilty of it as you say it's human nature we're wired to do it I'm seeing a fair number of the younger people who are quite good at this the ones that are well informed they're moving off the robo advisor over to the all-in-one ETFs you discussed because then they can save the 25 to 50 basis points and go straight and still automate the decision where it goes in monthly

and it goes directly into that fund do you think that's a good move for a lot of them yeah I think It certainly can be, but if I were to say on aggregate, I were to take all young people and say, is that something all young people should do, open up a brokerage account and buy an all-in-one ETF instead of a robo advisor, I'm not so sure that that would be a better option because you're still with that brokerage account, you still get that element of temptation. So there are always those people to do that, and I think the vast majority of people are like this, they don't want to make transactions. They don't want the vast majority of people, not people in generally in my circles, but when I get out and I speak to the general masses, and I'm asking

them questions, they're petrified at the idea of opening a brokerage account, even though when I say it, even though I say, it's easy just buy an all-in-one portfolio ETF. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure about that one day. No, that's an interesting answer. Now, Mike Green, down in the States, has done a very good job of shining a light on the fact that our move towards passive has made a lot of the broad market averages, let's go with the S&P 500, into a bit of a momentum play. And we've got all of that non-price sensitive monies coming in through 401K contributions and monthly purchases that, again, have pushed up the S&P, he would argue, beyond typical valuations. He worries what happens when the baby boomers retire en masse, they're already retiring, but more and you see

potentially a flip and a lot of that buying becomes selling, etc. Any worries, any thoughts about that at all? I think that if as an individual investor, if you're globally diversified, and that's really, really important because markets will swing too far in either direction. Benjamin Graham always said that. So Warren Buffett's mentor would say the markets go too higher than they should go and during times of pessimism, they go lower than they should go, not based on anything that relates to economics, but based on human emotions. So yeah, there will be a time when the U.S. market is a fire sale. It's a fire sale. It's going to be on sale, much like it was in 1973, 74, and you could argue in 2003. But I think for the people listening to this, when that happens, and it will

happen, and it might happen, it might happen several times within even our lifetime. These are just opportunities. And if you're globally diversified, you know, rebalance with your bonds, you're disciplined enough to maintain a consistent allocation such that essentially you're following Warren Buffett's mantra by being greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy just by rebalancing back to an original allocation or, you know, to your point, Dave, the all-in-one portfolio ETF does that for you. And if you understand how that works internally, you understand how that works internally, you

understand how it works internally. When that market does drop, this is actually a good thing. This is an opportunity, especially for people who are still adding money to the markets, people who aren't retired. And a lot of the people we teach, of course, are in that situation because a lot of our readers tend to be 45 and under, and they are still buying on a monthly basis, whether it's in their RSP, TFSA. So to your point, the rebalancing, where you've got the manager forced by that initial layout to sell the markets that have been robust and going very well, and reallocate some of that money into the ones that have been struggling. There's a forced sell high, buy, low situation, which tend to enhance returns.

And you're right. All in one, wow, I mean, it's hard to beat that decision if you can just stick with it and stay detached. Yeah, that's it, isn't it? That's exactly that. I know, it's funny. I was talking in the new book about how even with index fund investors, with ETF investors, if you're reading all the time about macro forecasts and you're following your portfolio's value on a daily basis, that's going to lead to negative things.

and I've seen this for 40 years that people like my dad who pay no attention whatsoever outperform those really well-informed people who are reading all the articles and following the markets on a daily basis. It's what a paradox. There's a false story.

And I think it is a false story. Fidelity had suggested that apparently Fidelity had done the study that suggested their best investors were dead or they were people who forgot that they had accounts with Fidelity. And I think it's actually been disproven like they never actually did that study.

But you can see how that really holds true. I see friends of mine, members of my family, much like your dad, they've got to set it and forget it policy. And they're not jumping out when the market's dropped because they don't even know when the markets drop. It's a beauty of it. No, I couldn't agree more. Now, have you advocated for and taught a lot about investing in rental real estate? Has that been a big part of what you've done too? Not as much, but what I do is when I, so one of the things that keeps my life and I'm moving around so much is I do. I do do a lot of talks, international talks. So I usually do, I'll do 35 to, probably 35 to 40 talks

in a typical year. And one of the things that I do, one of the sessions I have, is called What's Your Number? And in that, I'll say, you know, you're looking for future cash flow. And if you have a single property, I don't care how much that single property is worth. I don't care how much it's increased in value. I don't care that someone's paying for, for the mortgage. If you're living overseas, as an example, and you just have one of those, that's not an investment, not a cashful investment, because that person has to come back to Canada, has to live somewhere. That's right. So in that case, so your primary residence is not an investment. I know it's kind of, it is kind of hardcore, but generally speaking, in most

cases, it's really not. Some people can be sitting there. I agree with you. Later on, in some cases. Some people might decide to do a reverse mortgage. For some, it might be okay. Probably not for most, but for some it might be okay. And in that case, okay, there's an invested component, but nobody plans that, you know? That's right. So it's an investment in your shelter. And so with this, what's your number session? What I do is I look at, okay, how do we do a backwards design model? Like, how much do you want to be living on if you were actually retired today? And then let's say if you're retiring 15 years from now. Let's look at a inflation-based adjustment on that. So let's just assume an inflation rate of 3.5%. Right. And then do you have revenue-generated property,

which is a great inflation fighter because over time you can increase rents to match with the cost of living. So that's why revenue generating property is a, it's a great inflation fighter. And then the rest of it would be from an investment portfolio. So I generally do this and base it on like the 4% rule of thumb and then looking at what kind of cash flow people might have and then see if are they saving enough, are they actually on track? So to that point, Dave, I think that's, that's about all I talk about when I talk about real estate and investing in real estate. The funny things, though, is that people will ask me, like, is investing in real estate a good idea? And it's kind of like saying, hey, is investing in business is a good idea?

And it's like, well, depends on the- There's no easy answer to it, is there? No, it depends on the business, you know, it depends on the location, depends on the KPEX, depends on all those sorts of factors. So, yeah. No, I agree. And the landlord-tenant board comes into play now. And, of course, rent controls. There's a lot of moving parts.

You can't give an easy answer to that. I had trouble discussing in the most recent book. Now, you've referenced your rather unusual lifestyle. Let's talk about that a bit. You are truly a nomadic fellow. You're all over the place. You and your wife are traveling. Do you ever stay in one place for more than a year or two anymore?

No. We'll stay. No. Now, a lot of our viewers don't know that you're actually in witness protection and that, you know, this is a high danger move for you coming on to this show. We're going to blur your face out and change your voice. My real name is not even, no. It isn't, no.

What do you love about the lifestyle, just the wide variety of experiences and cultures you're exposed to? Yeah, I just, I love the learning. Okay, one of the major things I love the weather. So it's kind of like an endless summer. I can come and I can visit a cool location. so I can visit autumn, I can visit winter, and then I can leave. But, you know, a big part of it, too, is the characters that I meet, Dave. So, you know, not just the locals in Panama, for example.

My wife and I probably spend in most years, we'll spend more time in Panama than in any other country. So we stay up in a town called Bocchese, which is up in the mountains, and it's not a big. place. It's the base of a volcano. You climb to the top of this volcano. It's the only place on earth from which you can see the Atlantic and the Pacific from the same location on a clear day. That's actually very cool. Super cool. Yeah. But the people there, like not only am I learning, every time I move into a different country or I'm visiting a different country, I'm always asking questions because I'm so curious. And the more I learn about people and cultures, Dave, the more I realize, I don't know anything.

Right. Like, really don't know anything. It's very humbling, isn't it? So, so humbling. And then you've got another level. You got this other layer of it. You got these people that they'll leave Toronto and they'll become residents of Panama. And they'll, like, retire there or they'll open a business there.

And the first question I ask is, like, what's your story? Like, why are you here? Right. And those stories are always good. They're always different. No, and how many languages can you now say low-cost investing in? Have you mastered many, many languages to get that message out? Do you speak a lot of languages?

I mean, you clearly have good language skills. I don't clearly have great language skills. We're lucky because, of course, English is the most prolific language on earth. So I speak a tiny bit of a lot of different languages. But I'm, my wife is fluent in Spanish. Well, Spanish is the easiest language to learn because, of course, it's phonetic and they're in a lot of accents. You should pick it up. That would be handy.

Oh, yeah. And I'm working at it. But I don't find it as easy as you say. Are you fluent in Spanish? Not bad. I had a place in Costa Rica. And so my Spanish is very good. My dad's one of those people who's fluent in everything.

He can pick up any language. He was a language instructor. And he speaks, he even speaks Latin for heaven's sakes. Although, how do I know if he's right? He might be just speaking gibberish. I'm just always impressed by it. But, no, I think that's a marvelous lifestyle. And it's fun that you've matched up with somebody who shares that desire to,

travel and meet new people and take on new experiences because let's be honest you must run into some challenging situations too lots can go wrong when you're moving country to country all the time yeah it's it's all part of the adventure i mean nothing nothing nothing horrible is what happens so knocking on wood i mean we spent at one point we spent 17 months in a camper van traveling through uh mexico and central america can you please give uh your wife all of our deepest sympathy she's she's that's pretty impressive 17 months in a camper van. So you guys must have a great relationship.

I mean, you're spending a lot of time together in close quarters. Yeah, yeah. I mean, during that 17 months, stint, for sure, for sure. Yeah, so friends call her the project manager and me the project. I'm sure she said some not-so-nice things to you in Spanish, but you haven't realized at the time. You've just said, I love you too, back. What's next for you?

I mean, you've got the book, Balance. When did it come out? Tell us a little bit about it. I thought it was a very interesting approach, very different book. That came out in 2022, January 22, and with that, one of the things I found fascinating when it comes to just trying to identify what success really meant and the notion of success I felt was so one-dimensional and that in many cases wrong. And so I'll just say like the popular notion of success.

So you ask somebody like or somebody might say, oh, she's really successful because she's She has, she drives a Ferrari, she's head of her a law firm and she's got a mansion on the hill. And I remember thinking like, well, maybe she's successful in a broader holistic sense. But that only defined one part. So does she laugh? Is she happy? Is she healthy? Does she have good relationships?

Whenever we want to pursue anything, and this is one of the things I was sort of thinking about laying on a hammock one day before. putting balance together, I thought, whenever we want to pursue something, regardless of whether it is, whether you want to get a master's degree or run a marathon or build a million dollar portfolio, retire early, whatever it is, if we start asking why, like why do we want that? Ultimately, it comes down to some derivative of life satisfaction. Like, it makes me feel good. And so then why I wanted to reverse engineer that. So, okay, life satisfaction then is success. Success equals life satisfaction. Now, let's look at life satisfaction research. And if we live, you know, we live one, we all know we're going to die. We're all, we're all

mortal. So I started thinking about success more as a four-legged table. Like there's the money part. You've got to have it. As much as we might say, oh, money is not important. When we look at life satisfaction research internationally, 136 different countries assessed in a Purdue-based study. Absolutely. Yeah. Money matters. Money matters. Money matters. There's a threshold. There's a satiation point, but money matters, right? The other leg is the health leg. Then there's the sense of purpose. And then finally, there's the relationship leg, which arguably is the most important leg of all, the relationship you have with yourself and the relationship you have with others.

So taking those four legs, that's what I wanted to do with the book Balance, was to say, you know, I think in a lot of cases we can get really obsessed about money, especially when we're always writing about it. Right. There was a, and I know that you probably have had this happen to you before, Dave, where you, you know, you give talks and you've had several of the same people come to your talks and listening and, and they're fascinated with your message. and there was one woman who would just

be showing up in different countries at some of my talks and I thought that's a fan. That's a fan. That's a fan. That's a fan. I mean, on the international scene, I mean, it's not say you have to, perhaps we can put this in perspective. In the international scene, people do travel a lot. They move around a lot. So when you're going to Malaysia from Singapore, it's a weekend. Right. I'll go and listen to Andrews speak at this, whatever. And when I wrote the book, Balance, she really didn't like it.

So she sent me a fairly scathing email to suggest that, no, Andrew, you're wrong. Money is the most important thing in the world because money equals power. And when you have power, you have influence over others. And I just thought, wow, okay. I'm glad I wrote that puff. Right. Because there may be other people who think like her. And maybe they read it.

I don't think that way at all. I'm with you on all of this. And you mentioned the threshold. It's so important. Like a lot of my wealthiest friends and they're very wealthy, aren't very happy. And I have lots of friends, middle income friends and up. They're okay financially, certainly, but they're very happy. And it's for all the reasons you discuss.

They've got very strong relationships. They're healthy. They're invested in their community. You talked about sense of purpose. One of the things that I most fear with AI is that if it does indeed change society, takes away a lot of our jobs. You've got people arguing that's going to lead to abundance. But we need what?

ways to add value. We need a sense of purpose. How do you give back? How do you stay involved? And for a lot of us, that's through some form of work, not for everybody, but through many of us. So I think you're bang on and I think that woman's definition is far, far too narrow. Yeah, I think so. I think it gets pretty dangerous when we just started thinking about something in one, in a one dimensional sense like that. But it can be, people can fall into that trap. Can't they can have, even to the sense where we have uber frugal people not being able to find ways to enjoy their money spending it on spending it on experiences i mean research suggests giving pro-social giving so we can see the results of our giving spending it on bringing other people and other friends together now these are things that boost

life satisfaction so if you're so tight with your money that you don't quite see the forest through the trees, you don't really enhance your life. You and I agree on all of this, and you said that extremely well. That being said, you were wrong about one key thing. You said, we're all going to die. My father is not going to die. He has announced that many times. He's made it clear.

It gives us great pain to realize we're going to be with him and taking care of him forever. But he has assured us he's not going to die ever, ever. All right. Last question, because I know you've got things. I want to meet your dad. I want to meet your dad. I like this man. Bring butter tarts.

Okay, bring butter tarts. You can meet him anytime. He also loved traveling and love taking on all those experiences. So let me give you one last question. You are the czar of the financial industry in Canada. What changes would you bring to the industry, to its approaches, to the way it deals with the client base that you think overall would help Canadians? Oh, man.

That is such a good question. Okay, let's say something like, you know, when we talk about fiduciary standard day, Yes. That's so freaking loose. That's too loose to somehow find a way to really, really tighten that up. I think if they truly tighten that up, though, it would make the financial service industry really unpopular for people who would normally want to be working in it. Well, and of course, the vast majority of people aren't held to a fiduciary standard. They're held to the suitability standard, which is even looser still. And that being said, lots of people rise above that and do a wonderful job. In fact, it's interesting. We love to criticize certain things we see in the industry.

But I have to say that I recently saw two financial plans done by a young woman for clients. She worked for one of the financial institutions. People would say, oh, she's biased. She's influenced by it. They were wonderful, incredibly thorough, incredibly detail. If there was bias in there, I certainly couldn't. find it. So there's lots of people who do an excellent job. But going back to your point is one of your concerns that because we have so many people tied to product sales, almost inevitably that

can lead to a challenge. Exactly. Yeah. You've got, and this is one of the things that I talked about in a millionaire teacher where I was living in an apartment. Actually, I had bought an apartment and I was living in it, but spent the summer there. And it was in Victoria. And the The condominium complex had a Facebook group. And I was writing the second edition of a millionaire teacher. And what I did was I offered $50 to anyone who would go into a bank profess that they wanted to open up an RSP, knowing that the banks all sold their own version of index funds. So the major banks, the IVC, TD, RVC, right?

And I said, I want you to go in and tell the person, whoever they hook you up with, sit you down, tell them you would like a portfolio of index funds. And in every single case, they were talked out of that and talked into actively managed products. Right. And I said to them, whatever you do, whatever you do, don't open the account. I said, don't open the account. I can help you with your investing.

But this is just an experiment. And so, yeah, it was fascinating. I wrote a piece for it in the Globe and Mail. And then I ended up writing that, writing about that, and a millionaire teacher as well. So, Dave, how about this? You're the czar. You're the czar. What would you change?

I would certainly like to see people charged their on assets under administration or a flat fee more often than they are. But I will defend the industry a little bit. It's very difficult as people start out and haven't built up much yet. It's very difficult to come up with the model that's then fair to the advisor. If you're fair to the client and you charge them very little, like index funds, for example, or you charge them a flat fee, it's very difficult to do well because, again, they're working with very little money. And you can say, well, just start from the flat fee of $3,000, $4,000. But most people aren't going to pay that when they first started out.

They don't have it. So how do we put this in play and be fair to all parties? Because we don't want advisors not to make anything. Lots of them are very solid too. But I do think pushing toward more advice, less product sales, probably everybody wins. As you know, down in the states, the vast majority of kind of middling coming up are in the asset under management model. They pay the 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 basis points a year. They use a lot more index funds. We see that model much more commonly in the U.S. than we do in Canada. Canada, we're still more around the product than we are around that. That's kind of the direction, the general direction I would head. I would argue, again, I'm selling, I'm defending the industry, but it certainly is much better than it was 30 and 40 years ago. You have a lot of people taking courses now, having a better overall feel for financial planning, et cetera. But yes, the product sales are still problematic in many cases. I mean, you know, what did Charlie Munger say?

If you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Yeah. And that basically is a way of summarizing the story you just told about people walking into the financial institution. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I see it with insurance as well. You know, certainly some people are put into insurance policies that I don't think

common sense and math would dictate where the right fit in terms of type. And so it's the same thing. The incentives may be misaligned. Although, again, that has improved as well. And I do want to note that before I'm viewed as being too negative. I think also it's beholden on all of us as consumers of financial products and financial vice to do a better job. And that's why books like yours that took the intimidation out of the subject and made it more understandable, brought it down to a lower level, we're very flowing.

Those kinds of books can play a very positive role. We should be taking books like that and using it more in the school system. My only beef with your book, by the way, was that you didn't use an article. I cannot say millionaire teacher. I stick the word the in front of it every single time. I don't think I recommend your book all the time. I don't think I've ever not said the millionaire teacher. Next time I want an article in front of your title. I'll make sure the publisher sorts that out. Sort out. Get on top of that. Anyway, you've been a great guest. I knew you would be. And you, by the way, seem like a very happy fellow. You've obviously struck some strong balances, good relationship, you're enjoying your travels. You've added a lot of value

through your right and speaking. What's next for you? Where are you heading with all this? So are you thinking of like next month or are you thinking of years? No, a longer term. Yeah, longer term. Longer term, Dave. You know what? If I had something I would rather be doing five years from now, I'd be doing it now. Right.

So if I just continue to do what I'm doing because that's what I would want to be doing five years from now. Wow, what a great attitude to have. That's fantastic. Well, listen, we really appreciate you coming on the show. You've been a wonderful guest. Hopefully you and I will cross paths again soon. Learn that Spanish. We'll do.

Adios, me, me. Can live very well.