The Wealthy Barber Podcast - #55 — Mark McGrath: All-in-One ETFs, Rent vs. Buy and Financial Trade-Offs

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

Our guest this episode is Mark McGrath — one of Canada's top voices on evidence-based personal finance and a returning guest from episode #12. Mark recently came out of semi-retirement to launch his own advice-only practice called Phynance which focuses on helping physicians with financial planning. He is also co-author of "Wealthier: The Investing Field Guide for Canadian Millennials."  In this episode, Dave and Mark dive into all-in-one ETFs and why simplicity often beats last-mile portfolio optimization for the typical Canadian. They also discuss the renting vs. buying debate as Mark’s family has recently decided to sell their house and become renters. The conversation also explores the limits of the 4% rule, how safe withdrawal rates differ across countries, and whether retirees are more comfortable holding stocks today than they used to be. Along the way, Mark talks about calling out charlatans on Twitter and shares which personal finance opinions he has changed his mind on over the years. Whether you're a DIY investor, a homeowner weighing your options, or anyone trying to cut through the noise of online personal finance commentary, this episode is packed with practical, evidence-based perspective from one of Canada's most trusted financial voices.    Show Notes (00:00) Intro & Disclaimer (00:55) Intro to Mark McGrath (02:28) Mark's Semi-Retirement and His New Firm Phynance (06:01) The Evolution of the Financial Planning Industry (09:27) All-in-One ETFs Explained (12:32) Simplicity Over Last-Mile Optimization (15:39) The Case for a Home-Country Investing Bias (19:27) Why Mark's Family Decided to Sell Their House & Become Renters (23:44) Renting With Young Kids & Schools (25:58) Why Mark Didn't Like Being a Landlord (27:07) Homeowners Are Often Out of Touch With Costs (29:44) What The 4% Rule Leaves Out (34:05) Safe Withdrawal Rates Across Countries (36:09) Are Retirees More Comfortable Holding Stocks Now Than in the Past? (37:37) Voices Mark and Dave Respect in the Financial Industry (40:54) Getting Assessed for ADHD (41:54) Wife's Take on Personal Finance (42:42) Calling Out Charlatans on Twitter (45:03) Why Market Forecasters Keep Getting Booked (45:55) Why Mark Stepped Away from Twitter (48:32) What Personal Finance Opinions Has Mark Changed His Mind On (53:02) Phynance Already Has a Waitlist (55:52) Conclusion

Hey, it's Dave Chilton, the wealthy barber and former Dragon on Dragon Stand. 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, will be here to help you.

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 Chiltson, The Wealthy Barber with the Wealthy Barber podcast. Great guests today. We've had Mark McGrath on before. We did a short video, the two of us going back and forth about the RRSP, TFSA debate and how a lot of people have it wrong. Today we're going to talk about a much wider variety of subjects. Mark is truly one of my favorites in the industry. I wrote a testimonial for his book. I followed him on Twitter long before he and I ever dealt voice to voice and got to know each other a little bit.

He is very sharp. He's not afraid to call out some of the foolishness that he sees. in the industry. In fact, I would say he's even a little aggressive on that front online, which I quite enjoy. And he's had an interesting background, including the events of the last 12 months or so. You really enjoy this. This is a sharp, knowledgeable guy. It really is. There's lots of good thing going to come your way. Mark, welcome back to the show. Thanks, Dave. Yeah, great to be here. And thanks for the warm welcome. You can't really tell, but I'm blushing a little bit. It's always nice to hear it from the people you admire as well in the industry. So, no, thanks.

And good to be back. I'm going to start with a little bit of your background. Went to UBC. And you have your CFP, you have your CLU. I think you have your CIM as well, do you not? Yeah. So I only stuck with the CFP. So after leaving the asset management business earlier this year, which we'll get into, I'm sure, the CFP for me was really the only one that I wanted to hang on to. So I actually let the other two designations drop, but I just don't need them on a day-to-day basis anymore.

Well, you still have the knowledge that taking the material provided. So you may not have the formal designations behind your name, but you have that. Now, you mentioned that you had been in the AUM business, the assets under management business, with PWL, one of the better firms in the country, no doubt, and some of the people we've had on the show and have enjoyed immensely. And six months, nine months ago, you announced you were going to leave, go into a quasi-retirement and figure out what's next. And you've emerged with an advice-only firm, specializing and helping physicians.

I think you very cleverly called it finance, pH. That sounds like a Dave Chilton type name. I like it. That's very creative. Tell us about the thoughts behind the move. Yeah, so I was in the AUM business since 2010 in one form or another, so basically 15 years as an AUM advisor and portfolio manager through part of that as well. Most recently, to your point with PWL, again, as you mentioned, for sure, one of the top firms in Canada, at least, these guys are my heroes, really, like when I had an opportunity to work for them. I've been following Ben Felix, Justin Bender, Dan Bortolotti, who your listeners might know as the Canadian Couch Potato and

Canadian portfolio manager. I'd been following their blog. blogs and largely modeling my own investment and planning practice after a lot of the content that these guys were putting out online. Like they became my North Star for how to set up portfolios and think about planning and foreign withholding taxes and all that fun stuff. Like I used to have clients in my meetings and I would just flip my screen over and it would be the Canadian Couch Potato Blog. And I'd be like, here's how we're going to set up your portfolio now kind of thing.

So I've been a huge, huge fan of these guys. And when they reached out and asking to join, I was thrilled. So it was a bit surreal for me to kind of walk away from that after. I think it was only there for about two years. I think it was like 20, 23 months. And that's not at all a negative review of them or the people or the firm. This was a very, very personal decision that my wife and my family came to to step away from all that. And that was actually about a year ago.

So I left PWL, I think it was April 30th and we're recording today on April 21st. So it was just about a year ago that I decided to do that. And I called it semi retirement because I knew I wasn't just going to ride off into the sunset and do nothing. I don't know that I had any firm plans on what we were going to do. But I left on April 30th. And then I, my wife and my two young kids, Emily and Noah, we went to Spain for about three months last summer. And we went to Sweden for six weeks to visit family over the holidays this year. And just kind of got the itch to do something.

You know, I'm the treasurer for the Financial Planning Association of Canada, for example. So I'm like, it's still ingrained in the community in lots of ways. I still talk to guys and gals that you've had on the podcast. So these are my people. These are my friends. And for me to kind of just walk away from all that also didn't feel right. And so I started an advice only financial planning firm called finance. you mentioned, PHY. And I've worked with doctors for so long that I figured, like, there's

an insatiable demand among physicians for advice only, fee-only financial planning. And a lot of that stems from that community all getting together a number of years ago and saying, hey, I think we can manage the portfolio side, but we need great planners to help us on the financial planning side. And so there's huge, huge demand for it. And it happens to be a circle of people that I've worked with since about 2014. So I thought, okay, I'm going to exclusively work with physicians. I'm going to work with one, two families at a time, go really, really deep. I don't want a financial planning factory. I'm not trying to work 60 hours a week. I just want one client file in my head at a time to really tinker with and get really deep on. So I've been doing that

for the past few months and it's been a lot of fun. It's been great. It's nice to have total control over all aspects of the business, like the technology we use and my wife helps me. She's an engineer. So she helps me with a lot of the back end stuff. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, I've heard many rumors that your wife is much sharper than you are. I married up. I married up. She's a system is an industrial engineer. She's worked for Hershey, Amazon, Lulu Lemon. Yeah, she's a superstar.

She doesn't watch this, so she won't catch me, uh, glowing her up here. But yeah. Well, honestly, I mean, that's very sincerely. I'm glad you came back. You're a very sharp guy. You can add a lot of value. And you did a wonderful job when you used to go on the rational reminder as one of the hosts. And to give PWL some credit here.

I think when you talk about Ben, Dan, just these people have really influenced the entire industry. So it's not just a direct impact they've had on their clients, but advisors throughout the country watch them. And to your point, start thinking, hmm, maybe that's what I should be doing, et cetera. And they've raised the bar, I think. In fact, I think that'll be Ben's biggest legacy is that he raised the bar for a lot of the advisors in the country. And I'm seeing more and more of that.

As I have different people on the show, man, are you guys getting sharp? The planners, they really, I mean that sincerely, though. The planners are so much better than they were 10 and 20 and 25 years ago or 35 when I started. I was about the only guy doing it, the comprehensive financial plans. Now everybody's passed me by and the details you know and you're starting to specialize. So when you're talking about doctors, you know about incorporation, about cross-border rules, second families we talked about off air. In the U.S., the advice-only model often specializes on a profession.

And now we're finally seeing that come to Canada and we'll see it maybe for teachers and we'll see it for engineers and doctors. So I think these trends are all very positive for the Canadian consumer. Totally. And I think a lot of this is probably a symptom of the democratization of portfolio management and the ease with which people now can use a robot advisor or even just buy an all in one broad, globally diversified index fund year or ECF, right? Like if it's not that portfolio management is always easy, it is simple on paper. But for years and years, many people just had no easy way to access really great portfolios that they could just kind of hold forever and not tinker with. And now that we have that, I think planners have to really step up, right? Like the only value. you were adding to your clients was stock picking and market timing and you're charging them 1% to do that for decades. It's going to be really, really hard to justify that, I think, as the service model going forward. And for some people, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to slag anyone. I think there are people who deliver value in that realm. But I think, especially for the

newer planners who are coming to the industry and again, seeing what people like Ben and the rational reminder and those types of planners are doing, it's more fun, it's more exciting, it's more impactful. I think for clients to get really deep on the financial planning side, more so than talking about markets and you waste a full hour client meeting talking about manager performance and that kind of thing, it's just not really valuable. So now that clients can a manage it themselves or B, now that advisors just have so many great solutions for their client portfolios, it frees up all this time and capacity to do the good planning work that we all want to do. So I think it's a huge benefit to clients, of course, and to the planning community as

all. I agree. And I think that the planners slash advisors out there who are doing only the investment end of things and we still see a fair amount of that are going to be in trouble in the next five to 10 years. The consumer is going to become more demanding. We saw a little bit of it starting maybe seven, eight years ago when a lot of Canadians realized they weren't getting good advice on decumulation strategies on optimizing for tax early in retirement. And they thought, great, that should be part and parcel to what I'm getting from my advisor. And then we had some people go on YouTube explaining various techniques. Some advisors like you became very, very strong there. And again, it's pulled everybody else up. And now people are realizing I better be good at

that because that's something owed to the clients. You know, when 90-something percent of professionally managed funds and professionally managed accounts don't keep up to the broad market averages, that's a tough place to add value. And so it's got to be in the financial planning. You mentioned the all-in-one ETFs. Tell our audience what they are and why you in particular are so drawn to them. Yeah, there's a number of different providers. I think almost all of the major fund in ETF companies now have some iteration or some version of this product. But it's essentially a one-stop, globally diversified, low-cost index fund portfolio, right? So if you think about building a portfolio traditionally,

you'd have to go and buy U.S. stocks and Canadian stocks and Japanese stocks and bonds and cash and whatever it is you want to put in your portfolio, generally speaking, you could go and buy it like a big balanced fund or whatever. But if you wanted to get index funds for those components of the portfolio, you would often have to go and slice it up. And that's fine, and you can do that still

and at a very low cost. But what these companies have started to do is launch these all-in-one funds that do all that work for you. So something like the I-shares suite, XEQT is one that I talk about online a lot. It's not the only one. There's other great ones that other companies like Vanguard and BMO and Global X. They also provide these. It's a one-stop solution.

So they're going to have some kind of Canadian home bias in the portfolio. And there's good evidence to support that. You want to hold more than you would expect from like a global market cap-wading perspective. You would generally want to hold more of your home country. And then the 3% that the Canadian stock market is worth. on a global scale. And then the rest of the other, call it 70% of the portfolio is usually market cap weight, just meaning it's based on the size of all of these other companies all around the world. So you're going to get 35 to 40% U.S. stocks. And the balance, the other 30%

is usually some mix of global international and emerging markets, right? And they're going to rebalance. Different funds have and different providers have different kind of rebalancing schedules and tolerance bans and that type of thing. But it's the type of thing you don't have to think about, right? It's allowing you to outsource the rebalancing, the asset allocation decisions, all of that, you pay a very small premium for it. You hand your money over to say high shares in this case. And you can theoretically just hold that indefinitely. So they're fantastic solutions. When you say you pay a very small premium, I think a lot of Canadians don't recognize just how low the fees are. I mean, index fund fees of course have collapsed. But even the

all in one ETFs, how many basis points are they charging now? It's very low, is it not? Yeah. And they're always the kind of race to zero is still on, right? Like they're always undercutting each other. Vanguard not that long ago came and reduced their fees. They They were the highest fee of all of the providers, but by a few basis points, it was almost not worth considering. And then they just came out and undercut everybody else. And then I shares immediately in response matched their fees. So the MER, the management expense ratio on XEQT, I think is going to come out to about 0.19 after

because it's not free, but it's like close enough to free that it's not worth paying attention to. You know, like if you want to min-max your finances to the nth degree and really optimize the last 1% of that stuff. be my guest for me look I spend my life in personal finance I'm too lazy to care about that like my whole portfolio was X EQT and some variation of one I don't bother with asset location putting US stocks in my RSP and Canadian and I don't care just hold everything in the same place I don't have to think about it I don't even

know what my portfolio was doing I never have to check I never have to revalance it's just I don't even know what the market is doing most days yeah in the same way by the way I follow my hockey pool 20 times more closely that all of my investment accounts and in fact of the when I go and do interviews the media and they say, what do you think about the market right now? I often don't know what the market's been doing the last several days because why would I? I'm not going to make any changes to my overall strategies. So monitoring on an ongoing basis doesn't make much sense. Just for our audience, a basis point is one one hundredth of a percent. So Mark's talking about 0.19% 19 basis points. Think how

inexpensive that is and it trends towards 0.1. It's going to get down to 1 tenth of 1% in the next few years. It is almost a rounding error in terms of impact on returns. And I find it interesting. By the way, listening to you talk about people who are going insane to optimize to the point zero zero one level. Do you not think it's interesting that most of us who are perceived to be experts in the field don't tend to be like that. We do a very, very good job. We're not careless. We're not reckless, but we're not obsessive, compulsively nutty about the point zero one either. It's interesting.

Your clip with Brandon came up recently and he's a CPA and he does some great stuff. So he came on my radar recently just flipping through TikTok and he puts out some really, really great information. And on your podcast, he had said something about, I was like a Jedi mind trick or something, how like, the more and more you kind of, the more complex things get, I think he said, the more you kind of want to revert to simplicity. And I thought that was a pretty eloquent way to think about it. And I've actually really recognized this in myself almost in the past like three years where for most people, it's like, get the big things right. Don't worry about the other stuff. Go live your life. Right.

And I think as planners, we oftentimes want to prove that we know what we're doing and that we have fancy tricks in our pockets that your client. that your clients or the retail consumer might not know about as a way to kind of justify our value. And so I worked with the client recently and he had done such an incredible job of his finances. Like I really, by the end of the planning process, I felt bad because I was like, I don't really have any silver bullets here. You've done such a good job of everything. Everything is hyper optimized. And at the end of the day, you're still going to pay me because I did the work.

But my great recommendation for you was like, good job, man. Like, keep it up. And I asked for feedback after that process. And he's like, it was so really, really valuable to have a third-party objective view to just reinforce that, right? So that validation alone is fine. And I think as planners, like I said, some people might look at a plan like that and just try to force in additional complexity to give the client some perceived value. And I don't think that's necessary. So, yeah, I'm pretty simple with my finances.

I don't do anything wild. I used to rentals. I sold them. I hated the rentals. I'm selling my house and going back to renting. Like my whole portfolio, my entire net worth is about to be in liquid global index funds. I have term insurance. I have my kids RESP.

maxed. When you listen to our podcast, and I think you do on occasion at least, do you ever notice how similar you and I are in a lot of our emotions? We have very similar thinking about a lot of this. We really do. Going back to what you did for that client, I mean, there's great peace of mind when somebody is on the right track, but they go to a true expert and that expert says, yeah, way to go. You're on the right track. Well, now they're going to sleep better at nights. They're not going to deviate from what they're doing. They're not going to overthink it. So there's still a strong value. you add there for sure. I want to go back to the global asset allocation funds. You talked about how they tend to be overweight in the home country. So in Canada, our percentage of the world

weighting is about 3 percent oscillates between 3 and 4. You may have many of these funds as much as 25 to 30, even 33 percent type thing. And you said that can be a good thing. Why is that a good thing? I mean, it de-risk the currency risk a little bit. But why else do you like that? I'd say that's probably the primary benefit is the currency hedging, right? If you're going to live in Canada and spending Canadian dollars and you've got a global portfolio and you're not hedging the rest of the currencies, which in my opinion, you largely shouldn't, right? You want that currency diversification in the portfolio. If you're spending in Canadian dollars and the Canadian dollar goes up relative to these other

components of the portfolio, the returns are going to be muted on other components of the portfolio. I can't remember when it was. I think it was 2015 or 2016. I remember the US dollar jumped against the Canadian dollar by 20%, but the US market was flat. But your portfolio, that component of it was up. 20% just because of the currency risk, which was a benefit to you at that point, but it cuts both

ways, right? And so the currency hedging and making sure that a lot of your portfolio, or a good chunk of it, is in your local spending currency, is a good idea. The other thing is taxes and fees generally. This is maybe less true with index funds these days, but the argument always in the active mutual fund world, was it for fund managers, it's easier to do research on RBC than it is to do research on some Japanese company because they don't have to fly to the factories in Japan and go check out. I don't think that's necessarily true anymore with just how fast information has spread and is available. But the taxes as well because with Canadian equities, for example, you get an eligible dividend tax credit on those. And if Jason Pereira is listening to this,

he's going to hate me for saying this because yes, the corporation has paid tax. And integration works really well, Jason, I know. But at the same time, it's a pretty tax efficient way to hold Canadian stocks, especially in a non-registered portfolio. So a Canadian company pays you a dividend. and you get a dividend tax credit that can reduce or even eliminate a lot of the taxes on that. So when you combine those three things, I think there's a good argument for it. And there's also very good data on this from, I want to say Hendrik Bessimbinder. We interviewed him on the Raston Reminder a while back. And he did a really comprehensive study.

I hope that's who it was. It might have been Scott Sederberg, actually. So we'll have to go back and check after the show. But they did a really comprehensive study, not on just Canadians having home bias, but on the domestic experience of other investors who lived in the, other countries and how holding a global portfolio for those people would have fared versus a global portfolio with home bias in their respective country. So they looked at a German investing in Germany and a global portfolio, but with a German home bias. And generally speaking,

the findings were almost universal that, especially in developed markets, historically at least, you should have some home bias in your portfolio. What's interesting too is, I don't know if it was the same study, but one of the studies said that if you have a bigger home bias, you are more likely to have a longer hold holding period too. Oh, is that right? I'm not sure why that works. I'm wondering if it goes back to the data of 10 and 20 years ago where they said some

people are comforted seeing familiar names. Yeah. In the portfolio. It might be that psychological aspect of it. By the way, I mean, Ben, Felix, if he's listening to this is not going to be happy that you couldn't remember who wrote that paper. I'm so bad with names though. You put their faces in front of me and I can remember people from decades ago.

But if I go to a party and introduce myself to 10 people, I will not remember a single one of their names. It's a curse. Yeah. My dad had the same problem. him. I can remember faces. I cannot remember names. I'm Dave Chiltenman. It's good to have you on the wealthy barber podcast. If your name wasn't actually there in the middle of the screen, I might have forgotten. So thanks for him. Ben right now is not only got the guy's name, but can tell you his

birthday and his social insurance number. So he's not happy that you slept up there. And Ben's built different though. We're not the fib. Oh, man. His memory for that stuff is crazy. You know, you mentioned in that response that you have done something very unusual lately. you have decided to sell your home and you're a very young guy and your wife have decided to become renters. Walk me through the thinking behind that. Pretty big decision. Yeah, it is a pretty big decision. So we live in Squamish, BC, which for those who are unfamiliar, is a really kind of special, beautiful part of the world.

It's halfway between Vancouver and Whistler. And it's a mecca for like mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking, outdoor sports hiking, that kind of stuff. And my wife and I moved up here from Vancouver in 2019 when our son was. was one year old. He was turning one the day after we moved up here actually. And we just thought, you know, Vancouver was great for kind of like a young childless couple. We've got kids time to go to the suburbs. And most of my friends had moved south, east, but we liked squamish because right on the ocean, still you're halfway to Whistler, beautiful scenery. And we had like big dreams to become like outdoor people, you know? Turns out we're not outdoor people.

We can't force it. I went mountain biking twice, almost broke my arm the second time and was like, yeah, this is just not. I'm not that guy, you know? And we were really, we've really enjoyed our time here and the community's great, the people are great, so no complaints. But we've just been talking over the past couple of years. And this was actually going back to me leaving PWL, the genesis of that whole conversation started around 2023, 24. And we thought, okay, what are we going to do with our lives? And the culmination of those conversations was, we're going to move. I'm going to quit my job. We're going to do all these big things. But we didn't know where we were going to move. And so that's part of what we were doing in Europe this summer and

this winter was just, hey, should we move to Europe? Should we do something really crazy? And despite our love for traveling and for Europe. I think it was just too difficult to make a move and too difficult to undo that move if it turned out that it wasn't the right thing for us in the end. And the grandparents wouldn't be too enthused either. Yeah, the grandparents are in Mexico. And so, like, my wife's parents are in Mexico.

So they're like, yeah, go live in Spain so that we can go and travel and then stay at your place in Spain. So just through further conversation, we decided we'd like to move back to Vancouver. We've got a bigger social network there. We know everything about Vancouver and Canada and BC. Let's stay in BC.

So the decision to move was done. I don't want to hold my house as a rental. I hate rentals. Just not for me. I tried the landlord thing, wasn't cut out for it, sold them, never looked back. And it's not very tax efficient, right? Houses are very expensive to own. I think if you looked at like carrying costs.

I talk about it all the time. Yeah. They're so expensive. The property taxes, we've sunk a ton of money into just maintenance and utilities, property taxes, all that kind of stuff, the depreciation. And Ben talked about this too, but the opportunity cost, right? You're holding all of this capital in an asset that historically has not appreciated it as much as the stock market. And that's true even in Vancouver and Toronto. And then you've

got to pay all the fees to actually own it. And then if we were to rent it, then we've got to get more taxable income and manage people. It wasn't happening. Okay, so we're selling. So then the next question is, well, what are we going to do in Vancouver? Are we going to buy or we're going to rent? And so we went and looked actually at some some duplexes and some places in Vancouver. And we just weren't thrilled with kind of the space that we could get in the neighborhoods that we could get them for our budget. And then I started just thinking more about, well, if we sold this house and just invested all that money in, you know, global index funds or whatever, we have all this liquidity, all of the advantages of being able to buy something later if we wanted.

We can be aggressive with buying because it's not subject to a sale or something like that. All the capital is there and invested. We can live off sort of part of the portfolio income. And renting just became more and more appealing to us. And we both had good experiences renting before we bought. Maybe we were lucky, but I don't have. I was never scarred by renting as some people may have been. So then we just said, okay, we're going to rent.

rent. So we went and looked at I think 10 places and just yesterday we got an acceptance offer for a place that we applied for. So we now have a home to go to, which is nice. And did you rent an actually detached home or did you rent a condo? What kind of place? Yeah. So we ended up actually renting a big condo like right downtown Vancouver. And we looked at some really big older houses in South Vancouver. We looked at some townhouses and different areas. So we tried to get a real feel for the different building types and spaces and areas. We knew Vancouver pretty well. So it wasn't like necessarily picking neighborhoods. But of all the places we saw this one condo was the only one where we were like, oh, yeah, this is it. It's got beautiful

views. It's two stories. It's bigger than our house. It's got the amenities. It's got a pool for the kids. You're right downtown. So the most walkable place. You could be transits right there. You know, the ferries to Granville Island and all that kind of stuff are right there. So the location was kind of unbeautable. So that was the only one we applied for. A lot of people with young kids worry about renting because they think there's a chance they could get kicked out at some point. Yep. The landlord goes a different direction. And then they're forced to move and they may have to change schools and that could be psychologically impactful on the kids. What was your thinking there and how do you protect against that? Yeah. So that was actually the biggest downside or detractor

from the decision was like my daughter's three. So we've got a couple years before she needs to start school. We've got space there. But my son is conditioning up grade two this year and he'll be going into grade three. So I actually built an app just for us and I brought in as much data as I could on the Vancouver map. So I brought in things like protected view cones. I brought in things like school catchment areas. I even got an API, some data that plotted the trees on streets in Vancouver. So I have this like really cool overlay. Remember moments ago you said you weren't nuts. You just went through it told us you weren't kind of nutty and then now you're saying I'm nutty. This is how we wanted to make the decision too. Is it just like, well, how do I know

where the low crime areas are where the best schools are, the catchment zones and borders for those schools, the predictive view cones. So if we did buy something there, they're not going to put a skyscraper in front of us and ruin the view, that type of thing. So we brought in all this data. The tricky thing with schools is that the catchment areas are really, really small. So even if you were to rent a place and then buy within two kilometers of that place, there's a really good chance you're in a different catchment area. And so that's something we're going to, I think, have to manage, especially because we're moving downtown.

There's four elementary schools and downtown Vancouver's 30-minute walk end-to-end. So there's a lot of density there. So the probability is even if we bought something downtown, it could be somewhere else. So you can apply for cross-catchment schools. That's something. We're going to put our kids in tons of extracurricular activities. We have friends in Vancouver. We have some family in Vancouver as well.

So I think socially they're going to be pretty well adapted. And the nice thing about moving like schools is your buddies from the old school are not that far away if you're living in Vancouver. Right. They're still really close. So after school hangouts and that kind of stuff become pretty easy to manage. But it is a real thing. It doesn't matter as much until they get to high school, you know, where you have those friends that you're bonding with in a different kind of environment as you become young adults. It's not just saying it doesn't matter at all, but it doesn't matter as much until that age.

But you've obviously given a lot of thought. You also mentioned that you weren't the landlord type person. Yeah. That it just didn't go for you. What about that experience left a bad taste in your mouth? So it's funny. We generally had really good tenants too. Like I never had a nightmare tenant story or anything like that.

Never had late payments or vacancies. I used property managers as well who managed parts of it. I find when you use a property manager, you're basically now you're just managing a property manager instead of a tenant. There's not always a huge benefit there. It was little things like just property tax bills coming in the mail, interest rates going up on the variable rate lines of credit we had on the property that we had used to finance it. Not that there was in any way like we weren't at risk financially at any point, but it was just like there's this capital tied up here. We're getting this cash flow, this taxable income that we largely don't need at this point.

And I don't like the lack of liquidity that for me that comes with owning rentals. And the returns that weren't great. Like we had one in Vancouver and we held it for, I think, six years and we actually lost money on it. Like when we sold it, it was worth less than what we had paid for. And then we had one in Squamish and it had gone up quite a bit, which kind of offset. But at the end of the day, I was just, when I bought my first one, I was like, I'm going to build an empire. I'm going to build, I'm going to be one of those real estate guys. And we got to the second one and just went, this is just not our thing.

You know, it's interesting. Like I'm pro home ownership. You know, when people listen to the podcast, they hear me trying to give both sides and Ben giving both sides and I get criticism online. But I own my own home home and my kids own their own homes now. I'm pro home ownership. But I find it fascinating how when you sit down with very. smart people, how few of them recognize how much they've had to spend on their home over the years in terms of ongoing maintenance, small improvements, and of course, major refurbishings.

They're completely out of touch with the math of that. Because in Canada, we have the tax-free capital gains on sale of principal residence. You don't have to chronicle your capital expenditures on an ongoing basis. Do not agree that it's kind of wacky how to touch people are? 100%. And I've dealt with hundreds of clients who have rental properties and not one of them. has been able to tell me what their after tax return is total on their property over the whole period, including your cash flows from rentals, including your taxes that you had to pay, including all

of the stratophies when they were condos and refurbishing costs and property taxes, give me your net after tax annualized return over your holding period. Never had anybody actually give me an answer to that. Some people have great spreadsheets, but they still are not benchmarking the returns against actual alternative. No, because the money's coming and going at different times. You have to answer that into pretty advanced software to give you that number. But of course, you should be doing that because you have to compare it to alternatives. You should know to some extent. And I couldn't agree with you more. There's a real lack of knowledge on that front. But even our homeowners, not for landlords. I find that they're out of touch of that. Like, I can't tell you how many friends I've had

say, well, I bought the house at 500,000. I sold it at $1.5 million. I tripled my money. And then you see, oh, remember, you did that $450,000 rental. Yeah, yeah, you probably should count that in the math. Like, it's wacky that people do that. And that's exactly it. They'll say, well, I bought this house for $70,000 in 1962, and now it's worth $2 million. Right. And so they just take the start point, the end point, and they think the difference is the after tax return. And it's, of course, it's not. And I'm not against homeownership. I've been a homeowner for over a decade. Financial planning is just about tradeoffs. That's all it is. It's just tradeoffs. And as long as you can make intelligent decisions and collect the right data and think about your decisions

properly and understand the tradeoffs you're making, then I don't think you can make a a bad decision. You can have bad outcomes, but I don't think you can make a bad decision if you approach it that way. So for us, this is a good decision. For you owning your house is a good for many people. One or the other is good. And you could get unlucky.

We could move and a year later they sell the place and we're homeless again, right? That absolutely could happen. But that's something we factored into our decision making up front. So if that happens, it won't be a panic. It won't be regret. It'll just be, okay, now we have to reanalyze the decision. Yeah, no, I think you. You said all that very well.

Okay, you tweeted out yesterday a little piece on the 4% rule. And I want to talk a little bit about that because a lot of our listeners are early retirement or within five to seven years of retirement. They're thinking a lot about retirement income, et cetera. Talk us, talk to us about what the rule is. And then both you and I are going to come at the rule a little bit and talk about some of the negatives and how it's overused and abused. Yeah.

So the 4% rule was created by Bill Bengin. And essentially. what he did is he looked at different asset mixes using historical U.S. stock returns and U.S. bond returns, and he applied some withdrawal rates to that portfolio and said, if you had held a portfolio of, let's say, 50% U.S. stocks and 50% U.S. bonds, and you withdrew X percent of that portfolio per year and then increased that withdrawal every year based on the inflation rate, how many times did you run out of money? Right. So what he was, I think, trying to hone in on is what is the probability of running out of money on an inflation-adjusted basis if you spend some

percentage of your portfolio every single year, different asset mixes, right? Now, he didn't, he never called it the 4% rule. It got kind of perverted after the study and became almost gospel in early retirement communities and that type of thing. And it got perverted to the point where people go, you can always just infinitely spend 4% of your money and never touch the principle. And that is not at all what the study showed, not even close, right? In his study, you actually ran out of money sometimes, not just had to encroach on the principle. You literally ran out of money altogether, right? So I think the 4% rule, I have mixed emotions on it because we were talking earlier about how like we want to shift back to simplicity a lot of the time. I think it's too simple

to be used as a, it's not a rule and it's certainly not a decumulation plan. I think for young people who are thinking about how much money am I going to need to save to retire, like it can be a bit of a north star, like aim towards it. But do not mistake the first. 4% rule for a legitimate retirement plan because it's certainly not that. You did a great job yesterday. I thought I really liked your tweets yesterday. I thought you summarized some of the key aspects of the way he put that together that don't get enough attention. You talked about you have to know the portfolio construction, which was 50% US big cap, large cap stocks and 50% bonds. And, you know, he's trying to make it last at least the 30 years.

But one of the things that I've been astonished never got attention with his original work is he didn't include any ongoing cost to have the money managed. Right. And at the time he did it, of course, nobody was in low cost index funds and ETFs. You were in actively managed funds or he had a portfolio manager often charging one to two percent. That's part of the withdrawal.

So I mean, if you're taking out four and only matching market returns and then the manager was taking an additional one to two, then obviously that changes the math dramatically. Are you not surprised that nobody talks about that part of it? Now that you're mentioning that, I want to go back and I believe you, but if he's just using index returns, which are gross and fee returns, then you're absolutely right. And I think the other thing is that behavior is impossible to account for in this, right? It assumes the perfectly rational investor holds the portfolio properly, times their withdrawals

exactly how the study showed them, never panics, never sells, never makes any big mistakes. And so that and to your point, the fees that would otherwise accumulate, even transaction fees, which yes are largely, you know, a thing of the past these days, but they weren't certainly when he was writing this stuff, right? Like I said, it's been kind of abused and perverted into this kind of law, this immutable law, and it's really far from it. Like, and it doesn't include taxes, right? If that's a TFSA versus an RSP, it's a totally different withdrawal rate that's going to sustain your retirement, right? There's a lot that it doesn't include.

So I don't like people going, well, I've got a million bucks. I can spend $40,000 forever. No, that's probably not the case. But if you're like 25, 30, just really thinking about how much money do I think within a range of possibilities I'm going to need to retire? Sure. look at the 4% and roll as a starting point, but get some professional advice along the way. Yeah, what Mark means by that is if you think you're going to need $100,000 in today's dollars, just multiplied by 25, right, to get to the 2.5 million, then the 4% takes you back to the 100,000,

et cetera. And again, it's a general guideline early in life. And neither of us hates this, by the way. We don't want to come across. In fact, I think Bill added to the conversation and did some very good things with this. But to Mark's point, it's become almost gospel. And I'm always amazed by how many people quoted, who've never really read it. or look behind some of the important aspects of it,

you made a vital point last night when you talked about how that was based on the US market performance of the large cap and of the bonds. And if you move it over to other countries and most people in those countries, of course, have most of their money invested in that spot. Then the math changes very, very significantly. Yep. Yeah, because to your point, it is based on what is for the most part, one of the best performing stock markets in history on a very state.

economic time over that period. If you move it to other countries, I think I want to say it was Morningstar who did this study. I was actually trying to find it last night and I couldn't find the study, which was interesting, but they did a study and they looked at the safe withdrawal rates for other countries. And I can't remember if it was Italy or Japan that had the lowest one, but it was 0.2%. Well, probably Japan logically just because it was so such a poor performer. Yeah, it would be ultra low. Yeah, exactly. And Italy was up there as well. But even other developed markets had really low withdrawal rates historically. Canada was second highest, I think, in that study next to the U.S. I think we came out at like 3.6% or something like that. Although I did

find a study from Dr. Wade Fowe yesterday that it was measured over a different period and his study found that Canada's withdrawal rate historically was actually higher than the U.S. is something like 4.45, which is really interesting. But that's also the problem with this rule. If you run the analysis every single year, you will get a different number, right? Because you're dropping rolling periods. periods over time, you're going to find some years drop off and a new year is added. So even Bill Bangan himself went and updated the number. I think at one point it was 5% and then he dropped it to 4.7. So it's a backwards looking phenomenon and I would never want to assume that history is going to repeat. Even if you're a Canadian investor investing only in US stocks, you have to assume

that history repeats in order to actually use that rule in a meaningful way, right? So if you're holding a globally diversified portfolio, I think Ben Felix and the PWL guys found that it was like 2.7% is actually, I think, the number that they use for the safe withdrawal rate, right? So it just changes. And it's one of those things you can just cherry pick and slot whatever data you want in there and get different results. So is that useful? Are you finding more and more people you deal with have a heavy equity component later in life much different than 20 and 30 years ago when I started? That's a good question. I would say that I don't know about later in life. I would say anecdotally, it appears to me that more people are becoming more comfortable holding stocks than

they used to be. And again, this is totally anecdotal. Now, whether you should hold stock later in life or not, I think is different. But especially because of firms like Questrate and wealth simple and all these great online tools now, you can just go in one click and buy a diversified portfolio. And because I think we've seen a lot of pretty crazy times in the market over the past 20 years, we've seen 2008, 2009, we've seen 2020, and people have sat through that and been like, oh, okay, It's usually really sharp, recovers in a couple of years. I can tolerate that. I can hold more stocks.

And that could be true. We don't know what the next crash is going to look like. But I do think that there's more education out there. There's more democratization of portfolio management, easy access. Like Twitter and Wealth Simple just announced this thing where you can click on a stock symbol on Twitter and it'll take you right to your Wealth Simple account. I don't like that. But that's how easy it is to buy stocks.

So long answer to the short question. I don't like it either. And I got a lot of flack for saying I didn't like it. But no, that's going to be a net negative for people. It's going to make them overtrade. They'll read some hot tip on Twitter from somebody they like and next thing you know, they own the stock, but they're not following when that person's going to sell. And of course, outperforming the market is so, so difficult.

All right, I'm going to go a little bit different direction. Who do you watch in the industry? Like you're a very bright guy. Who out there do you listen to US or Canada that you think adds value to the conversation on the financial planning front? Great question. You've had a lot of them on the show. Like the usual suspects is kind of

The crew I grew up with in social media, right? The people that I gravitated towards and became friends with are all people that you know and have had on the show like Ben and Jason Pereira, Aaron Hector, Julia. And I have really impressed with Julia. She's unbelievable. I really am because she has a rare mix. She's obviously extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, but great communicator. Yeah.

And brings across her information in a very friendly, non-intimidating fashion. Yep. And again, that depth of knowledge mixed with that kind of friendly, take away, you know, the fears of the person sitting on the other side of the desk, that's a fairly rare combination. Like, she's a talented person. Yeah, and I've never seen her at work with clients, but knowing her personally and seeing to your point how she communicates and what a leader she is, I think she's got, and I'm assuming here, I think she's got a really good handle on the emotional and family dynamic side of money. Like she tends to deal with, I think,

larger business owners and that. And I feel, despite her technical prowess, she's probably a really great financial therapist in that sense and understands how to have conversations not only with the client but with their kids or grandparents as well and really bring families together around around the financial question so I'd love to see her in action like in a client meeting because she's phenomenal Jason Pereira is very bright I've never met anybody who speaks that quickly he listens to podcasts at 3x speed and I just refuse to believe it because it's inhuman but yeah I said to him if that data from the old book the bell curve is right that speed of speech correlates to intelligence, he may be the sharpest man to ever walk the earth.

Oh my God. It's hard to keep up to that guy. Yeah. He's very bright. He and I both use a tool called whisper flow, which is a text to speech. I like can speak and set like when I'm writing emails, I'm just dictating to my computer. And it tracks your words per minute over time. And so he posted his a little while back.

And I think his was like 140 or 150 words per minute. Mine's at 183. So just saying, Jason. Yeah, that's impressive. That's impressive. His are bigger words he'll argue. Yes. Like yours are seed dog run, et cetera.

That obviously tilts the, tilts the mat. Like I'm gonna have to, you know, been there. So, and what about the plain bagel? Do you listen to a Richard, he's got some great stuff? Richard Coffin. Yeah, I'm not gonna lie. I don't consume a ton of content anymore. And I don't know, like I have trouble sitting down and listening to a podcast or

even watching a video. And I don't know if it's something within me or if it's just my attention spin or if it's just I'm trying to do other. things, but even the rational reminder, I haven't listened to it since I used to host it and I don't listen to it. You just tell people, it's gone downhill since I've left. I'm not even listening to anymore. It's not worth it.

And these are all incredible productions. And I know the plain bagel has, I think, like over a million subscribers. I know Ben, he's outstrived. Yeah, he's outstead. Yeah, I know he's really good. He does a lot of like macro and economic type stuff as well, I think beyond just the personal finance. I know who he is.

I know he's very popular. I know that he's very well respected amongst people that I respect a lot. But I haven't, if you asked me, have I sat down and watched the single one of his videos, probably not. That's interesting. You should do it sometimes. But I think we're all battling ADHD, don't you think, with screens and the way life is gone? I have trouble now sitting and focusing on any of this stuff too. I have an assessment this week, actually. It's not something it had ever occurred to me. And then I do have some friends, close friends with ADHD, who have always told me, you definitely have ADHD. And I'm like, nah, that doesn't make any

sense. And then I was talking to Claude, like using AI to ask it some other stuff. And Claude said, back up a second, does this, this and this apply to you? I was like, oh, you just described me to a T. And it was like, bro, you have ADHD, but we assessed immediately. And I was like, I know it's AI. You have to take it with a grain of salt. So then I did an online test. And it was like, yeah, you should probably get it checked out.

So I have an assessment next week actually to see if that's the case. That's fascinating. Listen, I'm not an expert in this, but I think when Claude is calling you bro, it's maybe time to cut back the Claude use just a little bit. Okay. You may be going a little too far. It's because I've put in his instructions to be like, really friendly and colloquial with me.

And so it feels more like a friend. You don't have a lot of friends and you're counting on this. Okay. Now, is your wife into all of this? Is she into personal finance? Uh, nope, not really. It doesn't care.

It's funny, by osmosis, she understands a lot about personal finance because we talk about it all the time and she overhears me and she, like, has just picked it up and just soaked it up and she's a smart lady. So she does know a lot about it. I think she's never really needed to be interested because she just trusts me to handle it. Trust. So I wouldn't say she.

She's not interested in it. Like, it's our family and our family money. So she has a real concern there in the sense that she's a stakeholder in this. But she's always just trusted me and has better things to do with her time, I think. Yesterday or two years ago when you announced you were selling and becoming a renter, I immediately sent you a note saying, I'm assuming your wife left you. Yeah, sure enough, she's going with you. So it's good news.

It's good news. Who knows what comes from there. Now, you've also become a bit of a legend on Twitter for calling out charlatans. So you may not be following the top voices as much as you once did, but you're not afraid to look at some of the advice out there and say, what the heck. Give me a couple examples of that. Oh, yeah. That's probably the most fun that I have on social media is calling that stuff out, right? Because it's so dangerous.

And I think people really don't understand how detrimental this kind of stuff can be. Sure. It's a free speech platform and you're free to say whatever you want. But if you are going to say things that you are not willing to be scrutinized over that are. not backed up by any data and are just vibes and feelings, then you can expect that somebody like me is probably going to comment and try to put you in your place. I get blocked a lot by these people, like it's their first reaction. And it infuriates me not because I got blocked, but because now they've curated their echo chamber even further, right? And so they do this where they get dissenting voices

and opinions who correct them on stuff. They block them. And then their followers don't see any of those dissenting opinions. And it's like how I think a cult is created. It's just you just block out all that dissension, you create this echo chamber of your followers or believe everything you have to say because apparently you never say anything wrong because nobody calls you out. So I call it Robert Kiyosaki like on a near daily basis. Yeah, I love those. He is unbelievable. He's been predicting the end of the market since I think he said the other day his first book, which he called Rich Dad's Prophecy, which yep, you got to be very sure of yourself if you're going to call yourself a profit. But I think he said he wrote that in 2005 or something. Right. And he's basically

has always called for like a generational market crash collapse. And here's the thing. He's been right a few times. Sure, broken clock. But he never reverts. So when the market does go down and crash, he never goes,

ha, I told you, but now is the time to go buy stocks. He goes, no, we're just getting started kind of thing. And so I like to call that out because he has millions of followers.

And tons of people see his stuff. And I think people should be aware that he's been doing this for decades. And he's probably done some real damage to people. Now he's been really bullish on silver and gold and Bitcoin. And so that side of his argument has held up really, really well. But if he's predicting one market totally incorrectly and others correctly, at some point you have to stop and ask yourself, does he actually have some predictive power? Or is this just blind luck and survivorship bias?

Right? Like surely if he can predict gold, silver, and Bitcoin, he could have got it right with stocks, but he didn't. So yeah, I call him out a lot. Market forecasters in general, economic forecasters even, I don't put a lot of weight on, never have, even when I was relatively young. but when you get to me my age, you realize it's just a game that people can't win, can't win consistently.

They can get it right on occasion to your point, the broken clock. Amazing to me, by the way, how many people we have out there, including some very fine people I know who've been economic forecasters for 30 years have been quite bad at it and still are invited on show after show after show to give their forecasts. People want it. Like, it's, I agree with you. Well said. Well said.

But people want that. So that's what they're going to put it on the show, right? People listen. They tune in. They make decisions without. information and they never verify people's track records or nobody's keeping score on a lot of these people, right? There's no Hall of Fame for market forecasters. So that's why. Yeah, it would be more of a hall of shame in that case because there's been so few that have been good over the years.

Okay, let's wrap up with our topic of the first visit, TFSAs versus RSPs. It was not our video. I wish we could take credit. But if you not noticed in the last year that more people out there are getting back to seeing the light and starting to talk about this in the proper fashion that for a while there, it was nutty. I mean, you and I actually, this is how we came together. Yeah. Remember, I called you because people told me, you and I were saying the same things about how people were against RSPs to a level that made no sense whatsoever. And you and I had a conversation about it on the phone, but I have noticed some good things in the last 12 months. More people saying, you know what? We went too far and RSPs can still play a very positive role

for most Canadians. I won't say I've noticed it, but I am glad that you have noticed it. I'm glad people have turned around. Now I've learned you haven't noticed anything. You're not listening to anybody. You're not watching anything. You're not you're completely immune to all this. It's funny because yesterday in the past couple of days, I've tweeted a few things and I was like, I haven't tweeted stuff in a long time, like long, long time. And it felt really good to have conversations again when people were commenting and engaging and some people were calling me an idiot and that's fine too. But I was like, ah, this is, I remember how fun this was. So I think it might get back into the kind of more regular posting. But yeah, I largely tried to kind of not intentionally tune it out,

about because I was less reliant on it, like social media was for me how I became quasi successful in my industry. I developed a following as it was really important to me. But when I no longer needed that following and that I kind of had quit my job and I wasn't taking new clients and that kind of stuff, I just gave myself permission to just like back off and not comment. And then once you get into a slump, it's really hard to go back into posting regularly again as well.

But that is something I really want to get back into is posting more and spending a bit more time there. But also you had two young kids. And it's not like you consciously are thinking, I'm much busier now with kids. I can't post. But, you know, kids keep you pretty busy and certain things in your life for good reason drift away. And that's probably one of them.

Yeah. And even when I was posting regularly, I was largely blocking off an entire day per week. And I was like Monday, no client meetings, no paperwork, no nothing. I'm going to write and research and then schedule my posts out for a whole week. It does take quite a bit to be that consistent. And that's with writing with Twitter. Like I'm so impressed by some of these people who do YouTube and TikTok because is that takes way more effort to put out a single piece of content, right?

You know this with the podcast, right? So tweeting is easy because I can just fire a throwaway tweet while I'm waiting to pick my son from school or whatever, but you can't really film a YouTube video doing that. And you said your son's in grade two now? Yeah, he's in grade two. But he's 16 years old. So that's troubling. What's gone wrong there?

Well, maybe you got my brains and not my wife. I don't know. But yeah, really. Yeah. Okay, I'm going to wrap up with this question. You're obviously again, very sharp. What have you changed your mind on in the last five? in 10 years. So as you've actually sat across the table from clients, is there anything you took in the

courses? You know what? In real life, this doesn't translate to the extent that I thought it would or I maybe was wrong on that or the books were wrong. Is there anything that jumps to mind? I've really put you on the spot here. I apologize. No, no, no, no. That's a really great question. You know, there's a couple of things I think I've ping ponged on. And we talked about this a little bit when we were talking about manufacturing complexity for people and their finances. A few things I've softened up on, I'll say. One is dividend investing. I was quite critical of dividend investing. You were. And I have not come around to dividend investing is better than anything else, but especially having no income since I kind of semi-retired. I totally get the allure of dividends now. Even if mathematically,

there's no difference, say, the psychological benefits of having that income come in every month, I can totally understand why people focus on that. So I can make a good case, I think, for dividends, being generally a fine investment strategy. Assuming you've got the other things covered like diversification and a global portfolio and stuff, you want to go after dividends. I'm not going to beat you up about it anymore. I'd say that's one thing.

Permanent insurance, I think, is an area that is just so complicated and nuanced that it's really hard to have a blanket opinion on that as a whole space. And I don't know that I've ever been critical of the entire space, but I'm really have always been critical about that industry and how permanent insurance, like whole life insurance and universal life insurance is, oversold to people that don't need it. And I still believe that to be true. I just will say that there are

absolutely cases where it is the best tool for the job and certainly does make sense. It's not an all or nothing proposition. Other than that, like I said, like we talked about earlier, going from that last mile optimization back to getting the 95% correct and then like you're probably okay. And if you really want to nerd out on the last 5% then do that. But I think most people just need to get the basics, right? Yeah, I agree with all of that. You know, one of the things I've noticed about the dividend investors over the years. Very positive thing is they're less likely to panic during a market downturn. Yep. I think the fact that they see that income coming in has made them very, very comfortable and okay, we'll get through this and anything that makes people stay the course during the top

times is a positive. So that has to be, that has to be mentioned as well. And I think you and I agree in that last 5% for sure. So I think those are both very good points. You're 100% right about permanent insurance. I once did geek out on that to the nth degree. In fact, I would say in the early 90s, because I took so much criticism from the industry, I almost became a bit obsessive compulsive about understanding the policies, the complicated math and everything else. And I'm like you. I think in certain cases, for example, a corporation that has excess retained earnings that's for estate planning reasons, if you buy the right type of policy and get solid

advice, it's pretty tough to beat the math. But I still think it's oversold to the general population who hasn't maxed out TFSAs, RSP's, paid off non-deductible debt, that type of thing. But again, you're right. You can't really go all in anything. Like a lot of people blast annuities. Well, I still think a regular annuity in some instances can play a helpful role for people's retirement income generation.

And Mac, I'm always surprised how much criticism they do take because occasionally they make a lot of sense to me. 100%. Yeah. There are very few things, if any, that I can think of that I am wholesale against always at all times for all people when it comes to personal finance. Right. Like you said, annuities, I can find, I can manufacture situations just like in

case studies where that obviously makes sense. Permanent insurance, same thing. Dividend investing, whatever it might be. And that's why I said earlier, everything is about tradeoffs. And I think if you understand how to measure tradeoffs, then you'll make good financial decisions. And it doesn't really matter. Not that it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't really matter if you're going to come at this from these things are good and these things are bad. I think you're setting yourself up to lock yourself into a position long term that you either shouldn't be in or you're going to ignore options that might become available to you later on that could be really, really valuable. So I think you can never really take a hard line stance on a product or a strategy. It's all just so personal. Yeah, you said all that

very well. And I mean, I loved earlier when you used the word tool. It's better to think of these that way because then you recognize in certain instances that tool can indeed be very helpful. And I think that's a philosophy we have to bring. And you know, you've twice gone back to your tradeoff comment and it's a good one. That is a very good comment. All financial decisions are indeed tradeoffs. And when people step back, can think of it that way. I think it makes their judgment a little bit more clear on all of this. So as always, I've enjoyed our time together.

You're an excellent guest. You're a sharp guy. I'm excited about the new business. When does it actually fully launch website up, the host of bang? Yeah, it's funny. The website's done. I just haven't put it online. So the company is operational right now.

Like I am, I do have a small wait list already, but I haven't put up the website because I've already got a wait list and I don't want to just generate a two year wait list like some of my colleagues in the industry have. It is finance. when that launches. I can launch it any time at the click of a button. I'm just holding off. But you must be pretty excited that you've already got a wait list. That's neat. That's really cool. Well, it's incredible. And it's such a great community, the planning community, because I'd say about half of that way list is from referrals from other advice only planners who specialize with physicians

who have such long wait lists that they feel really bad that they can't go and help those people sooner. And so they've been referring business to me, which is, speaks, I think, to the type of community we have in the planning space here. Everyone just lifts each other up and we don't feel like we're competing with each other. It's all kind of abundance mindset type stuff. But yeah, I get two emails today from somebody who referred to more clients to me. People still find me on Twitter. They find me on LinkedIn. They've heard me on the rational reminder. And so they know in public. So I get new clients all the time, which is great. But I don't know what I want to do. I don't know if I should just raise my prices until everyone goes away or if

I should hire somebody to help me with the work or what I should do. But it's great. I think you'll probably end up doing a combination. I know you. You're not going to raise your prices dramatically to the point you don't feel it's a great value proposition relative to what other people are doing, but you may raise them. But I think you will bring in a person or two over time because it'll help you to scale a little bit, but it'll help other people. If you believe that you're doing a good job, you want to be able to do it with more of the physicians over time.

Well, we wish you nothing about the best. You know, when you think about the young planners coming to this industry, the people in their late 20s, early 30s who are really good. I'll say this to him and I know you'll agree. Getting into the advice only end of the business, one thing that's wonderful about it is the word of mouth with the client group and that you often don't have to do any marketing. If you're doing a wonderful job with the clients, they will take care of your marketing, especially when you're specific to an industry like you are.

If you get together with seven positions, they all go, wow, Mark was amazing. Of course they're going to tell their colleagues. Yeah. Yeah. It's difficult to pick a niche and stick with a niche and actually market a niche, I think, because we like in any business, the concept of potentially turning away bad fit clients for that niche is really difficult to get over, especially when you're younger starting out. Like the idea of somebody wanting to work with you and you saying, sorry, no, I work

with this type of client, and you don't fit into that. But I don't want to say I mentor a lot of people, but a lot of young advisors do you reach out to me on LinkedIn and just try to book time to chat about the business and where they want to go and stuff. And so I spend a good amount of time just talking to young advisors across the country and just trying to point them in the right direction. And I am seeing a trend of people thinking more in specialization and thinking more in niches. And I think that's going to long term be the right plan for a lot of these planners.

And it benefits the client basis. It benefits the client hugely. Yeah. No, no question. All right. Well, we'll let you go. Are you just going to go for a long walk. talk to your best friend, Claude now? Is that where the afternoon's heading?

Probably take a nap, I need some lunch. My kids are at school and daycare. I might play some video games. But who knows? No, I actually have a client meeting today. It's a rare client meeting. Yeah, that's good. Listen, it's our pleasure. Thanks for coming back on again. We'll do it another time. Yep, it's great. Great to be here. Thanks again, Dave.