We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC075: Talking w/ Your Advisor About Bitcoin w/ Morgen Rochard (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 02:31 - What attracted Morgen into finance. 05:56 - How has being a CFA charter holder and being a Bitcoiner contrasted? 17:52 - What are the issues most financial ...advisors have with Bitcoin? 24:46 - Why do most financial advisors say "crypto" not Bitcoin? 31:06 - How do elderly people that are dependent on a fixed income strategy navigate the current markets? 38:32 - What's the best way for Bitcoin'ers to optimize their taxes? 46:34 - What do you say to couples that have different risk aversions? *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Morgen's Twitter. Morgen's Book. Morgen's Origin Wealth Advisers. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Are you looking to start investing? Check out our article on How to Invest in Stocks: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: SimpleMining AnchorWatch Human Rights Foundation Onramp Superhero Leadership Unchained Vanta Shopify Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the podcast where we're talking about Bitcoin. One of the common questions I hear all the time from people is how they can have a conversation with their financial planner about Bitcoin without being shut down. As a result, I have Morgan Richard with me today to talk about those exact issues and counter arguments. Additionally, she talks about how to optimize your taxes, among many other interesting topics. So without further delay, here's my chat with Morgan. Listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish.
Starting point is 00:00:41 All right. So like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Morgan. Morgan, welcome to the show. I have known you for a few years, but not really like known you well. I know you through Pierre. Yeah. But I feel like we've known each other for a very long time, even though we're... I feel that way too, yeah, because you've been a household name for quite a while.
Starting point is 00:01:11 I guess since Pierre was on your show a long time back. Yeah, years ago. Yeah. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm thrilled to talk to you. And we had a little bit of a chance to hang out in Miami. Would you think of the conference? I've asked a few people this so far.
Starting point is 00:01:23 What did you think of the conference? Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I think I had probably a different experience than most because we brought our kids with us. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, which was, honestly, it was such a joy to see my son's face about everything. Our son is four and our daughter's one. And our daughter obviously didn't partake at all.
Starting point is 00:01:42 But our son, he went to the first day with all the vendors and everything and ran around. He played ski ball. He had a blast. And then the second day, he actually watched your panel with Pierre. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we were in the front row. And he started to get antsy.
Starting point is 00:01:54 So I had him doodle on an app. It was like this glow in the dark app I was able to find where he could doodle glow in the dark things. And so he did that. And every now and then he'd pick his head up. And he'd look at his dad. And he would go back to doing what he was doing. And I just found it so like sort of, it was just sort of sweet. I'm like, maybe he's getting some Bitcoin stuff through usmosis.
Starting point is 00:02:13 But yeah, so I didn't get to attend a lot of the daytime stuff. I did attend a lot of the nighttime stuff, which was really nice because I got to talk to a lot of people and meet people who I've known online for a long time. So that was really great. Well, Dad was crushing it on the stage. Yeah, he did really well. Yeah, he did really well. Yes. He, I mean, as always.
Starting point is 00:02:29 He always does, though, yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's start here. I'm curious about why did you become a professional at financial valuation and planning and going down this path. Like, what were you attracted to early on that you would choose this? So it's a great question.
Starting point is 00:02:50 So I grew up actually always wanted to be a doctor, which is, you know, exactly why you would imagine I'd be in finance to this day. And so it was literally like, I don't know, it wasn't maybe because I grew up as like in a Jewish household and that's just sort of a thing or you're a doctor or a lawyer or something like that. But I mean, I don't remember my parents really forcing that down my throat. I remember always just saying I wanted to be a doctor like my dad. And my dad's actually a dentist.
Starting point is 00:03:14 So he was hoping that maybe one day I would realize he was a dentist, not a doctor, and go down that path. But everything I did all through growing up and then in college was to become a doctor until I interned at this hospital. And they had me changing bed sheets and doing a bunch of things, which, you know, if you're like one of these people like me growing up where you think like, oh, I can do a lot more than that. you have me changing bed sheets and I just found it really disgusting. And then people were coughing.
Starting point is 00:03:41 It was just like, it was really not my environment. And I'm thinking to myself, like, I don't like coughing and I don't like germs and the bed sheets and all these things. Like, maybe this really isn't the right environment for me. I started second guessing it. And I had other members of my family who were in finance. So I started talking to other members of my family about what that potentially would look like. And I got really lucky getting a job as an intern out of college on the floor of an equity options trading firm. We worked on the floor of the amex and I got coffee for people. That was literally what I did. I was like a runner girl and I would get coffee and I would deliver messages and this was back in 2008 and volatility was like through the roof back then. So options traders actually did very, very well. So while everybody else, you know, was watching the world burn, options traders were making markets and were generally long volatility and we're having a good time. So that's where I like got my feet wet and started learning. So I learned
Starting point is 00:04:30 basically to be an equity options trader. And I did that for a couple of years. And then, you know, the trade flipped, right? So the VIX went to 90, but then after that, it just sort of, it came back down, but then it started to sort of creep down. And I don't know if anyone really remembers what went on in 2009, but it was like the VIX went from 60 and then it went to like 45. And then from 45, it just sort of slowly creeped down from 45 to about, you know, where it is today, basically. So that's like the worst case scenario for options traders. Like it's like you've got like, you're bleeding out money for your options. You're paying the time decay every single day. The firm started to lose money. And it seemed really obvious to me that I was not really somebody who they
Starting point is 00:05:09 were excited to keep on, like they were going to keep on like their veteran traders. So I ended up getting a job in wealth management at Merrill Lynch because that's who was hiring in 2010. And that ended up being how my career ended up where I was. So I worked for this large private wealth team and I started learning about what private client was about. And I still did a lot of trading because if anyone knows what goes on at these large warehouses, it's a lot of trading and not really so much long-term investing and, you know, hearing about what the research desk wants to do and then calling your client and telling them to do it. And it's a lot of like mumbo-jumbo garbage. But from there, I was like, well, I really want to be a portfolio manager. So in order to do that,
Starting point is 00:05:45 I need to have a CFA. Like, if I don't have a CFA, then I'm nobody in this field. So I started studying for it. Which is a big test, multiple tests, right? Because you've got all the different phases. And for people that might not be familiar with the CFA, I mean, that is. is a major undertaking for somebody to get chartered as a CFA. Yeah. So I had this like, I had a whole thing in my mind. I was like, okay, I'm very type A if you haven't already noticed. And so in my mind, I was like, okay, Martin Luther King Day is when I have to start. And I'll put up my calendars and I'll do everything and I'll mark off every single day. And that's literally what I did. I went to work at seven in the morning. I'll come home at seven at night and I would study and I would check off my boxes.
Starting point is 00:06:24 And I, you know, had this big calendar on my wall. And I did that every single year for three years and I got my CFA. So then I was like, okay, now I'm going to be a portfolio manager, but that's not what happened, right? What happened was is that there were a lot of people who got CFAs, especially in New York, which was the market I was in. And nobody really wanted somebody who was doing wealth management to, like, it was really hard to switch from, you know, the sell side back over to the buy side, as they put it. So then I was like, well, I kind of like wealth management. I just don't really like where I'm doing it. And I know people are starting firms. Why shouldn't I just go out and start my own?
Starting point is 00:06:58 that's at the time, like in my 28-year-old mind, that seemed like a really good idea. But I think like now a little bit more risk-averse with kids and marriage and all and all the other things, maybe I wouldn't have taken that leave at that time. But at that time of my life, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I had always been really good personally with my money. I had saved enough so I actually could make this off-the-cuff decision to go start a business. So that's what I did. I got rid of my apartment.
Starting point is 00:07:22 I broke my lease early. I moved in with my parents. I did basically everything I could to get like. Yeah. Yeah, as long of a runway as possible. And yeah, now here we are. Eight years later, I have my own wealth management firm. And it all started really as portfolio managery type. And then I realized, well, this isn't really going to work. This isn't what people want. People want financial planning. They need financial planning. They're asking me questions that I can't, I don't have answers to it. It's not within the confines of the CFA curriculum here. So I ended up studying for the CFP at that point. And that's basically how my firm evolved. And then from there, it's just gone more and more down the financial planning route. to the point where now we offer something called life planning. And I have my registered life planning designation, which is basically where we take clients through a series of three meetings to help them really organize their thoughts on what they want to prioritize and how they can execute it in their
Starting point is 00:08:10 financial life. That's amazing. Okay. So tons of context there. So where I want to go back to is this CFA because I've gone through the, I've never taken it, right? But I've gone through some of the manuals. I've seen some of the questions that are in there, the breadth of what it is that you got to know, especially just like fixed income. I mean, you have to understand the whole breadth of anything, financial derivatives, you name it. As you look back to like what's in those books from an academic standpoint. And I know what my answer is. I'm not going to tell you my answer. I don't want to know. No, I'm just kidding. What is something that you kind of remember kind of learning that in practicality and kind of how you see the world and the economic landscape is
Starting point is 00:08:55 just total trash. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to pinpoint one specific thing. I want to start high level and then we'll maybe funnel down here. So I find the main problem with the CFA curriculum is that it's not applicable at all to almost 99% of the population. So for like the 1% of people who want to be in the weeds doing, you know, minutia financial portfolio management. Yes, the CFA is great. If you take a bunch of McKinsey consultants and send them with their sharp ratios and all their little check boxes or I guess it's not even the McKinsey people, it's the Cambridge Associates folks, and they check all their boxes about alternative assets and all the things.
Starting point is 00:09:35 Like, that's who this is for. It's not for like the average person who is going to evaluate how they want to allocate their assets. And I use that term allocate loosely because that term allocation can go for anywhere from, you know, index funds to Bitcoin to individual stocks to individual bonds. Most people are not going to, you know, do all sorts of duration calculations, bond evaluations, derivative swaps, interest rates swaps, like all of this stuff is just not relevant to most people's lives.
Starting point is 00:10:05 And for the people who it is relevant for, it takes it to a place that's just not even it's even deeper than what's being asked on the- Yeah, it's almost like you get so lost in the minutiae that you can't even see what's right in front of you. And 2008, I think, is a perfect example of that because you've got plenty of people who have CFAs out there and they literally can't see what's right in front of them, which is the macroeconomic backdrop in which that they're evaluating these mortgage back securities and these CDOs and everything else that went on out there. So I think that that's really the true problem with what the CFA is doing is because they take you so far into the weeds, you can't take a step
Starting point is 00:10:39 back and actually evaluate a total picture. Yeah. Speaking of the 2008 and the CDO being right in front of their faces and nobody, except for the few that they're making it, that they made movies about that were making the call. How do you see our landscape today? Do you see a similar setup as far as like there's a really big thing brewing right now? And if so, what is it? Yeah. So something that I talked about a long time ago, even before I knew about Bitcoin, was the idea that there would come a time when people didn't want to hold dollars anymore. And I didn't really know at the time what would really be the catalyst for that or how. But I did know that the more we print money, the more we don't take into account,
Starting point is 00:11:22 like how much the government is spending and using the money printer as a way, as a means basically to give people, quote unquote, services that they may or may not need to provide things, let's say, like aid to Ukraine off the cuff without actually going through normal channels to do so, spending ridiculous amounts of money on, you know, missiles and other things that they do, right? just no checks and balances in regards to the budget, right? In my head, I'm like, okay, this doesn't really make sense. And while, like, at the time in my kind of stupid trading head, I was like, okay, I want to be
Starting point is 00:11:52 long, you know, tips, the inflation bonds, and I want to be short U.S. Treasury. Like, that's kind of where my head was at. It was like, okay, there will come a day where there's massive inflation and the 30-year bond will be worthless. And therefore, I want to be long the inflation bond and short the 30-year treasury. And now my brain's like, that's totally stupid. I don't know why you want to get involved in that. But like I think that there's sort of a mindset there of like there has been something brewing for a long time.
Starting point is 00:12:17 And this actually was, I believe, something that we could have gotten out of. Had we taken a step back, let's say, in 2010 or 2011 when things started to settle and raining things in, that we could have actually figured out a way to grow out of our debt, right? The way that everybody had talked about, we're going to muddle through and then we're going to grow out of her debt. Now we're at a point, though, where this is just what we do whenever we come up against some sort of crisis. And everyone could say what they want about the pandemic or whatever they want to call it. But right when it did hit, the first thing that we did was we printed money, we handed out free money, we've done everything we can to do that. And I think that that's not going to stop. And whether or not the crisis is brewing now or if it's brewing in the next crisis from now, if our only answer is to continually print money, then yeah, at some point, nobody will want to hold U.S. dollars, right?
Starting point is 00:13:02 And that's when this, I mean, the House of Cards comes tumbling down. Is it a cultural rot? What do you think is the – because I agree with you. I think back in 08, 2009, like shortly after they started doing QE and these big stimulus, like it would have taken a lot of austerity or something to try to get this thing back on the tracks. But we are so far down that path now that it almost seems like it's becoming indoctrinated into the culture. I mean, you're seeing it with the loan forgiveness for college education and things like that. just like, well, yeah, just like take my debt away. Like, why isn't the government just
Starting point is 00:13:39 printing a bunch of money and my debt to go? Is this cultural rot then? In a way, yes, right? So I had to bring it back to personal finance because that's what I know really well, right? Imagine you're a person who you took on a bunch of student loan debt and you also have credit card debt. And it doesn't really mean anything to you. After a while, maybe the first 10K you sort of felt like, oh, this isn't really the right thing. And then the next thing you know, you end up 60 grand and dead. And you're like, okay, well, that's going to be really hard to get out of. It doesn't really matter if I spend another extra $100 that I don't have and you do that, you know, a hundred times.
Starting point is 00:14:10 And the next thing you know, right, you've got the $60K plus the $100,000 and then, you know, and then the interest is accumulating. The next thing you know, you don't know what to do about it. And I think that our government is really there. There hasn't really been any need to say, no, we don't, we can't spend that money. We need to balance our budget, right? There have been, there are a lot of pundits out there, like Paul Krugman comes to mind, Stephanie Kelton, who are saying, this is actually the way, right?
Starting point is 00:14:37 This is the way to make sure that everyone in our country has what they need. And so I think it's a combination of you start down a slippery slope and it's hard to pull it back. It's really hard for somebody who's a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt to all of a sudden say, okay, you know what, I'm not going to go out to dinner as much as I used to. And maybe I will sell some of my stuff. And maybe I will, you know, not get a dog and a pool and all the other things that I thought I was going to have in my life, right? That's really hard for people to do, especially when you've already been doing that and you're on some sort of hamster wheel cycle about it. And that's really where our
Starting point is 00:15:07 government is for sure. And because our government is there, the people who live there are here are there as well, right? Because they keep seeing us printing money in order to pay for things. So it's sort of like, of course somebody's going to say, why would, why does this missile matter, but my student debt doesn't matter? Why doesn't my home matter, but Ukraine matters, right? Like there's sort of there's a disconnect within the population as to why the government is spending on what they're specifically spending on and where it should go, right? As a taxpayer, you think that, okay, I'm owed something as well. I like that because I think what you're really saying in that is you're saying it's hopeless
Starting point is 00:15:42 for most participants in the market to ever come out of the hole that they've been dug into based on the environment and the circumstances that exist in the world today. I mean, if you're making $50,000, but to really kind of have any respectable kind of lifestyle, it costs $75,000. Well, you're going to go $25,000 in the hole every year and you're not going to be able to come out of it. And it's somewhat hopeless. So you just kind of give up, I guess, right? It's crazy. And going back to a key phrase you said earlier, the MMT part.
Starting point is 00:16:17 Yeah. If you were going to, because I think this ideology and this thinking is also kind of adding to this hopelessness that we find in the population, if you could say something to an MMT or if you want to say something to Stephanie directly, what would you say to her? I mean, other than the obvious, are you an idiot? Well, it's just sort of, I would say to her, like, when does it end, right? Is this really something that you believe can go on forever? Or do you think that there's some point in time at which the buck needs to stop? Because I think that she does actually believe that this can go on forever. But if she looks at any period of time in history, literally any period of time, right,
Starting point is 00:17:02 it doesn't go on forever. I mean, even going back to ancient times, right? The first coinage that ever came out was the Lydian coin. Nobody knows even who the Lydian Empire is now, right? You barely even learn about it. And it's cool. It's like if you didn't go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and happen to stare at, you know, the, like the pottery for hours, you wouldn't even know. So it's one of those things where it's like, and it's that over and over and over again, just in a different backdrop with a different catalyst, with a different ending every single time.
Starting point is 00:17:30 So, I mean, I like to think about, you know, the quote Rome wasn't built in a day, but it also didn't fall in a day. And I really believe that that's where we are in this point of time, right? We didn't get to this point overnight. There were periods in time that certainly accelerated it, but now we're probably on some sort of slow decline. And there will be a point at which it's not slow anymore because the end is never slow. So when you talk to other investment advisors and managers that are Bitcoiners, what are the typical hangups that you kind of run into when you're talking to clients and you're talking to people? What are you hearing? Yeah, that's a great question.
Starting point is 00:18:08 So I think it depends on the client for sure. I'll just give a backdrop on my client base, which I'm sure can really be a proxy for most people's client base. There's going to always be a very small percentage of people who are either extremely interested in technology or extremely interested in Austrian economics. When you do a bell curve, right, they're like on the far right, and there's not very many of them.
Starting point is 00:18:31 Then there's the middle, right, of people who are like, oh, I've heard that, yeah, let's talk about it. And then there's the people on the far left, right, who are, they're the opposite, right? They're like either they're anti-technology or they can't wrap their head around it or their MMT type people or they just, for whatever reason, they can't seem to grasp that something that was created out of thin air could have value for one reason or another. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:52 Yeah. And so the questions are across the spectrum, right? For the people who are on the far right, they've got really hyper-technical questions about their Bitcoin and how they're going to do things with their Bitcoin and, you know, how can I lend against it? And why don't I need to do that versus selling or whatever? you know, they've got really hyper-technical financial planning questions. And on the left side of it, you're answering questions like, won't quantum computing make this obsolete? Won't the government
Starting point is 00:19:15 ban it? Won't, you know, I mean, you name every fud type thing, right? They've come up with it. They've read it in some sort of article. Isn't it only used for drugs? How can people use it if the internet goes out, that kind of stuff, you know? And then for the people in the middle, it either depends if they've got an open or closed mind, which I think when people think of Bigwinners, they think of us as closed-minded, right, because we have shunned other aspects of cryptocurrencies, right? But I actually like to think of it as Bitcoiners being open-minded and everybody else being sort of closed-minded. They've made up their mind about the fact that, you know, this specific coin is going to change XYZ thing in the world for whatever reason that somebody very interesting
Starting point is 00:19:53 to them on a podcast said without really thinking about the implications of why maybe you wouldn't need a blockchain or why that's maybe just a software project or why nobody would really even want that anyways. It's just somebody who looked at Bitcoin and decided that they wanted some random thing to be as a part of Bitcoin. So they decided to start a whole new project. There's a lot of that. And so I think it depends on who you're speaking to, right? Some people are going to be open-minded when you have those conversations and they're going to hear what a Bitcoin financial advisor has to say. And some people will be close-minded. And I believe that your job as a financial advisor is not to open the minds of the closed-minded. It's just to be repetitive enough that they
Starting point is 00:20:29 get comfortable having the conversation with you until they can actually open them right. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders from all over the world, many of them operating on the front lines of history. This is where you hear firsthand stories
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Starting point is 00:24:51 Oh, totally. Because they're just going to sell it at the wrong time, for sure. It's a fantastic way of putting it. Yeah. Yeah. Why do most advisors think that, and I have some friends, right, and I hear this from them, why do they think crypto and not Bitcoin? What is going on?
Starting point is 00:25:08 Like, what's the bigger story there that's being fed in Wall Street and all these throughout the whole finance space, advising space. So let's take that back to like a backdrop since we've sort of had a lot of context in general on these questions. Yeah. The average financial advisor, right, went to some sort of school. They probably majored in economics history or some sort of something in their sociology, some kind of social science, right?
Starting point is 00:25:37 They've heard Keynesian economics their entire life. they probably had parents who were either Republican or Democrat and didn't really swing either way very far to the left or right, right? That's kind of the average person. And their whole life, because, you know, they're probably somewhere in the range of age 25 to 65. They have heard about Keynesian economics and that money printing is okay and that inflation is good and that's how the economy grows and so forth and so forth. So I think it's actually asking a lot of financial advisors to then say, no, deflation is good. I think it's like really easy for us as Bitcoiners to be like, stop thinking all that nonsense.
Starting point is 00:26:18 What are you doing about that? You need to stop thinking about that and start thinking about Austrian economics. I mean, for starters, Austrian economics is not taught. Like, when I think about my upbringing, I'm actually generally, like, I think I'm pretty lucky of how I grew up and what I learned. My parents voted for Ross Perot. My dad was a Ron Paul fan. Like, it's sort of, this is like, these were household things that were talking.
Starting point is 00:26:39 about. I don't think that the average person got to hear about libertarianism, right, and didn't read, you know, Ayn Rand at a really young age, and then start reading Murray Rothbard, even though, like, that wasn't assigned reading in college. So I just, I feel like it is asking a lot of financial advisors to immediately flip the switch and go from being Keynesians to Austrians. With all that in mind, though, I also think that there's a disconnect between what money actually is and what advisors think it is. So money, right, is, it's basically something. that you receive, right? You hold for a period of time and then you send out. And there are all sorts of properties associated with money, right, that help you receive it, hold it for a period of time,
Starting point is 00:27:17 and send it out. Advisors don't really see money that way. Money is something that you receive and you send, but you don't hold it. Money, like the whole purpose of our profession is to take money and move it as quickly as possible into investment. There's no holding. The holding period has to be as short as possible, right? Because all we do is talk about how inflation is eating your money away. the whole reason why you need me is because there's inflation. And I'm going to help you invest that quickly because I know how to invest and you don't. And so I would say that that's the financial advising profession, not the financial planning profession, but that's what the financial advising profession has been about for a very long period of time. So I think like from that
Starting point is 00:27:52 perspective too, it's not even that these advisors are scamming. That's literally they don't know that you can hold money. So then I think if you throw at them a bunch of crypto software projects, right, where they don't have a 21 million cap, where the whole purpose of their quote unquote money is not to actually be the best way to receive hold and send, right? What they're promoting is it's money, but it's also all these other things, right? That makes sense to advisors because there's no hold part, right? It's like, okay, I'm sort of, I'm skipping the hold part and I'm doing the sending and receiving part, and I'm also getting all this other stuff out of my money. Almost like a tech stock is how I imagine a lot of them are just like,
Starting point is 00:28:33 well, you know, some of these are going to be like the next Netflix or the next Amazon or whatever. And there's no way that this the very first one. I mean, that's going to be the MySpace. And I hear this from time to time. And I imagine that that's probably the narrative that a lot of them spew. Yeah. I love that you brought the MySpace one too because I think it also hones in on a greedy aspect of this profession in general and that clients have. I think everyone wants to find themselves in a situation where they put like $1,000, like $1,000,
Starting point is 00:29:03 let's say into something that they paid 10 cents for and it turned into $65,000. And I think everyone thinks when they look at a Bitcoin chart that they would have been able to do that. If they had just known that that was the thing that would do that. And it's really easy to look back and say, oh, if I had only known, I would have done that, right? But on the other hand, it's very difficult to look at something that's 10 cents and actually be able to hold it to $65,000. So I think that there's also this misconception that even if you were to find it, that you would be able to hold it that long. But advisors are always looking for that next best thing for their clients because it'll pay for the fee. It'll, you know, look how smart I was. I told you to do it. Even if, you know,
Starting point is 00:29:37 they only 2x or, you know, 10x their returns, not, you know, thousand upon thousand X return at like Bitcoin, right? They still looked very smart in the moment. So there and clients want that too, right? Because there's that other aspect of personal finance where you actually want to spend everything that you make rather than saving it and doing the hard work to do that. And so, isn't it great if I turn a thousand dollars into, you know, quadrillion dollars? And then I don't have to do any of that saving stuff that we talked about. I know the same. I know the sounds crazy, but I see it on Twitter all the time where I think people just look at the sheer price and they're saying, oh, one Bitcoin's $41,000. For it to go to 80 or $100,000,
Starting point is 00:30:15 like, that's going to take a whole lot of more people coming into it. That's just like, that's going to take forever. But I can go out there and buy clown money and it's 50 cents and it could go to a dollar and I would make the same return as Bitcoin going to $100,000. And so I'm just going to, you know, there's no way I can, I can't even afford Bitcoin, right? You hear these. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious, do you think that even financial advisors kind of get caught up in that, that narrative?
Starting point is 00:30:45 Or do you think that they understand? I think for sure. Yeah, I mean, there is a bias against large, like highly priced stocks, for instance, like Berkshire Hathaway, Burke A, right? People want to buy Burke B and not Burke A. Yeah. And I mean, and it's not even the same thing, right, in Bitcoin because you can buy one Satoshi worth of Bitcoin, right?
Starting point is 00:31:03 you could. Whereas, like, you actually do have to go out and buy a whole share of Burk. So, but there's just this bias against high price stocks, even though, you know, obviously something going from 50 cents to a dollar is the same exact return as something going from 40 to 80K. Here's one that I, that I think is a really important conversation. And it's just age and how you're advising people. Because, you know, I look at my parents and I look at my grandparents. And then you look at folks our age. And I mean, the advice is just so different because the risk profile is so different. And the economic backdrop that each one of those generations are accustomed to is just drastically different. So, you know, how for a person who's a boomer or older, right, how in the world do you go about advising them
Starting point is 00:31:54 with what it is that you know that you expect to kind of play out here from a macroeconomic lens and what I would imagine most of them are comfortable doing on what they probably need is a fixed income very conservative portfolio. How do you manage that? Yeah, I like the question for sure. So I want to start with the fact that a boomer is probably in the age range of, let's say, 60 to 76 or so, 77, right? and most people are living to be at least 80 to 90, let's say.
Starting point is 00:32:31 And most people don't have a goal in mind of dying with 0.01 in their bank account. Most people have a goal of, you know, providing a legacy in some way, giving to their kids, providing to charity, right? They don't want to die with nothing. Dying when nothing is actually, I mean, psychologically very difficult to see yourself work for your entire life and literally die penniless. So there are other goals that people generally have when they're in retirement. And that goes from anyone who's even living paycheck to paycheck to one of the wealthiest people, right? You don't really want to die with nothing if you can help it in any way or another. So that means actually, if you think about it, that people have much longer time horizons than they think they do.
Starting point is 00:33:12 So because if you're a person who's in your 60s or in your 70s even and you're expected to live for at least another 10 to 20 years, and then you tack on a legacy to that, you're actually adding at least 20 years. to your time horizon, in which case you need equity, not bonds. And so this is something that even before Bitcoin is something that we talked about with clients, right? Even before clients were open and willing to allocate to Bitcoin, it was that their time horizon is way longer than they think it is. And so because of that, we try to push clients as far on their wrist horns as they can go.
Starting point is 00:33:45 With that in mind, though, right, you can't have a client who can't sleep at night because their portfolios bouncing around, right? So there is some portion of that portfolio that you need to manage that risk. There's another portion of the portfolio, though, where you can talk to them about the fact that they're not going to need this for quite some time. And if anything, actually, it's going to help them outpace inflation and it'll help them meet their goals later in life, whether that be to make sure they have a legacy or that they have, you know, even the nice assisted living facility to go to, right? There's any number of goals that we can put on the end of life there. So you got to convince them of the volatility. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:21 So then it's talking about the volatility. So at that point, that's when you need to make a decision specifically around Bitcoin, how are you going to hold it? So I think for most people, something like GBTC really doesn't work, right? You put it in their brokerage account and it fluctuates like crazy and they see their statements and they're going nuts. They're like, why is my account up 65 percent? Why is it down 48 percent?
Starting point is 00:34:41 Why am I paying this fee? Why did I get this 1099 that has all these expenses on it even though I didn't sell anything, right? It's actually like massively confusing as opposed to you, go help a client go buy, I don't know, a couple of Bitcoin on Coinbase. You help them move it off into cold storage. You get them set up on a multi-sig. You teach them that, okay, you know, you lose the key, you call on chain capital, and they'll help you figure it out, or you call CASA and we'll figure it out. That's what we're paying for. You pay $25 and you move on in your life, right? And in the
Starting point is 00:35:10 meantime, we've actually also set up your estate plan because you talk about how estate planning works in regards to having multiple keys and how, you know, your son can actually hold a key, but he won't be able to move the money until you die and he gets the second key, right? There's like a whole number of things about it. And then there's not that fluctuating statement that every financial advisor wants because they want to be able to show returns, but no clients want because they don't want to deal with the volatility. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:35:34 And I'm assuming, I mean, the position size is obviously an enormous part of that. Yes, for sure. I would think for an older client, they don't need to have hardly any position size and it would still protect their portfolio against this big systemic risk. risk that's out there that I think we're all aware of. Yeah, definitely. So for my clients who are boomers are older, we had somewhere between a 1% and 5% position. That's totally manageable and something that really does actually hedge. And, you know, I think a lot can be said for a larger position, obviously, because, you know, the more concentrated you get, the more likely
Starting point is 00:36:12 something will pan out. But in these specific situations, right, diversification, and I don't mean within crypto, I just mean within standard assets, really does help mitigate that volatility. And if you can convince somebody as to why they should hold it in a specific way over another way, it really is the best way to do that. That's not always an option. So I'm not totally negating the GBT in somebody's portfolio. Like, I think if that's the only way you can do it, then yes, you do it. And you really focus on position size and managing risk and talking to the client whenever they want to talk to you. But if you can get it where they have it off, you know, in cold storage, like it really is your best bet and it will help them the most over the long
Starting point is 00:36:49 period of time. Morgan, how many of them are becoming more open to it, like percentage-wise? Is it getting easier? Is it pretty much the same over the last couple years? What's like the trend there that you're seeing? Yeah. So in 2016 was when I started advising on Bitcoin specifically. And I had three of my 30 clients interested in 2016. I had two of them actually take legitimate positions. And I had one who was like, you know, see, whatever, and I'll do what I'm going to do. But he did take a position. He just also sort of traded around some other stuff.
Starting point is 00:37:27 After the run-up in 2017, I had another couple of clients get interested in it. In 2020, we just decided that no matter who we had talked to and who we were going to help allocate, which we did help other people get allocated. Some people were open. A lot of people were not. In 2020, I just said, you know what? That's it. I did the Bitcoin for Advisors event through.
Starting point is 00:37:45 coin desk and I was like, I have, you know, half my client base doesn't even have Bitcoin, whoever we can get on the phone and talk to about getting, like getting actual Bitcoin we did and everybody else just got GBT. And from there, it's actually been the opposite of what I think people expect when you allocate GBTc. So people think you allocate GBTC and that's it. And then the client just has GBTC and, you know, that's what they do for their whole life. No, what actually happens is that people are like, what is this asset in my portfolio? Why do I hold it this way and not the other way. You're always talking about holding it the other way. Can we hold it the other way? How do we hold it the other way? And for, yeah, so for there were some people who were like, I don't even
Starting point is 00:38:23 want this on my portfolio. I don't want JBCC. Why did you do that? And we sold it. That was a very small minimum compared to the people who are like, I want more. How do I do this better? How do I get actual Bitcoin? And now I have people who are like starting to become true Bitcoiners who are like, I want 40% or more of my net worth invested in this. Wow. I like, I like, this question. This one came from Twitter. Somebody was wanting to know, what's your best advice for Bitcoiners to optimize their taxes? Yeah. So, and I'm really sorry in advance. I answer a lot of questions. It depends because it does. So this is a really, it depends question, right? I think it kind of depends on where you are on the income spectrum. So if you are a high income earning
Starting point is 00:39:06 Bitcoiner, right, the options available to you are going to look very different than a low income Bitcoiner. So let's start high income and then we'll go to low income, if that's That sounds good. Yeah. So high income, right? High income, I think tax planning is often thought of as one of these things where I can save tons and tons of money and it's going to be great. And then I don't have to actually save any money because I'll just save money by not
Starting point is 00:39:25 paying my taxes. And that's how I'll do it rather than I need to allocate 20% or more of my pre-tax income towards savings. And then whatever I do with tax planning is a bonus. So I would start there actually. If you're a high-income earner, you really need to focus on creating savings. What you do with that savings, though, right, is you can do through tax planning. So there are a lot.
Starting point is 00:39:43 more options available, I think, to Bitcoiners now than there ever have been before. Typically, people like to park money in 401 plans or if you're a business owner, you can put money into a self-directive 401k or an IRA or a pension plan, right? And then from there, if you're actually the business owner, right, you can actually directly allocate that into Bitcoin. There are a lot of services available to people right now where you take your IRA, you open up an LLC, you buy Bitcoin through the LLC, and then you can even hold your own private keys.
Starting point is 00:40:09 And there's a number of ways that you would want to do it so that you're not actually looking like he took custody of those Bitcoin and therefore paying penalties to the IRS. But that is available to you. You can also own a portfolio of miners if you wanted to, right? And then that would be a way of being allocated to Bitcoin. You can also own GBTC, right? So there are a number of ways where if you were like, I am dead set on not owning any standard assets, only owning Bitcoin, I can still save money on my taxes by parking money in these plans and also own Bitcoin. That said, if you're a Bitcoin and you've got 90% of your net worth in Bitcoin, maybe you use the way where you save money your taxes by putting money into a 401k plan or these other things as your diversifier, right?
Starting point is 00:40:47 That's another option available to you as well. So high income earning, like, that's the way. It's going to be HSA type plans. It's going to be 401K type plans to find benefit if you can or, you know, a step IRA, even if you're a business owner. There are a number of reasons why maybe you wouldn't want to do the step IRA because it would make it difficult for you to let's say do a backdoor Roth. A backdoor Roth would be another thing. It wouldn't be a tax saving strategy like from an income perspective, but it would be a tax saving strategy over a long period of times. That would be something to consider. And then if you are a business owner, obviously, you know, making sure you pick up all your deductions, not that it's free, but it does help.
Starting point is 00:41:21 On the low income side, right, if let's say, I don't know, you're a Bitcoiner and you, you know, you've done your best to save money in Bitcoin and you've now accumulated a large amount of Bitcoin, but you don't really have a lot of money coming in. There's a lot of actually like brokerage type tax strategies that are available to you. So the best part about Bitcoin, right, is like you could just buy it. And if you own it, like how you, normally would go to Coinbase or anywhere else or you're mining for it, right? That's technically what the IRS would consider a taxable account and anything you do in that quote unquote taxable account falls under the same rules as any other taxable account. People who are single get the first
Starting point is 00:41:55 $40,000 of capital gains for free. Tax is 0% if you're married, 80 grand. It's actually really quite nice. So if you're making under these thresholds, right, you can actually sell some of your Bitcoin and actually pay 0% in capital gain. So that's an option that's available to you if you're on the a low-income side. And I think that like brokerage, ways of holding things in brokerage or just outright owning Bitcoin, not in any of these other convoluted accounts, right? It actually affords you a lot more flexibility. Let's say, I don't know, you've saved a lot and you know you have two low-income years, right, and you want to go buy a house. So maybe you split up that game between the end of, you know, 2021 and into 2022, and now you pay less taxes by splitting it up and
Starting point is 00:42:35 then you can go buy your house, right? There are ways to do it where you get to choose when you take that tax liability rather than the government choosing it for you. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC or running an enterprise GRC program, Vanta keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, Vanta gives you continuous automation across more than 35 security and privacy frameworks.
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Starting point is 00:46:06 Yeah, sure. What's your advice for couples that have a different risk aversion? For example, let's say a husband who's selling his chairs to buy more Bitcoin versus a wife who's a little bit more conservative and maybe not so willing to sell the chairs for some Bitcoin. Is somebody talking about my household? I'm not sitting on a chair. right now. I'm standing. So I think it's actually funny because people are always talking about how,
Starting point is 00:46:34 oh, what's it like here to be married to like this, you know, conservative financial planner who's like obviously stodgy and probably making you buy stocks. And meanwhile, I'm like, you know, this like weird libertarian that like grew up learning about Ross Perra. And, you know, who's like just as into Bitcoin as he is. No, but to get back to your question. So I think it's really common actually for spouses to have different risk tolerances. So like you go on your first date, right? And you talk about all sorts of things. You know, you talk about what kind of life you want to have and what's important to you, right? I don't think anyone on date one through 30, even after marriage is like, so what's your investment risk tolerance? Is that, you know, are we aligned there?
Starting point is 00:47:16 Do we want to be invested the same way? It's just like, it just doesn't come up, right? There's no way. Yeah, there's just, it's just not a question. So this is, so far more common than I think people discuss. And it goes beyond even investment risk tolerance. It's like your tolerance for debt, your spending habits, how you grew up and what money matter, like what parts of money matter to you versus what parts of money matter to your spouse. We actually have a whole list of questions that we give to clients before they get married that they can potentially talk about their spouse or their future spouse with. But by then it's too late, right? By the time that they're having this conversation with us, they're already committed to getting married.
Starting point is 00:47:49 There's no way if they differ on these things that they're going to be something about it. Yeah, they're like, we agree on everything else. We'll figure out this risk tolerance problem. It's actually a really big problem. So what happens, though, is that generally the person who is less risk tolerance wins out because that person is so afraid of what's going on that the other spouse can't tolerate dealing with the spouse who's afraid. So, I mean, it just, it really is how it is. So I think that really, so there was this Jordan Peterson thing I listened to where he said that when they had people who had, I forget, what the fear of elevators is called. He had a word for it. But when people have fear of
Starting point is 00:48:25 elevators, what they do is they show them pictures of elevators for a while until they get comfortable with the pictures. And then they take them to go visit an elevator, but they don't go inside. They wait very far away. And then they get closer and closer, right, until one day they step in that elevator, right? And then one day, they step in the elevator, but they have somebody else with them and then they are able to run out. And then finally, right, they get to a point where they can ride the elevator and they're like, okay, we're good. I think that you actually have to do that with your spouse. It's like you give them a Robin Hood account. or something and you let them play with like $40 or whatever.
Starting point is 00:48:56 Yeah. Yeah. And then they like, you know, they lose $40 because that's what's going to happen. And then maybe they even take out a margin debit. You know, you just let them kind of go wild with it and see how far you can take it where they're like,
Starting point is 00:49:08 okay, I feel a little bit more comfortable. Yeah. It's the same thing with spending or saving, right? You have to like expose your spouse to whatever it is that you need to be doing as a couple. And I think the thing that's often forgotten is the what we need to do as a couple part,
Starting point is 00:49:22 right? Like usually the person who's very risk seeking is like, this is what we need to be doing. You've got it wrong. And the person who is not risk seeking is like, no, you've got it wrong, right? But maybe it's somewhere in the middle. And maybe if the two spouses came together and actually had a conversation of what they wanted to do with their money and what they wanted to do with their lives, they would figure out exactly how they needed to be invested.
Starting point is 00:49:42 And obviously, if you can't come to terms with that, it is time to get a financial planner involved. I love that. I think that is a great way to kind of, because at the end of the day, it's, it is a to meet in the middle with your spouse to try to stay sane. I mean, if one's being extreme, obviously, it might not be smack in the middle. But yeah, this is an interesting question for you. And I'm curious to hear how you answer this. What habit are you most proud of developing or quitting? Oh, okay. So this is not going to be financial. I hope that's okay.
Starting point is 00:50:12 I love it. Yeah, let's hear it. So I grew up Jewish and I grew up as a cultural Jew, not a religious Jew. So as I have learned about Judaism more as an adult, I've wanted to incorporate more religion and not only my life, but in my children's life. And one of the most, I would say, one of the greatest tenets of Judaism is taking a Sabbath. So that to me is that we have a Shabbat dinner on Friday nights. We have now done this for two years where we've had a Shabbat dinner every, almost every Friday night with the exception of, you know, Bitcoin Miami. We had, we've had a Shabbat dinner every single Friday night with our kids. It's a time to disconnect. I put away my phone. I don't use my phone for 24 hours and I spend true time with my children. And I have taught them
Starting point is 00:50:56 prayers and my son actually now sings a lot of the prayers with me. And it really is just a time for us to be together as a family. We often invite other families over who live locally to come and do it with us, even though they're not Jewish. And what I've found is while it's a religious practice that we've incorporated, it has, it has improved my life on a spiritual level for sure, but also financially, right? If you are really connecting with your family in a deep way and you're not on your phone, you're not in this material world, you're not consuming things. You're just being present and you're like, for me, it's what life is about, right? Everything that I do is so that I can spend more time with my children so I can be there for my children so I can be with my family.
Starting point is 00:51:35 And so for me, this is one of the greatest ways that I've found to be able to do that. And I hope that we continue. I love that. It is. I mean, it's about being with your family. It's about one of the things that I've kind of discovered through this show is we're, you know, we're studying these people who are really extremists trying to achieve that massive unprecedented levels, you know, billionaires and these people that are doing these things. And the one thing that I guess just really sticks out in my head as a quote that Ray Dalio says is, you can have anything in this world, but you can't have everything. And it's almost like this realization that, you know, here's a guy who's probably one of the best
Starting point is 00:52:16 investors on the planet and understands macro, but you have to ask yourself at what cost. And I don't know, just doing the show through all these years and studying all these people who have gone on to just, I mean, they've changed the world in so many different ways and they've done these amazing things. But I always like look back and the thing that I've really truly truly. learn from just studying these people is my family is the most important thing on the planet, right? Like no amount of money, especially at that level. I mean, how much do you need? Right? Like, oh, totally. At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, like, how much is it that I
Starting point is 00:52:53 actually need to just live the lifestyle? And I'm a pretty simple person. And so is my wife. And you just, you get to this point where you're just like, man, it's all about what you just said. It's all about being with your family. And, you're having. Well, I think also, so generally people's largest expenses are their home, right? And they tend to think I need a lot of space because I'm having kids or a dog or, you know, both. And my kids need a certain, like, we need to have a certain amount of space for them. And we're accustomed to a certain lifestyle. And when my husband and I bought our home, one of the things that I thought about because the first thing was,
Starting point is 00:53:30 I didn't want to have more than 3,000 square feet because I thought it would be such a pain the ass to clean. I was like, I do not want to clean a house that's so large. I don't want to spend my weekends doing that. And the other side of it was also more than 3,000 square feet is actually, you know, it's quite large and it's expensive. And so one of the things I had in my head was like, okay, if we were at like maybe more like $2,500, what would life be like? And the first thing that came to mind was, would my kids even notice a difference between 130 square foot room and 160 square foot room? Would they even know? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:03 And the answer is no, right? Would my kids notice the difference between a playroom that's 200 square feet or a playroom that's 400 square feet? Like, no, right? Because what do you do with a playroom that's 400 square feet? You fill it with twice as much toys. And then your kids have twice as much trouble figuring out what it is that they want to play with. And then they yell at you to go buy other things to play with, right? Because you've just filled your house with garbage. So it's like, in my head, I was like, okay, the more square footage I have, the more time I have to spend cleaning this place, and the more money I'm going to spend filling it with junk that I don't need. And then the more money I'm going to have to make to support a
Starting point is 00:54:35 lifestyle that I don't want to have. And I think that often it's really exciting to like see the kitchen that you want and beautiful pristine floors, a large house and a pool in the backyard. And, you know, really everyone's dream house, right? Design aside, it's really exciting to think about that. But you don't think about the other side of it of when you're living in it, the cost to you of actually doing so. Amen to that. I'm with you. Just you have to ask yourself why, right? Like you have to ask yourself, why do I want whatever? Why?
Starting point is 00:55:06 And you ask yourself that and you really kind of get at the heart and the root of like what your real intention is because boy, oh boy, do we lie to ourselves, you know? Oh, yeah. And I mean, our brain can literally, you could couple of it with any reason to justify whatever it is. Oh, it's crazy. They will, you can think of literally anything. And there's a reason to do everything and there's a reason not to do everything. Yeah. Oh, it's crazy. It's ridiculous. Yeah, that's the one thing I really try to guard against and I catch myself all the time. Like, Preston, you're lying to yourself. You don't actually want whatever that is, right? It's, it's, yeah. Yeah, we're in the process of teaching our son about money. And so he does, you know, extra tours around the house and then he gets a dollar. And I know everyone's booing now because they're like, why isn't your son set up on a lightning wallet? You know, why am you put him on the moon? And the answer is because he's four.
Starting point is 00:55:58 But so he'll sometimes get really excited about money and doing the tour. And other times he'll be like, I just don't feel like it. I think you should give it to me. You know? And I find it really funny because like I think that like my son's attitude about things is actually how we all actually feel in real life. Where you're like, you know, sometimes you're like, okay, I'm ready to go get after it. And other times you're like, how did I end up in this situation?
Starting point is 00:56:23 And I don't want this dollar. Like I just want to go do something else. And I think it's amplified, obviously, in my four-year-old. But it's also, I mean, I think that if we, we're as adults, we have the ability to take a step back, to detach from our situations and to think about things a little bit more clearly if we don't immediately dive into whatever it is that we think that we're supposed to do. If we really are able to take a step back, pause and think about why it is that we want to do something, how we're going to implement doing it, whether or not we have money for it, whether
Starting point is 00:56:50 or not our spouse agrees about it, is it going to provide, you know, all the elements of my life that I want to have, right? Just taking even five minutes to do that would actually save a lot of people, a lot of heartache in their financial situations. Hey, so back to the markets. When we're talking about bonds, this is something, this has been like one of the biggest topics that I've talked about throughout the year on the show. The story has just been this negative spread. And when we look at the premium above inflation that we've seen for nearly four decades, we're in an environment and we're in a situation. that pretty much everybody alive that's investing right now has really never kind of experienced
Starting point is 00:57:32 in their lifetime. And if they have, it was, you know, for a very short period of time. And even if you go back into the 80s and maybe you'd have a client there, I mean, they still had a positive premium above inflation for most of that period of time. There was a few instances where it wasn't. But for most of the, like, there was still a positive interest rate above the inflation rate, but now we are, I mean, we are nowhere on the reservation. I mean, drastically off at a discount to the inflation rate on these government issued bonds, at least. So I'm curious, your clients, are they coming to you about this? Or are you kind of preemptively saying, hey, there's some concerns here? How is that conversation taking place? Are they all flipping out?
Starting point is 00:58:19 Or are they just not really even understanding like the magnitude of this? Yeah. So I want to preface this with, I don't like bonds. I haven't liked bonds for a long time. Every time I look at bonds, I get angry at bonds. I've had conversations with other financial planners and we're like, we don't know what to do about this bond thing. Clients need bonds, but we don't really know where to put them.
Starting point is 00:58:40 And there's really nowhere to put them. And if you talk to an average CFA folk and Lord help me if the CFA Institute actually listens to this because it'll probably take my CFA away. But they just don't know what they're talking about. They're like, oh, well, you just put the 30-year bond in the portfolio with SPY and everything's going to be fine because you're rebalanced, you know, when SBY goes down and then you really, you buy more 30-year treasury and then you do the opposite. When SPY goes up, you sell something, you know, and you do the whole thing.
Starting point is 00:59:06 So, yeah, that works like fine. That works in small scenarios. Like when COVID first hit, right, that was a good trade. If you had rebalanced because your treasuries went up and you had bought SPY because your treasuries went up in value and then you took those gains and you put them into SBY you would have done pretty well. But preceding that, it was a positive spread and it had been a positive spread. Yeah, proceeding that it was a positive spread. Also, though, we're still at all time lows and interest rates. People did not know that COVID was happening.
Starting point is 00:59:36 And what were you doing with a 30-year bond in your portfolio if you didn't really need that thing? Right. I mean, and I don't really know of anyone who actually needs a 30-year bond. Like, let's be honest. So in my practice, we like to do something called asset liability matching. And what asset liability matching means is we set aside a cash and short-term bonds as a means for paying for things over a short period of time, short-term goal, starting a business, funding college education that's very close by, you know, doing your trip around the world that you always wanted to do in two years, buying a house, right? These are things that come to mind where you would maybe want to have a portion of your portfolio and cash a bond. Everything else, we are trying to push people to the edges of their wrist horns to basically invest the rest of it because if you don't need this money in the next three to five years, and you have no business being in any of these other assets.
Starting point is 01:00:22 So, yeah, it hurt in like 2020 when, yeah, that was a good trade to be in a 30-year bond. But it's helped for sure right now. And I was very early to this trade for sure and got a lot of flack from other planners about how much cash I'm keeping around in portfolios. but I just can't in good conscience have people be in anything longer than a five-year bond at this point. And so it's a rough position though to be in because, I mean, I'm very fortunate in the regard that the median age of my practice is 41. Of people who are boomers in my practice, we're probably talking about 10%. So, like, I'm hyper-focused on this for maybe 10% of my client base, but for the majority of my client base, this isn't even a thing because we're pretty close to 100% or equity Bitcoin, right? I use equity loosely as a term of just including risk type assets.
Starting point is 01:01:12 But I think for the average financial advisor who is dealing with this, who has a lot of retirees, I mean, this is a major issue. And it's unprecedented. And you need to be having serious conversations with retirees about how you're going to reallocate their assets. And again, I would be doing the same thing of thinking of how long their time horizon really is. Because somebody who is 65 doesn't have this time horizon that requires them to be 75% in bonds. It just doesn't. So the education portion with your client needs to be about why they need to hold other things
Starting point is 01:01:43 and how they can hold it over a long period of time and how you can handle them through doing that. All right. So, Morgan, for the last question, what is something that you feel or you believe that you think you know that you think a lot of people might disagree with you on? Yeah. So I think that people tend to be something that I like to call married single. married single to me is when two people get married, but they live single lives. And the more that our society goes in a material direction where everything is me, me, me all the time, the more people come together, get married, and they live these single lives.
Starting point is 01:02:21 And it's portrayed very deeply in their finances. Married, married people combine their finances. They do things together. They make decisions together. They don't think of the pot as my husband made this and I made, you know, my wife. wife made that. And therefore, you know, as the person who made 72% of the income, I get to spend 72% on so-and-so. Married, married people go out to dinner and one person pays the check because they're married. And it's not about who put the credit card down or who put the cash down, right? Married single people
Starting point is 01:02:53 split bills or they go back and forth about who paid the check last, or they split their rent in a weird way, or they put, they have separate accounts. And they like to say, say things like, oh, I just don't want my spouse to know what I'm going to buy him for his birthday. Or I didn't want my wife to know that I spent a little extra on ammo, right? Things like that. They say like innocuously like, oh, that's the whole reason why our entire financial picture is separate is because every year I buy Jimmy, you know, something for his birthday and I'm afraid he's going to check the statement. But really what they're saying is I don't want somebody telling me what to do. I want to have complete control over my financial situation, whether I'm married or
Starting point is 01:03:34 like, you know, my situation be damned. And I think that people get really bad advice from financial advisors and planners and lawyers and accountants about these things because there's the legal liability in the United States where they're like, oh, you should keep things separate because, you know, just in case one of you is sued, you won't lose all your money, you know, at least one of you will still have money. But for like 99.9% of people, it's completely irrelevant, right? It causes so much strife to like protect against the situation that really for most people doesn't even exist. And instead, you live this married single lifestyle.
Starting point is 01:04:09 So I would say most people probably don't agree with me there, but combine your finances for the love of God. Just combine them. Be married. Be married, married, married. My parents both told us the exact same thing when. Amazing. Yeah, whenever my wife and I got married.
Starting point is 01:04:24 Yeah. Exact same thing. And that's what we do. Yeah. Love it. And you're right. I think that I think you would get a lot of pushback on that, even though I agree with you as well. But, you know, that's, that's us.
Starting point is 01:04:37 So, Morgan, this was such a pleasure. I'm so glad we were able to sit down and record a conversation together. And I look forward to hanging out with you and Pierre, a whole bunch more here in the future. All right. So the final thing, Morgan, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you, maybe check out your firm or anything else that you want to highlight. Yeah, thanks. So you can find me on Twitter. Morgan with an E. Rochard. You can also find my firm. It's called Origin Wealth Advisors. That's
Starting point is 01:05:04 OriginWA.com. I also wrote a book. It's called the Personal Finance Quick Start Guide. If you liked what we talked about on this podcast, then you'll love my book. The biggest complaint about my book is that it's not a quick start guide because it's 350 pages. So it's more like a CFP textbook, but it's really a lot more fun. I promise you. And we also, my husband and I run a podcast called Bitcoin for Advisors. It was meant for financial advisors to learn about Bitcoin, but what we've found is that lots of people really enjoy it, so you don't have to be an advisor to listen to it. And I also offer financial consulting through money owners. Awesome. We're going to have links to all of that in the show notes. And Morgan, thanks so much
Starting point is 01:05:43 for coming on. This was so much fun. Yeah, thanks, Preston. Let's do it again. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin-specific shows come out every Wednesday. day, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes,
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