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The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in more places that could expose you more to identity theft. But LifeLock monitors millions of data points per second. If your identity is stolen, our US based restoration specialists will fix it, guaranteed your money back. Don't face drained accounts, fraudulent loans or financial losses alone. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com podcast terms apply. It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy, restoring order to your financial chaos. Retirement, investing, taxes. You've got financial questions. He's got financial answers. It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy.

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This is one of my favorite times of the year because of what just came out in the last week and a half. Welcome to the Money Guy Show. I'm your host, Bryan Preston, here to talk to you about what's important to you financially and try to help you make the best financial decisions so that you can reach that true peace of mind that comes from financial independence. So we're here to do that by day. I am a fee only wealth manager down here on the south side of Atlanta. You can go out there and check out our website@moneyguy.com you can also write the show at Brian. That's B R I a n@moneyguy.net so thanks so much for joining in. If you're wondering what we're going to be talking about today, we're going to be talking about the Berkshire Hathaway letters to the shareholders that are written annually by the Mr. Warren Buffett, the oracle from Omaha. He comes out once a year and publishes this letter to the shareholders that I think is great. Now, I did a guest post for 5 cent nickel a few weeks ago and I know there were some naysayers that don't like Warren that much, but he's a very interesting guy for me because he's so humble. Still lives in the same house he bought many, many years ago. He doesn't, you know, you'd never know, obviously everybody, he's kind of a celebrity. He is a celebrity. I shouldn't say kind of, but he is a celebrity. But it's just his, you can tell he's a very humble man but has been extremely successful and is one of the wealthiest men in the world. And he's actually, you know, as you've probably seen from in the past, he's donated or he is donating a large portion of his assets to the Bill Gates foundation so that they can do some other things and make actual use of that money. So I think that's very noble that they're doing that. But I think there's also a lot to be learned from the most successful investor of our lifetime, and that's what we're going to be focusing on today. I do want to give you a few quick updates. I'm about to make the plunge in changing my phone. I am one of these guys that has. I've been with Sprint for quite a while, and it's been like the carrot hanging out there as soon as the iPhone came out. I've seen that as a carrot that's just kind of been out there. Because in the past, if y' all can remember going back in time and this is kind of the way I look at my life, is that I used to be one of those guys that had the daytimer. You know, that's the biggest big black portfolio folder that you keep your schedule on that. My younger listeners probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but it's the big black binder. And you went out and bought refills every year to put your calendar in there. So I had that. And then I remember when I had, of course, my business calculator. No good financial planner worth his weight is not going to be walking around with a financial calculator. So I had that. And then I also had a cell phone. So those were the three things that I used to have to walk around with. And then I remember I was able to get it down the Palm Pilots came out and I was able to get rid of the day timer and just had my Palm Pilot to keep up with my organizer, my schedule, my phones, my contacts. And then I had my cell phone because I also was able to get the Palm Pilot to become a financial calculator. Now I got the Treo. That's what I have at Sprint, that allows me to have the phone as well as the financial calculator and my organizer, but it doesn't have my ipod on it. It's amazing how you add technology over time. And now, hopefully with this iPhone, I'm going to be able to have it all. I'm really excited. I'm sure there's many of you out there that already have made the jump. I've gotten the emails from you that you're doing the iPhones. So I'm about to join the ranks of you guys, you early adopters out there, and I'm just so excited about it. Just wanted to give you an update on my technology thing because I think you all Know, that's one of the reasons I even started doing this podcast is I'm kind of a geek when it comes to electronics. I love the surround sound, I love the other stuff. And this will complete me for what I wanted to buy this year. Also, I want to touch real briefly quickly on the bad financial market out there. Even Warren talks about that in his letter to the shareholders this year about the state of the economy. Remember, I've talked about this. I spent a lot of time on this in past podcasts. If you're a young person, this is just a bump in the road. You need to just make sure that you're taking advantage of your 401, your Roth IRAs, your Roth 401s, any type of employer provided matching. That's out there because you are getting in at decent prices. When things get beat up. If you're looking for any silver lining out there, remember you're getting in at cheaper prices because things will turn around. And people say, well, Brian, what if we're in a different time? What if things don't ever turn around? Well, I say we need to go find a good island out there in the Caribbean. Because if the capitalistic marketplace, if we can't recover in this market, if companies can't find ways to make more money or new industries come out of our innovation, then we're in trouble. The money's not worth what it's printed on and the assets aren't going to be worth anything. So you have to realize that things will recover. So I always say, when people give me that doomsday question, I say common sense tells you, don't underestimate the power of the government to change policy. They can change the rules at any time. And then also don't underestimate the ability of innovation and companies trying to make profit out there. That's why capitalism has done so well historically. So focus on that and settle back and relax if you're now into retirement, because I do have listeners of all ages and you're freaking out about this that's going on out there in the economy, you might need to go reevaluate what you've been doing asset allocation wise, because diversification is going to be the thing that's going to give you a little peace of mind. Now, it doesn't mean you're immune to losses, but it does mean that hopefully you're only enjoying a quarter to a third, maybe half of the volatility of the broad markets instead of sitting out there hanging it all out in what the equity funds are doing. So just think about that when you're trying to put everything into perspective to know what you should do with your financial assets. Now, let's talk about the actual topic. Today I went through and I've provided you guys an executive summary of the annual letter that Warren Buffett did to his shareholders. What I like about this is that the letter really provides insight into what really his thoughts are on what it takes to be successful, as well as the criteria he used when he was buying and selling throughout the year. There's also quite a bit of humor added to the annual letter. I will tell you, my wife walked by earlier this week while I was reading the letter for the first time. She walked by, I think it was like Monday or Tuesday last week. And I was sitting there giggling. I. I was reading quotes out loud. And I was just in generally a very happy mood while I was reading this letter. And she looked at me and she goes, you know, honey, you're such a dork. And I take that badge with pride. I really do. Because this is one of those annual traditions that I just get so excited about. Some people I know get excited about going to Star Trek conventions. They get excited when maybe a new book is released by an author out there. I get excited when Warren Buffett publishes these annual reports. And that's why you also notice when you go to the Money guy site@moneyguy.com you know, we even have a random Warren Buffet quote generator that's up there. So it is quite interesting. But let's talk about the actual interesting points from this executive summary. This executive summary I've created on Warren's letter, and it talks about the first thing he kind of touched on is the recent downturn in real estate. And the first thing I thought that was kind of interesting, he said that a lot of the major financial institutions have experienced staggering problems because they've engaged in. And here's where the rabbit ear quotes come out. Weakened lending practices. And I think that's obviously an understatement. I think banks would be the first to admit that they might have been just throwing out money left and right without thinking about what they were getting themselves into. He also says, this is kind of that comedy side of Warren. He goes, it's very interesting that the industry has invented new ways to lose money when the old ways seem to work just fine. And that's about the truth. Getting into all these complicated financial packaging of all these, you know, subprime. I mean, if you'd asked people probably three years ago, What's a subprime lender? I think a lot of people have been like, what in the world is that? But very quickly now it's just part of our vocabulary. It's very interesting how the world has changed from that. Also, for people who aren't familiar with, you've probably heard of Warren Buffett, because you have to live under a rock not to know who Warren Buffet is. Just his reputation as a great investor. But a lot of people probably don't understand that he actually runs Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is a company he bought many, many years ago. And then he just started. As the company became successful, he started acquiring other companies. It became a holding company, really. And then he started getting into investing in traditional investments like Coca Cola, Johnson and Johnson and other household names that he made as part of his permanent portfolio. Now he's just grown and grown and grown. The performance of his investments has been incredible. He's put together quite an impressive track record. One of the things that I think is also interesting, I haven't looked at the price recently because I don't personally own any Berkshire Hathaway, but he doesn't split or do anything with the price. Whatever it trades at is what it trades at. So one share of Berkshire Hathaway recently, and I'm doing this off memory, I know it was over 130,000 a share might have gotten as high as even as 144,000. I'm doing this off memory, so I could be off a little bit on those numbers. But well over $100,000 is just one share of Berkshire Hathaway, which just shows how interesting how much compounding interest he's had if you look at the rate of returns he's generated. But talking about the downturn in the real estate, he went on to quote and say just about all Americans came to believe that house prices would rise forever. That conviction made a borrower's income and cash equity seem unimportant to lenders who shoveled out money, confident that house price appreciation, as Warren called a hpa, would cure all problems. Today, our country is experiencing widespread pain because of this erroneous belief. As housing prices fall, a huge amount of financial folly is being exposed. And he goes on, he repeats a quote that he used several years ago, and I even mentioned it when I was doing that guest post. He goes on to say, you only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out. And what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial institutions is an ugly sight. And what he's saying is everybody thought it was all fun and games. We found great ways to make money, especially on these ultra short term products that we can package up with the mortgages and resell them. And now they're being caught. There's a lot of people, if you don't read the financial trade papers out there, is that, you know, of course this is the time of the year when you get into March and April where people start selling a lot of their assets to pay their tax bill. Well, here we are about to come into April in the next few weeks and a lot of these big, big investors and big time wealthy people that have put their liquid investments trying to get the most squeeze as much return out of those liquid investments that are sitting in cash reserves waiting to pay their taxes and whatever else they might have out there invested in some of these products that were sold to them and now they're stuck. And that's why you also see all these big financial institutions that are setting up margin loans for a lot of their big investors because they're stuck. They have all this liquidity, this cash out there, but they can't get to it because it's locked up in these products that are just being discounted at tremendous discounts where the assets are eventually, when you look at some of these packages just because they have a little bit of subprime product in them, they're trading at big discounts just because of a little bit of exposure. So a lot of these people are being locked into these type of things and it's starting to cause problems on relationships and other things. So it's not only about the profit at the banks. You can imagine if you're a wealthy investor and you've been sold some of these supposedly, quote, safe investments that are going to get you a better rate of return while you're waiting to pay your taxes. And now you find out they're not as liquid as you were told. You're probably pretty upset about that. So these are some of the interesting things that are going on. On page four of the annual letter, Warren says something that many shareholders will also find somewhat troubling. He goes on and he quotes he says Berkshire's past record can't be duplicated or even approached. Our base of assets and earnings is now far too large for us to make outsized gains in the future. And what my thoughts are on this is either Warren really believes this and he truly might believe this after you read some of the other quotes that Warren has written in the at the end of his letter, but. Or he could be, you know, one of the biggest things that, you know, I went to the University of Georgia, big, huge Bulldogs football fan. We get season tickets every year. And I can never forget Coach Donen. We had a Coach Donen. Jim Donein was one of our coaches a few years ago. You remember, he was the coach when Quincy Carter was the quarterback. And I never forget, I went to one of these Bulldog club meetings where, you know, the coaches come out and greet the season ticket holders and the people who've contributed money. And he said, guys, I tell you, this is the best team of my 50 years on this planet, or whatever. He said something like that. He said something effective. This is the best team he's ever coached, that he could pretty much assure us that we were going to either win the sec, the Southeastern Conference, or even possibly the national championship. So he was putting a lot out there on the line and sure enough, didn't have the performance that he had told us. And so he went out on a rail because of some of those predictions and really putting his reputation out there. So I kind of feel like, because there's a lot of other coaches that have learned, if they keep expectations low, you know, play possum a little bit and act like they're not as powerful or strong as they actually are, you know, it keeps expectations in check, and then all you have to go is up. Because if things are bad, you say, look, I told you that things are going to be rough. Told you so things go up, you can go, aw, shucks, be humble and say, oh, shucks, I made that money or won that game, whatever. You're a coach or money manager. That's kind of the controlling expectations is an important thing. And I'm hoping that there's a little bit of that in what Warren is saying. I'm hoping he truly doesn't believe that he's not going to be able to produce all the results that he's done in the past. So that's something that, if you are an owner of Berkshire Hathaway, that I would be concerned that he had made a statement like that. Warren does go in. It always amazes me, and I'm sure this is very successful for him because his reputation works out so well, is that he actually publishes an open invitation for businesses to essentially be acquired by Berkshire Hathaway. And he provides a list of what he's looking for, and he gets into some details. He even talks about how many millions of dollars you have to do in sales and so forth. If you go look at his annual. Every year in his annual letters, he publishes his criteria. What I thought was very interesting is that he does put in there what he looks for in a company. And I think that's what could be very educational for you guys out there listening to this. He goes this year's requirements for what makes a business great, good or gruesome. The basics. First, what Warren and Charlie. And Charlie. Warren mentions Charlie quite a bit in his letters to the shareholders. That's his business partner at Berkshire Hathaway. He says they look for the following. A, a business understand, B, A, favorable long term, it has favorable long term economics, C, it has to have able and trustworthy management and D, a sensible price tag. What's interesting about that is that a lot of times, and he even says it in this year's letter, that their managers, they pretty much just let them run the show. I'm sure there's some oversight to a degree, but. But they don't come in there. And it's not like the Pretty Woman scenario. If you watch that movie where you got guys that come in, take over companies, tear them apart and then sell the assets. There's a lot of Hollywood storylines out there with these corporate takeovers and mergers and acquisitions. It doesn't work that way at all at Berkshire Hathaway. It sounds like if you run a good company, they just want to get in there, help you out, become a partner, maybe even help you with their asset base because they have a huge amount of liquidity with the cash. So they can take you to the next level and generate a very handsome return for themselves as well. So very interesting. But I thought what was very cool about what Warren did was he mentioned what makes the difference between a great good or gruesome company or industry. And he goes on, the difference between a good and great business. A great business requires, and this is his quote, an enduring, enduring, long lasting mote, you know, and that's mote M O A T. I don't know if my Southern accent distorts that a little bit, but mote is, you know, like back in the ancient times, King Arthur, if you're getting into, you know, just when you think about, you know, knights and so forth and castles, I think of King Arthur just because I grew up when a lot of those books were, you know, big with the kids during that time. But, you know, a moat is what protects a castle. It's that water that kind of surrounds and it goes on. It says, an enduring moat that protects the excellent returns on investment Capital, the dynamics of capitalism guarantee that competitors will repeatedly assault any business casel that is earning high returns. And that's a great point, because then he goes on to say that his criteria of enduring causes them to rule out a tremendous amount of companies and industries that are prone to rapid and continuous change. He goes on to say, through capitalism, creative destruction is highly beneficial for society as well as the consumers, because, you know, that's what's driving the prices down for us. Usually that's what causes the price of the TV to go down. And all these great innovations that are going on in technology, the prices keep coming down because there's a lot of competition out there. But he goes on to say, it precludes investment certainty, a moat that must be continuously rebuilt or will eventually be no moat at all. So that's very interesting. He also goes on to say he looks for businesses whose success does not depend upon having a great manager. He says if a business requires a superstar to produce great results, the business itself cannot be deemed great. And I think he gave out a great example because he said, look, if you have a doctor's office in your area, maybe there's a doctor up in Atlanta that is known for. Well, I can give you an example. I'm getting Lasik surgery in a month. I'm getting it on April 18th. I'm so excited. I've been wearing glasses since I was in high school, as well as contacts. So glad to finally get rid of them, be able to swim underwater when I'm on vacation with my eyes open like I did when I was a kid. So I'm very excited about getting Lasik. But an example is that the guy I'm going to get the Lasik surgery from, he was a former client at one of the old firms I worked at. And he's just known here in Atlanta because he's done a lot of the live athletes, he's done a lot of celebrities. He's just well known because he's the guy that they also hire to be expert witnesses and testimony against other people who might have made mistakes with their surgeries. Plus, he does a lot of corneal transplants. So this is the guy, if something goes wrong that you want to have in your corner to work out things. He charges a little bit more because of his reputation. But the thing is that if he wasn't at this practice, I don't know if it would be as successful. That's a key point to what Warren is talking about. If you have a business that requires a superstar, what Is that business truly worth if that superstar is not there anymore? He goes on and he says, but think about this Mayo Clinic. Everybody out there has heard of Mayo Clinic, but could you tell me who the head doctors are of the Mayo Clinic? And I would tell you probably most people can't. And that proves the point exactly. What Warren is talking about is that you want to build. They want to invest into businesses that are much bigger than individuals, that are much bigger than requiring just a flash in the pan on their success. You know, they got to have that moat, as Warren puts it. It's got to have some type of barrier that keeps them successful in the long term, that provides that financial certainty that he talks. He goes on to talk about what's a gruesome business. And he says, the worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. And it goes on. And it says, Warren provides an example of a gruesome industry, and that's the airline industry. And I got to tell you, it's funny how Warren, if you read these letters every year, he does repeat himself on certain topics. And you can kind of learn from some of the things he suggested. I've used this so many times, is that Warren Buffett actually came to the University of Georgia, as mentioned previously, that's where I graduated from. But he came and spoke to University of Georgia a number of years ago. And when he came out, somebody asked him at that, when he came out to the Georgia and said, what's the worst investment you've ever made? And it didn't take him long at all to answer the question, because he quickly said U.S. air. And he replied that there was just too many things that caused that to be a bad purchase, because he said, you know, gas prices, you're so much at the mercy of what's going on within the fuel price sector because, you know, fuel prices are up, that completely cuts off your profit margin dramatically. Plus, if you have, you have dramatic competition out there in airfare prices. And then if by chance you have an accident, a tragedy, or a plane has a problem, or you have customer service issues, your stock price can be beat up by that. So there's too many factors that you cannot control with the airline industry. Well, he goes on, so this is from my experience when he came to University of Georgia a number of years ago. But if you look at what he talks about here, he goes on and he kind of laments the exact same thing, because he says in this year. I'm reading my own notes and can't even keep up. But it goes in this year's letter to shareholders, Warren once again lamented over the bad decision of US Air. So he has not let go of that bad decision. And I mean, this has probably been, oh God, I don't want to put a date on it. But I mean, it's been at least, you know, probably six, seven, eight, maybe even 10 years since he was at Georgia. So he is still, like I said, he's still thinking that even though they made money. It's funny, he goes on to say that he still made money off that purchasing US Air, but it was not one of his finer moments and finer decisions. Warren's take on equity investments. It says Berkshire has a large portfolio of traditional investments. Examples include American Express, Anheuser Busch, Coca Cola and Kraft Foods. What's interesting is the way that Warren evaluates performance for these holdings. We do not measure the progress of our investments by what their market prices do during any given year. Isn't that interesting because I think probably if you looked at most of us talked about what was going on with our companies, all we're really worried about is what they returned us last year in price change. You know, what that monthly statement change was. He goes on to say, rather, we evaluate their performance by the two methods we apply to the small business. Well, not small to the businesses we own. Number one is improvement in earnings with our making due allowance for industry conditions, meaning that obviously they own some stuff that has real estate exposure and lending exposure. And Warren even goes on into the letter to say that they've taken into account that they might not be having a great year this year, but relative to their peers, they're still holding up well. Number two, whether they're moats. Remember the word moats? That's that protection keeping your market share have widened during the year. Warren goes on and he gives his thoughts on the falling dollar. Wow, I'm looking at the clock. This is turning into a long podcast. Didn't mean for it to turn out this long. Thoughts on the following dollar Americans like buying products made elsewhere more than the rest of the world likes buying products made in the U.S. inevitably, that causes America to ship about 2 million 2 billion. Look, I tried to turn into million $2 billion of IOUs and assets daily. That's every day. $2 billion is coming out of the United States to the rest of the world. And over time that puts pressure on the dollar. Warren goes on to say that when the dollar falls, it makes our products cheaper for foreigners to buy and their products more expensive for US Citizens. That's why a falling currency is supposed to cure a trade deficit. And I got to tell you, I have been telling friends and family and others that one of the reasons I feel like we've been doing a lot of this deficit spending in Washington and then what's been going on with the dollar. And, and so I do feel like there is a secret plot to essentially weaken our value so that it can make some of these trade deficits look much smaller than they actually are. But it's turning out to not be as successful. And this was very interesting to me because he goes on, he says, but ponder this. In 2002, when the euro averaged 94.6 cents, our trade deficit with Germany, the fifth largest of our trading partners, was $36 billion. Whereas in 2007, we, with the euro averaging $1.37 per euro. So you go back just a few years ago, we were actually stronger than the euro, and now we're much weaker than the dollar is our deficit with Germany was up to $45 billion. So we've actually seen an increase of $9 billion during this time when we're supposedly bringing this in check. But it hasn't done it the same thing. In Canada, the dollar averaged 64 cents to one Canadian, meaning one Canada currency, Canadian dollar. I don't know why I had such trouble with that. So we were obviously much stronger in 2002. Now we're still stronger than the Canadian dollar. It's 93 cents for one, you know, 93 cents of one American dollar to buy $1 of the Canadian dollar. So we're still stronger, but still significantly different than we were. That's about a 20 cent. Yeah, a 19. Almost a 29 cent difference there. But we still, our deficits increased there from $50 billion in 2002 to $64 billion in 2007. So far, at least, that shows that the plunging dollar is really not fixing any of those problems. And that's kind of concerning to me. Warren also talks about as a country, we need to take responsibility for these problems we're having, the influx of foreign investments. And you've heard about this. You know, a lot of companies. We heard Citibank was being bailed out by that Dubai investment group. Now they came out. That's part of the reason we had so much volatility last week is that that Dubai group came out and said, wait a minute, we're not going to be able to fix everything with Citigroup, they're going to require even more capital. And of course, the stock market was like, oh my God, what's going on? And we lost even last week. So he goes on to say, when we force feed $2 billion daily to the rest of the world, they must invest in something here, meaning the United States. He goes, why should we complain when they choose stocks over bonds? And he's got a great point there. It is true, he goes on, and he says our legislators should recognize, however, that the current imbalances are unsustainable and should therefore adopt policies that will materially reduce the deficit sooner rather than later. Otherwise, our $2 billion daily of force fed dollars to the rest of the world may produce global indigestion of an unpleasant sort. And he goes on to talk about a little bit some of the different price things, you know, we make ourselves where we're not really great global players with some of these decisions we're making in the long term. I did think it was very interesting he mentioned, you know, I'm running out of time, so I'm not going to go into detail as much as I have in some of these notes. But he kind of gives kind of a he picks on the corporate executives, the CEOs out there, and some of the decisions they've made with stock options and the fanciful figures and how public companies are juicing earnings. You can kind of get into that when you want to go out there and look at that. I am going to provide a link to Warren's letter on the MoneyGuy website if you go to moneyguy.com but points of concern, then we'll close out this show because we're right at 30 minutes right now. I should mention that people who expect to earn 10% annually from equities during this century, envisioning that 2% of that will come from dividends and 8% from price appreciation, are forecasting a level of about 24 million points on the Dow by 2100. And that is an interesting point. So it sounds like Warren is saying, look, if you're expecting the Dow to go to 24 million, you might be a little disappointed. And what I took from that, a lot of people will say, oh God, the sky's falling. What are we going to do? But I think it just means to a degree also you got to pay attention to what you're paying and expenses, but then also think outside the box in the fact that you're not going to just be able to rely on U.S. companies. You have to diversify into other markets, you're going to have to find inefficiency somewhere. It might be outside the United States. You might have to think more global with your investment plan. You might have to definitely go outside of just the traditional stocks, bonds in cash. I mean, you really are going to have to think outside the box to be successful over the next coming 92 years to close out this century. He goes on to say, whatever pension cost surprises are in store for shareholders down the road, these jolts will be surpassed many times over by those experienced by taxpayers. Public pension promises are huge. In many cases, funding is woefully inadequate because the fuse on this time bomb is long. Politicians flinch from inflicting tax pain given that problems only become apparent long after these officials have departed. This point, I think, is very important because I've said many, many, many times that we've got to fix this huge liability we've got sitting out there with Social Security and Medicare. But nobody seems to want to do anything because we're scared to make changes. But we do have huge, huge obligations coming down the road. As I've told you guys in previous podcasts, 2017 is the year that Social Security will start paying out more than what it's taking in. And why do I say paying out more than it's taken in? Because basically, Social Security is a pyramid scheme, meaning in the fact that there's not actually a trust fund. There's no savings accounts anywhere. What happens is what current workers are currently paying into the system is then paid right back out to the current retired individuals. And any excesses go to the federal government and they use it for their general fund. And then they just write an IOU back to the Social Security Administration. Basically a filing cabinet or microfiche. I don't know how they're keeping it. It used to be a filing cabinet where they put these IOUs. So in 2017, the government's going, you know, Social Security Administration is going to go over to the government and go, wait a minute, we don't have enough money. You know, you guys need to cover this difference because we got all these retired people out here that are expecting their Social Security check. And the federal government's going to go, oh, okay, you know, well, I guess we got to raise taxes. And, you know, I don't want. You guys. Remember, I'm. I'm probably the most conservative, one of the most conservative people out there when it comes to fiscal policy. That's with an F, not a P. But you just can't see These big obligations we've got in 2017, and that's without thinking that probably they are going to have to raise taxes at some point. And that's why I'm constantly writing you guys, the Roth IRAs, the Roth 401Ks are going to be tremendous. I know you hate it that you don't get that tax deduction now, but tax deductions now we're at the lowest tax rates we're probably going to see for quite some time. Who cares if you're paying taxes right now? Because let me tell you, that tax rate is going to be much, much higher 20 years from now, 25 years from now. So think about that policy wise. That's why you're putting these money in these Roth accounts that grow completely tax free, is so that when you do pull that money out in retirement, you can laugh because you're essentially sticking your tongue out at the IRS and the federal government because you're not going to have to pay taxes on the earnings, on the growth of that compounding growth that's coming through if you put that money out there. So think about that. I do want to close it out. Warren closes out the letter with the following. In the 2007 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway from Mr. Warren Buffett, the oracle from Omaha. He goes at age 84 and 77, Charlie and I remain lucky beyond our dreams. We were born in America, had terrific parents who saw that we got good educations, have enjoyed wonderful families and great health, and came equipped with a business gene that allows us to prosper in a manner hugely disproportionate to that experienced by many people who contribute as much as or more to our society's well being. Moreover, we have long had jobs that we love in which we are helped in countless ways by talented and cheerful associates. Every day is exciting to us. No wonder we tap dance to work. And you know, the big thing I think there is because I feel kind of, and I'm writing a note to myself, I kind of feel blessed in that degree too. And a lot of my clients who are business owners, you can tell they love what they do for a living. That's kind of the way I wanted to close this show out today is think about where your passion is, think about what you love to do and then follow that dream. Because if you love what you do, if you're passionate for it, I think that there is a way that you can turn that into your day job, be successful. Take what the oracle from Omaha, Mr. Warren Buffett himself has put in this letter to shareholders. Use what you've learned, hopefully from the Money Guy show and try to put yourself on the road to happiness by working at a job that you enjoy, making that money that allows you to save, and then going to reach true financial independence. That's what this show is all about. So check us out moneyguy.com you can write the show Brian B R I a n@moneyguy.net and then please tune in next week. We'll have another show for you. Thanks so much and good luck and I hope you have a great week.