Money Expert: Buying A House Is A Mistake! Becoming Rich is Simple But You Won’t Do It!

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Episode: Money Expert: Buying A House Is A Mistake! Becoming Rich is Simple But You Won’t Do It!

Date: April 30, 2026
Host: Steven Bartlett (DOAC)
Guest: Ben Felix (Money Expert, CIO at PWL Capital)

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Overview

This episode features Ben Felix, a well-known financial educator and evidence-based money manager, unpacking the biggest myths and mistakes in personal finance. Key topics include whether buying a home is really a good investment, academic-backed strategies for becoming wealthy, the psychology beneath successful investing, and the most common pitfalls that prevent people from building substantial wealth.

Should you rent or buy? Why aren’t more people rich if the path is so simple? What’s the #1 thing that sabotages people’s finances? With trademark research-driven clarity, Felix explains why most people get finance wrong—and what to do instead.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Distribution Matters in Success (00:00-01:00)

• Bartlett introduces the concept of distribution: even great content and products mean nothing if nobody sees them.

  "Distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or lose." — DOAC [00:13]

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2. Renting vs. Owning a Home: The Uncomfortable Truth (01:00-06:00; 26:30-39:21)

• Unrecoverable Costs of Homeownership:

  • Mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance (often underestimated), emergency/renovation costs, and most importantly, the opportunity cost (money that could have been invested elsewhere).

  "Opportunity cost is one of the largest costs of owning a home." — Ben Felix [28:39]

• The 5% Rule Explained:

  • If the annual unrecoverable costs of owning add up to around 5% of property value, use this to compare the break-even point vs. renting.
  • Formula: (Home price x 5%) ÷ 12 = Equivalent monthly rent.
  • If you can rent for less, renting may be better financially.

• Psychological and Mobility Considerations:

  • Home ownership reduces mobility, which can hinder career opportunities and flexibility, especially for young people.

  "It can limit your mobility, your ability to go and find maybe higher paying work. It introduces a risk that you probably don't need..." — Ben Felix [34:20]

  • Renting is often misjudged because people compare rents only to mortgage payments, ignoring all additional owner costs.

• Happiness Data:

  • Homeowners aren’t necessarily happier than renters after controlling for property type and neighborhood, despite common belief.

  "If you control for property types and neighborhoods... they're not." — Ben Felix [37:26]

• For Young and Mobile People:

  • Renting can be financially and personally smarter, especially early in one’s career.

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3. Top 10 Mistakes People Make With Money (10:20-61:09)

1. Not Earning Enough (10:30):
   • Many underestimate their ability to increase income through upskilling, formal/trade education, or entrepreneurship.

   "Those are all ways to make your own self a more valuable asset..." — Ben Felix [10:38]

2. Not Saving Enough (15:23):
   • The compounding effect makes starting early crucial. Hard to catch up later.
   • Young people may not need to save aggressively, but eventually must.
3. Not Setting Financial Goals (16:42):
   • Most never define what a "good life" looks like; setting goals using the PERMA model (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment) is recommended.

   "If people don’t set goals... they will do things that don’t really matter to them." — Ben Felix [16:42]

4. Overspending on the Wrong Things (21:50):
   • Spending should align with personal values and genuinely contribute to life satisfaction.
5. Not Taking Enough Investment Risk (22:55):
   • Avoiding the stock market (or being too cautious) has a huge opportunity cost.

   "The stock market has delivered these incredible long term returns... not participating in that is a huge mistake." — Ben Felix [22:55]

6. Taking the Wrong Risks (25:50):
   • Chasing fads, trading individual stocks, or speculative investments like crypto and options often carries hidden costs and negative returns.
7. Missing Tax Planning Opportunities (45:17):
   • Even low-to-mid-income earners miss easy wins with government-advantaged accounts.
8. Missing Estate Planning (51:20):
   • Failing to create a will creates avoidable messes and tax bills for families.
9. Ignoring Partnership/Marriage Compatibility (52:47):
   • Financial incompatibility (tightwad vs. spendthrift) predicts relationship conflict and can be majorly destructive to wealth.

   "Tightwads and spendthrifts are more likely to marry each other... and have more marital conflict around money." — Ben Felix [53:53]

10. Underinsuring Against Catastrophic Risks (61:09):
    • Life and disability insurance protects families—often cheap, often overlooked.

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4. Psychology: The Hardest Part of Investing (04:37–06:33; 94:37-96:14)

• Investing is "Solved"—the Challenge Is Sticking With It

  • Academic evidence shows that a simple, diversified, index fund approach yields best results over time—if you can avoid letting emotions sabotage you.
  • Looking at investments too often causes people to take less risk, selling in downturns and underperforming.

  "The more people look at their investments, the less risk they take and the lower returns they earn." — Ben Felix [05:27]

  • Secret advantage: People who forget their passwords to investment accounts often outperform because they don't tinker!

  "She's really good at investing because she always forgets the password…" — DOAC [96:08]

• Women Often Outperform Men in Investing

  • Due to lower trading frequency and less overconfidence.

  "Women are probably better investors. I'm going to give the simple answer right there." — Ben Felix [96:57]

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5. Goal Setting with PERMA Framework (17:23–21:42)

• List all goals, double the list, and use the PERMA model as a prompt to elicit deeper, more meaningful ambitions.
• Examining goals through these categories prevents wasted effort on hollow achievements (e.g., buying a Ferrari simply for status).

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6. Asset Allocation, Index Funds, and Market Efficiency (03:35–08:49; 62:02–79:38; 93:37–99:29)

• Don’t Overcomplicate
  • Most people believe they must have deep expertise, but a little knowledge (about index funds and discipline) beats overconfidence and overtrading.
  • Academic research supports a "100% stocks, globally diversified portfolio" as optimal for long-term returns—bonds are "safer" only in the short-term.
• Market Is Efficient: Forget Stock Picking
  • Everything knowable is already priced in. Professionals rarely beat the market, and when they do, it's not persistent.

  "Trying to outperform tends to make you worse off rather than better." — Ben Felix [96:14]

  • Buy low-cost index funds and focus on discipline.

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7. What Not to Invest In (67:21–76:39)

• Avoid covered call products, thematic/sector ETFs, and trendy vehicles.
• Don’t chase what's hot—by the time a theme ETF launches, much of the upside is already priced in.

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8. Inflation, Hoarding Cash, and Retirement Planning (69:18–75:00)

• Keeping cash under the mattress is riskier than people think; inflation erodes half the value in 20 years at 3% inflation.

  "When you hold cash, you in real terms have a negative expected return." — Ben Felix [73:04]

• Responsibility for retirement now falls much more on individuals, but the tools today (like index funds) are far better than a generation ago.

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9. AI, Economic Upheaval, and the Future of Work (85:27–92:49)

• Advances like AI may disrupt jobs rapidly—but history shows that the world adapts, new jobs emerge, and markets eventually benefit.

  "The same cycle has repeated itself... There has been unemployment, social unrest, wealth inequality, but this happens every time." — Ben Felix [89:52]

• The writing is never truly "on the wall" for a market collapse; if risk were obvious, prices would adjust preemptively.

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10. Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Buying a Home:

  "If you could rent for $1,250 or less, you should rent." — Ben Felix [33:15]

• On Investing Psychology:

  "Investing’s been solved. We’re going to use index funds. That’s it. The hard part is actually doing that." — Ben Felix [04:43]

• On Market Efficiency:

  "If the writing were on the wall, prices would reflect that today... it happens at a time when no one is expecting it." — Ben Felix [92:38]

• On Life and Wealth:

  "Health and wealth have a lot of parallels anyway...It is so hard to reverse the effects once you realize it's a problem." — Ben Felix [15:54]

• On Gender and Investing:

  “Women beat men with their investments..." — DOAC [97:01]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00-01:00 — The importance of distribution for success
• 01:00-06:00 — Renting vs. owning: costs and psychology
• 10:20-61:09 — 10 money mistakes (& deep dives on each)
• 17:23-21:42 — PERMA model and setting goals
• 26:30-39:21 — Homeownership: the case against, 5% rule
• 45:17-48:15 — Tax planning basics for all income levels
• 51:20-61:09 — Estate planning, marriage/partner compatibility, insurance
• 62:02-79:38 — Asset allocation strategies, what not to invest in
• 85:27-92:49 — Economic change, AI, lessons from history, market panic
• 93:37-99:29 — Market efficiency, index funds vs. stock picking
• 96:41-97:37 — Why women outperform men as investors

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Final Takeaways

• Becoming wealthy is simple—but psychologically hard.
  Stick to boring, evidence-based strategies and resist emotional, short-term decisions.

• Renting is not financially inferior to buying—especially when considering all costs and personal flexibility needs.

• Don’t attempt to outsmart the market; you’re competing against the collective wisdom of the world.

• Start small, take risks with long-term assets, and prioritize compounding early.

• Set intentional goals using the PERMA model to avoid chasing meaningless achievements.

• Focus on what you can control: earning, saving, asset allocation, and your psychology.

• Avoid high-fee, complex, or fad-driven investments.

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Where to Find More from Ben Felix

• YouTube: Ben Felix
• Podcast: Rational Reminder
• Website & Tools: PWL Capital

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This episode arms listeners with hard-won, evidence-based answers about the money myths keeping them from real wealth. For anyone serious about financial freedom, it’s a must-listen.

Transcript

[A]

Something we think about a lot in the diary of a CEO is distribution. Because we could have the most interesting guests in the world and the most thought provoking conversation, but if nobody can find us, none of that really matters. And this logic applies to pretty much any business. Whatever you're selling, however good it is, distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or whether you lose. And this is why it's interesting to me that so many vacation rental owners are essentially invisible to a huge chunk of their potential market without even realizing it. Let me explain. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world. And since 2010, it's helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's a huge pool of travelers actively looking for places to stay. So if you've got a vacation rental that isn't on booking.com, that means you're missing out on being seen by millions of travelers already searching their platform. Getting listed takes 15 minutes, and nearly half of new hosts get their first booking within a week. If you need that kind of global reach for your listing, which I assume you do, Then head to booking.com to start your listing today.

[B]

Renting versus owning a home. The biggest financial decision most people make in their life. So we're gonna talk about all of the unrecoverable costs of owning a home, including property taxes, maintenance costs, which is the one that I think people underestimate the most. And then there's also emergency costs. I've got a whole stack of them, as well as a 5% rule to figure out if renting is a better financial decision.

[A]

We'll go through that. What else have we got?

[B]

So this is something that people just don't think enough about, which is the top 10 financial mistakes that I think people make. For example, tax planning opportunities. Like there are simple things that people can do to minimize the amount of tax they're paying and we'll go through those.

[A]

Felix's firm manages the money of more than 3,000 people, ranging from people with huge amounts of money and not so much money. His whole thesis is giving people money advice that is based on academic research.

[B]

Our brains, our psychology absolutely gets in the way of making good long term financial decisions.

[A]

And today we're going to answer the big money questions like, what should I invest in?

[B]

A lot of people believe they need to have a lot of background information before they can start investing. But I would argue that people who know just a little bit, they will be better long term investors. There's a ton of evidence supporting that this will outperform most other investment strategies.

[A]

And also, what is the mentality, the mindset, of people that end up making money over the long term?

[B]

Psychology is important for determining what your financial goals are. So this is a framework that we developed to elicit higher quality goals.

[A]

What would you say to young people that are thinking about their financial strategy?

[B]

A lot of young people feel a lot of pressure to save, but there is research suggesting that it's probably suboptimal for young people to save, which we'll talk more about later.

[A]

And then, in a world of AI where everything is changing so quickly, what should I be doing with my money right now? Ben Felix has the answer. Guys, I've got a favor to ask. Before this episode begins, the algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And a simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Ben. There are lots of people out in the world talking about personal finance and investing and all these adjacent subjects. What is the approach you take that you think is different to lots of the other sort of finance experts that are on YouTube that are giving people advice?

[B]

What I think and the approach that I've always tried to take is what can we take from academic literature, very smart people who spent a lot of time thinking about these things. What can we take from them and apply to making good financial decisions for a typical person?

[A]

And what are the key questions that you've sought to answer for the audiences

[B]

that you have is renting versus owning a home that's always been big. Asset allocation is another big one. How much should you invest of your long term money that you can afford to take some risk with? And another important question people wonder about is why should I not do this other investment strategy that seems very attractive.

[A]

And who are we appealing to with this conversation? Is it just people that have lots of money or is it no, I

[B]

think these questions need to be answered. I mean, the renting versus owning a home one is applicable to pretty much everyone because that is the biggest financial decision most households will make in their lives. Regardless of what their net worth is. But investing, what should you do with your long term investments that's applicable to anybody? Anybody that's going to be saving for their future, whether they have $10,000 or $10,000,000, the same principles apply.

[A]

And how much of this game of investing, making money, comes back to psychology?

[B]

So I like to say investing's been solved. We're going to use index funds. That's it. The hard part is actually doing that because our brains, our psychology absolutely gets in the way of making good long term financial decisions. Where our brains are designed for survival, they're not designed for thinking about long term abstract concepts like taking your money today, investing in the stock market, ignoring all the stuff that happens in between, and then having money left over later to fund your retirement.

[A]

That's so interesting because a lot of the time people talk about tactics and strategies, but I guess underpinning your ability to execute on any of those tactics or strategies are one's own psychology. And is there academic research about the best sort of mental approach to take towards money in finance and investing?

[B]

So one of the best approaches, and it's a little bit counterintuitive, is to not look at your investments. There is an academic paper showing that the more people look at their investments, the less risk they take and the lower returns they earn. Because when you look at your investments every day the stock market goes up and down. We know that if you're looking every day at your portfolio and it's down 5%, up 6% in going up and down all the time, that can be very stressful. And it makes it seem like the stock market is very risky and so people will invest less in the stock market. In reality, for long term investors who can invest in stocks, buy and hold for a very long period of time, that they're a lot safer than people think.

[A]

So we've got some props here for some demonstrations we're going to do. Could you just explain to me the high level of what these things are on the table and the different frameworks we're going to go through?

[B]

Sure. So we have a bunch of things here. This is one of my favorites that I bring up in a lot of my videos. So this is the perma model, which comes from positive psychology. Psychology is important for investing well, but it's also important for figuring out what your long term investing strategy should be.

[A]

We'll go through that. What else have we got here?

[B]

This is the top 10 financial mistakes that I think people make. This is the three steps for investing your first, $10,000.

[A]

Okay. And we've got $10,000 there. So you're going to talk me through how we do that as well.

[B]

We're going to talk about all of the unrecoverable costs. Got a whole stack of them that you incur when you own a home.

[A]

Okay. And I guess this begs the question, who is Ben Felix? What is your background and what is the education, the reference points, the experiences that you're drawing upon to give us this information today?

[B]

Probably where it starts for being relevant is I did a degree in mechanical engineering at Northeastern University. And I say that's relevant because when I came into finance, I wanted to approach it like an engineer. And a lot of finance, a lot of financial services, of investing and wealth management is not approached like an engineer. It's approached like, I feel almost bad saying this, but it's approached like a car dealership selling product. So I was disappointed in that and had to find my. Find my own way.

[A]

They haven't got my best interests at

[B]

heart in a lot of cases, I don't think so. I started spending a lot of time reading through academic literature so that I could be very confident and comfortable that the advice that I was giving to people was good, high quality advice.

[A]

And where is the best place to start? Is it in the psychology? Is it one of these frameworks? Is it somewhere else? Is there a background understanding of the economy one needs to get going?

[B]

That is a great question. I don't think so. And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck, where they believe that they need to have a lot of background information before they can start investing. They may do research on specific industries, they may look at the energy sector so they can build out an energy portfolio as one example. But investing the way that I would say is sensible for most people, which is just using low cost index funds, capturing market returns. The market returns have been there and they're going to continue to be there. They should continue to be there. In the long run, doing that doesn't require a lot of background knowledge. I would argue that people who know just a little bit, just enough, they just know that index funds are sensible and they have enough conviction they can stick with that. They will be better long term investors than someone who knows enough to hurt themselves.

[A]

What would you say to young people that are thinking about their financial strategy? Would you say that someone in their early 20s, 21 years old should adopt a completely different approach to money based on what you've just shown me versus someone that's 51 years old.

[B]

It's going to be different for sure. I think this is a. It's a tricky subject, but a lot of young people feel a lot of pressure to save and that might be saving for their retirement, it might be saving to buy a home, but they feel a lot of pressure from their parents and just from society in general that they need to be saving money. That if they're not saving money, they're being irresponsible. But again, if we come back to academic research, there is research suggesting that it's probably suboptimal for young people to save. General point is that you should save more when you have a higher income and save less when you have a lower income. And what that ends up meaning is that young people may not need to save or may not need to save as much as they feel pressured to save. The reason this topic is tricky is that while what I just said is true, it can cause bad habits where if people spend all of their income and then don't have that shift towards saving at some point, then they'll end up in a difficult position later on in Life. Someone who's 50, it's going to depend on their situation. If they're the person who I just mentioned, who never saved, they're in a tough position and they are going to need to save a lot in order to have some wealth later on in life. But if they've already saved and they have wealth, then they can focus more on some of these topics.

[A]

And you've got the 10 money mistakes people make here. Can you run me through those ones and just let me know if any of them are particularly pertinent or interesting that we should dive deeper into.

[B]

So this one's controversial. It's not earning enough money. A lot of people feel like they don't have an option, that they're not earning enough money because that's just the way things are and there's nothing that they can do about it. I don't think that's necessarily true. Investing in your human capital, and that can be formal education, it can be gaining skills, it can be becoming an entrepreneur. Those are all ways to make your own self a more valuable asset, to increase the value of your human capital and allow you to earn more money. So that's a big one. I think people who get stuck in the feeling or the thought that they do not have the ability to increase their income and that this is just the way things are, I think that can be very problematic.

[A]

I've always thought of it across these sort of five buckets, the first two buckets that we attempt to fill when we're starting our careers are our knowledge and then our skills. And kind of like when knowledge is applied, it becomes a skill. And these two first buckets are so imperative because they can almost never be unfilled. Whereas the other three buckets, which is your resources, your network and your reputation, you can have career fluctuations and earthquakes that cause those buckets to unfill. So as like you were saying earlier on about young people, one of the things I've always thought is like, when you're young, just like optimize fulfilling your knowledge and skills as much as you possibly can. And actually, I guess the level of nuance there is acquiring a rare but complementary stack of knowledge and skills that the market values. And I think over the long term, you know, this doesn't apply to everybody because things happen in life and bad things can happen, but over the long term, I think life tends to land you pretty much in and around the value of and the rarity and the complementarity of those knowledge and skills as it relates to the market's demands.

[B]

That's absolutely true. There's data on this too, where we know that there is a mechanical relationship, at least historically. We can talk about the future, but historically there has been a mechanical relationship between formal education or trade education and lifetime earnings. And we also know that certain degree types like engineering, finance, business, some other sciences have higher lifetime earnings than other degrees. So I think you're absolutely right, there are. And the hard part is we don't know what exactly those degrees and skills that are going to be the highest paying in the future are going to be. Ten years ago we might have said software developers, today we might not.

[A]

But even you as an example, so you did engineering and then you did finance, and now you've added this other string to your bow, which is you know how to make content on YouTube and that makes you as a finance expert and professional and CIO, so extremely rare. It almost makes you like one of 100 on planet Earth. Maybe this is what I mean by rare and complimentary skills. You could have just learned more finance and I don't think that would have moved you up this sort of earning ladder. But because you added this really rare skill of being able to make content to your other skill stack, I'm guessing it made you money.

[B]

It did, it has. And I continue to be paid well. And you know, it was. Please don't. But if you were to go back and watch my Old videos which are still up. I am so rigid and nervous. And I was. And it took probably years of recording. And we do a podcast too. So just being in front of the camera for me to feel pretty good. I mean, it probably took me three years to smile on camera, really. So, yes, that was a skill that I acquired through just practice.

[A]

I guess I say this because I really want people to think about how rare their skill stack is. It's not something we're taught. And then also one of the things I noticed, I used to work in a biotech company for a little while while I was in between things. And we were looking for a writer, a biotech writer. Now, the other writers that we hired at our other companies might have been paid $50,000, whatever it is. For a biotech writer, we would pay them a quarter of a million. And the only difference is the biotech writer had like some base. They didn't have to go to medical school. They just needed experience in writing about biotech and it 5x'd their earnings. So this other point is, you might have a skill stack, but are you selling them on the right market? And even me, first part of my career was marketing. I was helping Uber and fizzy drinks company and dress seller company sell their dresses. As I just said, the second little stop I took in my career was helping biotech companies with marketing that are about to ipo. My first contract with one of those companies was worth 8 million 6 months work. And it was a real pivotal moment in my career. Where I go, it's not just the skills you have, it's like where you, the market and industry where you sell those skills can wildly change your, as you say on that card, your earning potential.

[B]

Yeah. And as you say, this is something that you don't have full control over because you could do all of those things and not find work as a biotech writer. But putting yourself in that position I think does increase the odds.

[A]

What's the second one you've got there?

[B]

Second one is not saving enough. Touched on this a little bit. Young people maybe don't need to save, but at some point you do have to start saving. And the tricky thing about saving is that wealth compounds over time. And if you're not saving out enough, you're missing out on compounding. And it gets a lot harder to catch up with the amount of savings you would have otherwise had if you'd started earlier. So that's a big one. And some people will wake up when they're 50, 55, maybe even 60 and realize they haven't saved enough. But by that time, there's nothing that you can do about it or very little that you can do about it. There's a lot of parallels with health here, where if you eat poorly and don't exercise, you can wake up when you're 55 and you can have heart disease. That is very difficult to reverse. And it's the same effect it's compounding over time. I think health and wealth have a lot of parallels anyway. So not saving enough can be very problematic because it is so hard to reverse the effects of it once you've realized it's a problem.

[A]

Interesting. I read a book called the Slight Edge by. I think it's Jeff Olson when I was 18, which talks exactly about that. I think it uses. One of the analogies it uses is like brushing your teeth. Don't brush them today, it's fine. Don't brush them every day this week, you're fine. Don't brush them every day this month you're fine. But in five years you're fucked.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

In five years time you can't like start brushing them. Then you're in a dental chair having them ripped out. And I guess finance is the same in this regard.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah. Number three is not setting financial goals. And that's. We talked a little bit about this earlier as well. If people don't set goals, they will do things like think they need to earn more money because. Because. Because that's what you do. Or they'll think they need to buy a house because that's what you're supposed to do. But they won't step back and reflect on what are the components of a good life for them. What do they want their life to look like and what would they need to do to achieve that. And if you don't go through that exercise, you can end up spending years or dollars achieving things that don't really matter to you. And again, because of compounding, by the time you realize those things didn't matter, that's time and money that you can't get back.

[A]

So how do I go about setting good financial goals? What is the process? There's.

[B]

So this is the process that we created is three steps. List your goals.

[A]

Okay, so what does that look like?

[B]

So you're going to sit down with a piece of paper or. We built an app for this that we use with clients. You just list out your goals.

[A]

So I could say, I want to be a dad, I want to buy a Ferrari. We want to Go on holiday to Cancun. I want to be able to retire at 50. Those kinds of goals.

[B]

Yep. Now, step two. So you've got your list of goals, you're going to double the list.

[A]

Double it?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Why?

[B]

So you came up with, I think, four goals just now. You're going to write down eight goals because this forces you to think harder about what other goals might be important to you. And research does show that this elicits more goals that people later identify as being at least as meaningful as the initial goals that they listed. And then the last thing, we're going to come back to the perma model. So the perma model is a five factor model of human flourishing. If you have these components contributing to your life, there's a very good chance that you'll live a good, satisfying life. I think you've lived through this experience where you've seen that wealth does not lead to a good life. And so what does? Well, a whole bunch of really good research on this, and it does suggest that positive emotion is one big piece of it. What does that mean? It's literally enjoying what you're doing and feeling good throughout the day. Engagement. You could probably argue that we're getting some of that right now, where you're doing something that you enjoy doing that's maybe a little bit challenging, but it's at your skill level. It's the idea of getting into flow. I know. I get that when I do podcast interviews, when I do research, when I'm sitting down and writing a video script. Relationships is having good, strong relationships with people who are close to you in your life. And that can be friends, it can be family members, it can be colleagues. Meaning is being part of something that is bigger than yourself. That can be a lot of different things. For some people, it's religion. For some people, it's community. For some people, it's their own business. And accomplishment is achieving hard things, setting goals and achieving them. You're going to look at the items of the PERMA model, you're going to look at those as categories and think about what other goals you may have that fit into those categories. That's called a categorical prompt. And again, there's evidence behind that, helping people elicit more meaningful goals.

[A]

So one of the things I said is buy a Ferrari. Again, these aren't my gods. I don't care about Ferraris. But in case they want to sponsor the podcast, then I care about Ferrari. But say the Ferrari thing, do I have to find where it sits in terms of positive Emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning accomplishment.

[B]

It would be wise to. And this is why I think this framework is so important, because you might realize that a Ferrari does not contribute to any of these things. It might though, like maybe you take it to the track and you spend hours racing it.

[A]

And that would be engagement.

[B]

That would be engagement. Maybe you have a bunch of buddies who have Ferraris and you want to be part of that friend group.

[A]

So that's relationships.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. I mean positive emotions, but that might only last a couple of days.

[B]

Yeah. Well, it's the hedonic treadmill idea. That's exactly it. Yeah.

[A]

And then accomplishment, I mean it's not really an.

[B]

If it was a goal that you've had since you were 5 years old, maybe you could call that accomplishment. Maybe. Okay.

[A]

So I fit my financial goals, my life goals into the PAMA model as a way to understand what my financial goal should be.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. How many people in the general public do you think have actually thought about what a good life for them looks like?

[B]

Not enough. Not many. I think everyone's people are so busy with their day to day lives and I know this is true for me and my family too. It's really, really hard to step back and have this kind of thoughtful discussion about what you actually want your life to look like.

[A]

Cause I was just thinking about that. I was thinking, I don't even know if I've got really clearly defined life goals for myself. I think most of us just kind of act on how we feel and that can somewhat drift us towards the short term. Like if I just. What's gonna make me feel good today and do that every day? I don't know. Some might argue that you have to be a bit more long term thinking it can help.

[B]

Right. Cause it can help you from making decisions that you might regret in the future.

[A]

Yeah. Cause when I look at this perma model, there's some things on here that I've optimized for which have sacrificed the other things that I've got.

[B]

That's it. Yeah.

[A]

I might have over indexed on this, like achieving things, but it might have cost me some relationships. So what's the fourth mistake people make?

[B]

Yeah. So this is related to what we were just talking about, but it's overspending on the wrong things.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

When you think about what is a good life for you and if you realize that you're spending on things that are not contributing to that which is resulting in you not being able to save toward things that would contribute to what you want your life to look like that's probably not a great position to find yourself in. So it could be spending $12 on an iced coffee every morning and not enjoying it, because you could get positive emotion out of that. But you're like rushing to work, chugging down the $12 coffee every day. That's probably not contributing to a good life. Number five might be one of the bigger ones, which is not taking investment risks. And that's really. The stock market has delivered these incredible long term returns. And on expectation, it should continue delivering strong returns for investors. Not participating in that is a huge mistake. And it's a mistake that many, many people make. A lot of people don't invest in stocks at all. And a lot of people who do invest in the stock market don't invest enough in stocks. They have very conservative portfolios. And that has a very large implicit cost. By not participating in the stock market when you could be, you're giving up a huge amount of economic gain.

[A]

How do you quantify that for the average person in terms of what kind of gain they're giving up or the size of the gain they're giving up?

[B]

Well, you can look at the historical returns on stocks and you can also look at the expected returns on stocks. So let's say it's. Let's say it's 7% that we expect stocks to earn in the long run. And if you could get 2% by sitting in cash, that 5% difference is your opportunity. Cost of not investing in the stock market when you otherwise could be 5% compounded over the long term is enormous.

[A]

So say I have $10,000 and I invest it in the stock market and I'm getting, what did you say, 8%, say 7%. How much money is that? Let's have a look. So I've done $10,000, which is what we have here invested in the stock market. 7% return over 40 years, that would be $150,000. Do you know what's quite scary when I think about that is that kind of means that today if I spend $10,000, I'm actually spending $150,000.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Which makes me not want to spend any money on anything.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because if you buy, I don't know what cost $10,000. Like a small car.

[B]

Yeah, maybe.

[A]

Yeah, you're actually spending $150,000 when you factor in the fact that if you'd put that $10,000 into the stock market, you could have made 7% a year and it would have turned into $150,000.

[B]

Yeah. That's one side of the coin. I think you also have to think about any enjoyment or utility that you get out of that car. If that car lets you drive to a job you couldn't have otherwise done, it may have a significant economic value to you in the long run.

[A]

As one example, you know, I've got a coffee here. Some people spend $10 on a cup of coffee with frappa chappa toppings and all that stuff. Looking at that over the long term, in 40 years, if you'd not bought that coffee and put it into the stock market and got just 7% return, you would have had $150. So when you buy that $10 coffee, you're actually theoretically spending $150 in 40 years time.

[B]

So you better really enjoy the coffee.

[A]

Is there a bit of a fear that it makes us not want to spend money on anything and therefore we end up having a shitty life in the near term? No.

[B]

I think that's why this framework, that's why the perma framework for thinking about these decisions is so important. Because you do want to have positive emotion and engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Those are all really, really important. And yes, that money could be worth more in the future, but it can also be worth a lot today if you're optimizing on the right things.

[A]

What else? Number six.

[B]

It's another big one. So not taking enough risk is important. Taking the wrong risks with your investments. So we just ran some numbers about a 7% stock market return. You can basically get that using an index fund. The problem is a lot of people don't invest in index funds. They pick individual stocks hoping to earn really high returns. They trade individual stock options, they trade crypto tokens and all that kind of stuff. And a lot of those types of risks have negative expected returns or they have high costs if you're doing a lot of trading. And that can really erode long term investment growth.

[A]

What about buying a house? Is that a good investment?

[B]

I wouldn't consider buying a house to live in an investment. It sort of is. You get an asset, but you're really, you're buying an asset that funds your housing consumption. It kind of pays you a dividend. That's sort of like getting rent from the house that you own. When you do the side by side comparison, which I think is the only way to think about this. If you compare buying a house. So that means in Canada you'd usually save up for a 20% down payment. So you put 20% down in your house, you Take out a mortgage to finance the rest. You're now living in the house. You're paying your mortgage payment. You're paying for some maintenance costs. You're paying for property taxes. Alternatively, you could have rented the house. That 20% that went into buying a home could have been invested in the stock market. So again, we're back to the idea of opportunity costs. And the other important thing here is that renting typically has lower cash flow costs than owning. So these are the unrecoverable costs of owning a home mortgage interest. So that's when you buy a house and you borrow to fund the purchase, you're paying interest to the bank. I call these unrecoverable costs. That's money that you're paying for the use of money in this case, and you're not going to get those dollars back. It's gone. Opportunity costs. So that's what I just mentioned. Whatever equity you have in a home is equity that you could have otherwise invested in the stock market, the capital portion, the principal. The price of homes has increased around inflation. At the rate of inflation, maybe a little bit higher. Historically, stocks have far outpaced inflation. So by having money sitting in a house as opposed to invested in the stock market, you have what is called an opportunity cost. You're not earning returns you could have otherwise been earning. So that opportunity cost is one of the largest costs of owning a home. So I've got mortgage interest, the opportunity cost of equity. Property taxes are another big unrecoverable cost. Property taxes vary depending on where you are, but it's say between 0.5% and 1%, maybe sometimes a little bit higher. You get utilities and some services in exchange for it. But it's again, it's an unrecoverable cost. You pay that, you've got nothing left afterwards. Then we've got maintenance costs.

[A]

Oh, this is the annoying one.

[B]

It's the annoying one. And it's the one that I think people underestimate the most. I started making content about renting versus owning a home years ago. I used to say 1% was a reasonable estimate of maintenance costs. And people would push back and say that's way too high. There's a bunch of academic literature showing this too, that says it could well be over 2%. I think that's probably a more reasonable estimate. Having been a homeowner now for six years after renting prior to that, I'm fairly confident, at least in my case, that maintenance costs are far higher than 1 or 2% of the property value per year.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I bought my first home a while ago and fucking hell, I didn't think about the gardening. And the pool pump gets broken, and then there's a crack in the patio outside, and then the heating system breaks. And then everything just seems to break.

[B]

And it's always breaking.

[A]

It's always breaking. Every time I go back there, which is. It's in a different country. The first week I've just spent looking at the things that have broken since I was last here, like, making a list of the new expenses. And it's never cheap.

[B]

No.

[A]

And if I was renting, that wouldn't be my problem.

[B]

No.

[A]

There's also like another cost here which we don't talk about, which is like the time you waste on the maintenance. Like, when we think of maintenance cost, I imagine people are thinking about the fees to fix things, but actually, the time I spend having phone calls and speaking to people, for me, is worth a lot more than just the costs. But anyway, yeah, maintenance cost, yeah.

[B]

The coordination is huge. And you could outsource that, but that would be expensive. And depending on how valuable your time is, it could make sense to outsource it. But I agree with you. I do the same thing. I spend time on the phone finding which contractor is going to come in and fix this thing. And then you have to wait for them, and then maybe they're late. Yeah. So that's maintenance costs. We have emergency cost here, which is really a subset of maintenance costs. So you can have big things like the roof needs to be redone, the foundation cracks, whatever. Those can be very significant. And one of the challenges with those types of big costs is that you kind of have to have liquidity available to fund them. And that means that you have to have cash sitting somewhere, or at least some liquid assets sitting somewhere. So probably not invested in the stock market, which also has an implied cost

[A]

to it, which is more opportunity cost.

[B]

Right, more opportunity cost. Exactly. And then this one's interesting, and this is one that I don't think I appreciated until I own my own home, which is renovation spending. We talked about maintenance. When you fix something in your house, you don't just fix it to get it back to the baseline level that it was at before. You make it a little bit nicer.

[A]

You're right. I never did that when I was renting. So the side by side.

[B]

So you run the side by side comparison. You account for all of those unrecoverable costs that the owner has. You account for the renter investing in the stock market and investing, the cost difference, the cash flow cost difference between renting and owning each month or whatever frequency and what you'll find. And I've done this with projections. So looking at expected stock returns and expected real estate appreciation, you can very easily show that there is unequivalence. There is a level of rent where you are indifferent between renting and owning. I did a video years ago that has millions of views now where I came up with this idea called the 5% rule. So I took some of those costs. I took property taxes, maintenance costs, and the cost of capital, which is the opportunity cost and the cost of borrowing. I wrapped all that up and said We've got roughly 1% for property taxes, roughly 1% for maintenance costs, which is probably way too low as we just talked about. And I said 3% for opportunity cost, which I think is also on the low end. And you put all that together and you get 5%. So I said, okay, if you divide the price of a home by 5% and then divide that number by 12, you will get the monthly rent that is equivalent to the unrecoverable cost of owning that home.

[A]

Okay, so let's do that. So I'm thinking of buying a $300,000 house. What's the method I need to do to figure out if it's better to rent?

[B]

Multiply it by 5% and then divide that by 12.

[A]

Divide it by 12.

[B]

Okay, you're brave. I usually have a rule to never do math live on a podcast I can edit.

[A]

So just in case, okay, the result is 1,250.

[B]

There you go. 1,250 is the equivalent rent where you're roughly break even between renting and owning.

[A]

So if I could rent for $1,250 instead, or less or less, I should rent.

[B]

Renting is a better financial decision. So this is an important part of this topic. We can show financial equivalence and just that is important. We can show that there is financial equivalence between renting and owning. I've done more robust versions of this analysis since then. PWL has a calculator on our website where you can see the break even by putting specific numbers in instead of just doing this rough rule of thumb because things will change it. For example, if your asset allocation is more conservative or more aggressive, that opportunity cost number can be different. If you're a taxable investor, meaning that you're taxed on your investment gains by investing in the stock market or the bond market, your opportunity cost decreases because the after tax, expected return on stocks and bonds decreases relative to homeownership. 5% is a very rough rule of thumb.

[A]

Do you think for the average young person, let's say someone's, I don't know, 25 years old, they should, and they're thinking about building their wealth over the long term, do you think they should be buying a house as an investment or should they be doing something else?

[B]

I think for young people it's really tough. And it's tough for a couple of reasons. One is because home prices are high, you have to save up a lot of money to buy a house. Another one is that it can limit your mobility. We've seen in Toronto, in Canada, where I'm from, prices, condo prices in particular have plummeted. They've fallen off of a cliff. If you bought a condo in Toronto and you get a job offer somewhere outside of Canada, what are you going to do with that condo that's at a big loss, you're kind of stuck or you have to try to rent it out and now you've got this just difficult situation to deal with. Plus there are big transaction costs if you're selling a place. So for young people, I do think that homeownership can be tricky because it can limit your mobility, your ability to go and find maybe higher paying work. It introduces a risk that you probably don't need in your life because you may end up moving somewhere else. And then people often move up where they want a condo today, but they're gonna want a house later. For my family, I met my wife, I was renting a place. The first place we met in a second place, a third place and a fourth place. We went to four different places as we were having our family. We have four kids. And so our needs were changing over time. We needed a bigger condo and then we had a townhouse, then we had a house. But we just. The lease ended and we gave notice and we left. We found a better rental that was more suitable for our needs. If we had been homeowners, the amount we would have paid in transaction costs to do that would have been insane. Or we would have had to buy the house that we were going to have forever much earlier, which would have introduced significant opportunity costs.

[A]

That's one of those things that's just impossible to measure because it's so intangible. But like the psychology of feeling like you can't easily move. And I see this a lot actually with people that apply for jobs in our company is in the interview process. They'll say, well, I've just bought a house in insert city. And you can see their sort of psychology is holding them back from taking an opportunity because they've made an investment in a particular city. And so they might lose, as you say, like an opportunity in New York or LA or London because mentally they feel committed to a place.

[B]

Yeah. Now the flip side of that is that if you're really sure that you want to stay in one place, one of the best ways to accomplish that is buying.

[A]

Who can be sure?

[B]

Yeah. You can't. But if someone was really sure, maybe someone has. Maybe like me, I have four kids. They're all in the same school. It's very unlikely that we would move.

[A]

The other big mistake I think I made is I bought a holiday home. That was a terrible. Well, I shouldn't say terrible idea, but kind of a terrible idea. In part because of the same reason. In part because it means you only go on holiday to one place.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is like defeats the point of holiday.

[B]

Yeah. And it's. I have not done that. And the main reason is the mental overhead. I don't like having to think about one property. I can't imagine having to think about a second one that I'm not at.

[A]

Such a dumb idea.

[B]

I don't know.

[A]

I don't know why I did it. Especially when you're like young. It's like the whole point is you can still walk up mountains and do things. You don't want to be sitting in the same house every day.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Are homeowners happier than renters?

[B]

Depends how you slice the data. If you control for property types and neighborhoods and all that kind of stuff. No, they're not. If you don't control for those things. I think owned homes do tend to be a little bit nicer and better maintained. They do tend to be in better neighborhoods. So uncontrolled renters are a little bit less happy. There's multiple studies on this. Statistics Canada has a really good one that does exactly that. They have controlled and uncontrolled life satisfaction differences for renters and owners. If you're a professional who is thinking about buying a house in a nice neighborhood or renting a nice house in a nice neighborhood, it's unlikely that you'll be happier in either case. If you are forced to be a renter in a not very nice neighborhood because it's all you can afford, you may be less happy. But it's not necessarily the renting that's making you less happy.

[A]

Is there any particular group of people that you think should be buying a house?

[B]

Yeah. So people who are very risk averse, people who want to stay in one place for a very long time because

[A]

they have a family or something.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you don't want to be priced out of the market that you live in. This did happen in some cities in Canada in recent history. It's now reversed, but there were people who were getting priced out of their market. They'd been renters for a long time and rents went up so quickly that they just couldn't keep pace. It depends on your rental market. Some rental markets are controlled where that's less of an issue. So you do have to think about things like that. But yeah, if you want to stay in one place, owning your home is the way to do that. But it's a double edged sword because if you realize you want to leave, you might be stuck. And then the other big one for who should own a home is taxable investors with high tax rates. And again, that comes back to the opportunity cost where if you're paying a lot of tax on your investments, whereas real estate tends to be tax preferred in Canada, gains on your primary residence are tax free. US has, I believe, unamount. And so that's another thing to think about where the opportunity cost changes depending on your specific tax situation.

[A]

When we have these conversations about buying a house or not buying a house, one of the things I see a lot in the comments section is people sharing their case studies of them buying a house 30 years ago and now it went from being worth $100,000 to $600,000 and they're asserting that that's evidence that it's a good idea. You probably see this a lot.

[B]

Oh, this is the thing, this is the example. And if everyone has the family member that bought a house for $70,000 and sold it for a million, I'm just

[A]

going to read you the top four comments and I'd like to get your response on them. The first one is the not buying a house does not work in the UK as 90% of rents are higher than a mortgage cost. Also, if you want to start a family, you need a stable place to raise your children. And with renting you can be kicked out within a few months notice and your whole life could be turned upside down.

[B]

I personally think there are ways around that. And as I mentioned earlier, I did rent for six years of my life with a wife and an increasing number of kids. The two things that I always made sure to do were to rent from professional landlords. We did have one experience renting from a sort of mom and pop person who had bought a condo and rented it out. And that wasn't great. But after that we were very careful about vetting our landlords and only renting from professionals. And then the other thing that we did, which addresses, at least in Canada, addresses one of the other points there is we would sign long leases. If we want to stay in the house for a few years, we would sign a multi year lease. And landlords do tend to like that. The other point that was in there that I think is really important is that rents are higher than mortgage payments. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they're making the rent versus own comparison is they'll say, this is my mortgage payment, this is my rent. If the mortgage payment is lower, owning must be better. But that's not the case. As we talked about a minute ago, you have property taxes, maintenance costs, potential renovation spending that you wouldn't do otherwise, and the opportunity cost of capital. When you add all that up, the cost of owning a home is far more than the mortgage payment.

[A]

This guy here said, I bought a house. It's the best thing I ever did. It's launched my mindset in new directions. Remember that having your own space has profound psychological impact and can be life changing for some of us that want to live in a healthy environment. What do you make of that point? Does it have profound psychological impact?

[B]

If someone believes that it does and they've really taken the time to reflect on their life and has decided that yes, it is in fact true that it has had a profound psychological impact, of course that person should own a home. Of course they should. Is it true for everybody? I don't think so.

[A]

Dawn said. My experience I purchased a house in 2013 with 20% down payment deposit. My total payment, including taxes, insurance, HOA, homeowners insurance.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Insurance is $1,800 a month. As of today, the exact same house is renting for $4,000. The property value has also gone up 3x. I'm glad I bought my house.

[B]

Yes. So there are cases where real estate allows you to use leverage very easily, as Don mentioned. And if you end up buying in a market that goes up a lot in a short period of time, it can be really, really good. However, and this is what we've seen in Canada more recently. It hasn't touched other markets yet, although of course the US has had their own declines and so have other countries. But Canada is right now in one of the biggest real estate price drawdowns when you adjust for inflation going back to 1975. And so if you had bought, yes, seven years ago and then looked at the price in 2022, you'd think, wow, I'm a genius. Of course everybody should buy. But if you had bought in, I think it's 2021 was the kind of peak. And you look at it today, you're thinking like, wow, I've ruined my life. So yes, there are examples like that for sure, but that is not what people should expect every time that they purchase a home.

[A]

So are you saying that the future's not going to be as the past for this?

[B]

I know the Canadian market best, but I think it generalizes outside of Canada. We've seen record decreasing interest rates, although that's changed a little bit now. But for a period of time, we had interest rates going down, down, down in Canada. We had a ton of immigration. I have no problem with immigrants, but we had levels of immigration that were just not compatible with the amount of housing that we had in. In Canada, which is contributing to prices going up. We have housing supply just not growing quickly enough, which are all things that Canada is addressing now. But all that caused prices to go crazy, which is, I think, why they've come down in such an extreme way. So I'm not saying necessarily that we're never going to see high house prices again or house prices going up at an extreme rate again, but in Canada at least that has now normalized or at least started to normalize. I don't think it's reasonable to expect stock like returns from real estate forever, even though we did see that for some years.

[A]

So for most people then you think if their goal is to make money and they care about mobility, being able to get up and go if opportunity arises. A better investment decision would probably be just investing in an index fund which gives you exposure to the stock market.

[B]

Yeah, I think the mobility piece is key there because remember, just from a wealth perspective, we can show that, hey, these are pretty close to equivalent. But if mobility matters to you. Yeah, I think that matters a lot. If you have unique investment opportunities, that can be another reason where your opportunity cost is really high. I had an opportunity to buy equity in my company years ago, and if I had been a homeowner, I think I actually had just bought a house and I think I even had to reduce the amount of equity I bought because I think our. Well, pump broke around the same. Anyway, it was a whole thing.

[A]

It's annoying, isn't it but that's like

[B]

there's opportunity cost in the stock market which is call it 7% or whatever. But there's other opportunity costs that can be a lot higher. Like in that specific situation and the

[A]

next one there is number seven.

[B]

Yeah. Missing tax planning opportunities. This is something I think people just don't think enough about. But it's not terribly complex. But there are simple things that people can do to minimize the amount of tax they're playing paying. For most people it's just optimally using things like in Canada we have the RSP and the TFSA. In the US it's the Roth and traditional IRA and 401s. Using those things optimally make a lot of sense. Then the rest other types of tax planning tend to get more country specific. There tend to be lots of things, particularly for higher income people that you can do to pay a little bit less tax.

[A]

What about for lower income people?

[B]

For lower income people, the government accounts

[A]

that are provided are like ISA in the uk.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Those are probably the best thing for people to be focusing on. But even then I don't like people are often not using them optimally.

[A]

One of the things people don't talk about enough is all the ways that rich people do things to avoid paying tax. They have like they hire people so that they don't have to pay tax. I hear about all these crazy stories of like I've started this business on the side here so I can get a real estate license and if I get a real estate license, I don't have to pay the same tax on this thing here and I move the money around here and I flip it around there and then I don't have to pay any tax. Most people, like the average people don't have any loopholes that they can they jump through.

[B]

Yeah, it's true.

[A]

And even one of the crazy ones I learned about when I got some money was that you can take a loan against your stocks and there's no tax on the loan. So if I have a million dollars of Facebook stock, I can go to a bank and get 500k in cash loaned against that stock without having to sell it. And then on that 500k I have no tax to pay and I can just hold that Facebook stock and when it goes up to 2 million I can go back to the bank and say give me another 500k.

[B]

You could, but if it goes down, you get margin called and they have to come up with the cash to.

[A]

Don't they just sell? Don't they just sell the stock?

[B]

They might, but then you're selling after it's come down. So it's not risk free. But yeah, that is a thing that people do.

[A]

I guess everybody could do that, right? Most people could. If they invested in the s and P500, they could go and get a loan against that investment. And that loan would be tax free.

[B]

Yep, same. Same rules for everybody. But I would still say that you're taking a lot of risk by borrowing money against risky assets like that.

[A]

Okay, so tax planning, there's nothing else to cover that in terms of the average person?

[B]

Yeah, I don't think so. But it is an important thing for people to think about. If thinking about what mistakes might I be making in my financial plan, they should definitely be thinking about are there tax planning opportunities that I'm missing?

[A]

How would they find out?

[B]

It's a tough one. A good cpa.

[A]

What's a cpa?

[B]

An accountant. A good tax professional should be able to identify tax planning opportunities for you. Good financial planners similarly should be able to identify good tax planning opportunities for your situation. But as you said earlier, the reality is there aren't that many things that people can be doing. And it's really things that you could figure out how to optimize once and then you're kind of set.

[A]

Much of the reason most people haven't posted content or built their personal brand is because it's hard and it's time consuming and we're all very, very busy. And if you've never posted something before, there's so many factors in your psychology that stop you wanting to post what people will think of you. Am I doing this right is the thing I'm saying. Absolutely stupid. All of these result in paralysis, which means you don't post and your feed goes bare. I'm an investor in a company called Stan Store, which you've probably heard me talk about. And what they've been building is this new tool called Stanley that uses AI, looks at your feed, looks at your tone of voice, looks at your history, looks at your best performing posts and tells you what you should post, makes those posts for you. You can also just use it for inspiration. And sometimes what we need when we're thinking about doing a post for our social media channels is inspiration. Building an audience has fundamentally changed my life and I think it could change yours too. So I'm inviting you to give this new tool a shot and let me know what you think. All you have to do is search Coach Stan Store. Now to get started, I run multiple companies that have multiple sales teams. And one of the things, as a founder of a company that's often confusing is you find it hard to figure out where sales are. So about 10 years ago, I started using Pipedrive in my former company and it's also the reason why I switched over all of my commercial teams in my current media company called steven.com to use Pipedrive as well. Not only do they sponsor this show, but they've been an incredibly effective way of scaling our sales engine over the years. Pipedrive is an easy to use intelligent CRM and at its very core, it makes your sales process visible through one dashboard, a visual pipeline showing every deal, what stage it's in, what needs to happen next, and it's all in real time with no delay. It doesn't magically close the deal for you, of course, but it does replace complexity with clarity. If you want to join over 100 companies already using Pipedrive, you can use my link for a 30 day free trial with no credit card payment needed. Head to pipedrive.com CEO to get started. That's pipedrive.com CEO. I'll see you over there. Who does need a financial advisor?

[B]

Probably a lot of people, but the financial advice profession has a lot of challenges. We were chatting about the sales nature of the financial services industry and I do think that's a big problem because if someone has. Here's Ben say, okay, Ben said I should have a financial advisor and they go to a bank or they go even to some random firm, there's a good chance that they're going to be sold products that they don't eat. And I don't have a solution for that. It's a difficult situation when that is the state of the financial advice industry.

[A]

I guess to get around that, one might ask their friends and family who does their financial planning and then go with a trusted referral.

[B]

Yeah, but people often trust people that aren't giving them great advice. Like, it's really, it's really problematic. I think a lot of people can benefit from financial advice. It's just finding the right person. And a lot of people don't need financial advice because you do pay fees for it.

[A]

What's the next one? Number eight.

[B]

There eight is. It's kind of a similar discussion to what we just talked about, but it's missing out on estate planning.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

Figuring out how your assets are going to be distributed to the people that you want them to or the entities that you want them to when you die.

[A]

This is an Interesting one, because nobody's. Well, most people aren't expecting to die anytime soon, so they haven't really thought much about this.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you know, some might also say, listen, I'm not going to be here, so why should I care? Especially people that. I guess that's a mindset of someone that doesn't have kids.

[B]

But yeah. And it can cause a lot of problems if you don't think through and plan for the way you want your estate to be distributed. You can pay a lot more tax than you otherwise would have. And your estate can go to people that you may not have wanted it to go to.

[A]

You can pay more tax if you

[B]

don't have things set up properly. And again, this is going to be country specific, but yeah, there's cases where you would pay more tax if things were not set up properly than if they were.

[A]

Do you think everybody should write a will?

[B]

Everybody that has any dependents should write a will. I've heard an estate planning lawyer joke that everybody has a will, but it's the government's default will, which you may not actually agree with.

[A]

It's like prenups.

[B]

Yeah, kind of like that. Yeah, it's exactly like that. You could say everybody should have a will because it can help from having a big mess for other people to clean up. But for sure, if you have kids, if you have dependents, I think having a will is really important.

[A]

And on that point of prenups, number nine is about who you marry.

[B]

Yeah. This is a tough one. It's a tough one because, I mean,

[A]

this is front of mind for me because as you can see from these photos, I just proposed to my fiance.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I mean, this is not the ring, but. Cause this is a bit extra.

[B]

But that's awesome.

[A]

Oh my God. They put my face in the team put my face in the books. That's creepy. But yeah. So why is this so important who you decide to marry as it relates to how rich you'll be or won't be?

[B]

Well, it's not just how rich you'll be, it's how satisfied you'll be with your life and with your marriage. Academic research has identified two spending profiles that you can categorize people into. One is tight wads. It's people who don't like to spend money. And one is spendthrifts. That's people who do like to spend money. The names are kind of funny, but that's what the research calls them. And the crazy thing about this is that tightwads and spendthrifts are more likely to end up marrying each other than to marrying someone who has the same profile as them. So a tightwad and a spendthrift are more likely to get married than a tightwad and a tightwad or a spendthrift and a spendthrift.

[A]

What do you think that is?

[B]

The research on this talks just about kind of opposites attracting. And there may be some sort of thrill to the differences initially. But tightwads and spendthrifts, as they go through their marriages, do tend to be less satisfied in their marriages and have more marital conflict around money. And again, that's based on an academic paper.

[A]

Now, that's the reasons why the marriage might not last. But in terms of how it might impact your financial success.

[B]

If you really want to save, if you have. If you go through your goal setting, exercise and your perma model and you have a vision for the life that you want to live that requires saving, and you have a spouse that wants to spend a lot of money today, that can be very, very difficult. It can make it a lot harder for you to achieve your goals. I don't think it's insurmountable. I think a tightwater and a spendthrift can work. I mean, it's not like all of them end up getting divorced, but it does require a different level of coordination and communication and being on the same page.

[A]

Do you have to speak to clients about this?

[B]

Often it comes up a lot. We have lots of clients who were single and end up getting in relationships and then getting married. And we have to all have all kinds of conversations about marriage contracts or prenups, estate planning.

[A]

Do you think everybody should get a prenup? Going back to what you said earlier, where you said if you don't write your own, the government will give you theirs. Which just to simplify that, if you don't write your own prenup, then the default position is the government will decide through the law how your assets are divided at a time when you break up. Problem is, people find prenups to be really unromantic.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And they also think there's an implication that we're assuming we're gonna break up, which is also not so sexy.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Do you think people should get them?

[B]

If both partners are on the same page and comfortable with it, it's not gonna cause a major rift. And if it does, maybe that's a red flag.

[A]

Do you know what I mean? Why would it cause a rift?

[B]

Do you know what I mean?

[A]

And it's not to Say that I'm just keeping all my stuff and you're keeping yours. It's just to say so let's agree. Now, what would happen in the 50% probability that this doesn't work out?

[B]

Yeah, we've seen both. We've seen clients come up with very creative and interesting marriage contracts that have specific formulas for how things are gonna work. And depending on how many kids they have, it's kind of an interesting exercise. And in that case, it was kind of fun and they were engaged in the process and it didn't cause an issue. And we've also seen people who did not have anything in place and have had very bad divorce outcomes from a financial perspective.

[A]

I had a friend go through a divorce recently, and he's a very successful person. His wife was there from the beginning. She took, looked after the family while he was off gallivanting around the world, building his businesses all over the place. So obviously she, you know, she's contributed hugely to his success. What I noticed though, is it's destroyed what could have otherwise been a good relationship. As they separated, they now really, really hate each other because lawyers have stood in between both sides and basically caused tension because that's their job. They're going to get paid more. And her lawyers are incentivized to squeeze every single penny they can out of this separation. And so I think he said it had been like six or seven years since they decided to divorce, and he's still in court arguing with lawyers about how they separate. And it's destroyed their relationship. And they've got two kids. You just think, gosh, like, if you had a prenup, this would have been quick and it could have saved the relationship. Okay, anything else to say on this point of marriage incompatibility?

[B]

The academic research on this does have a short quiz. I don't know if we have it kicking around anywhere here.

[A]

I think this is it. It's called the Tightwad and Spendthrift Quiz. Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

This scale measures the pain of paying, the emotional distress some people feel when spending money. And here's a quick DIY version of that quiz. Question number one is, you see a high quality coat on sale for $100, which is usually $300, you need a coat and you have the money. Do you buy it? Answer A, no, $100 is still a lot of money. I'll wait for a better deal. B, yes, it's a great value. I need something. C, yes, and I might buy a scarf. To match since I save so much. Which one are you?

[B]

I mean, if I need the code,

[A]

I'm B. I think I'm C, but actually, to be fair, I just don't buy stuff, so I don't even know if I'd buy it anyway. Question 2. You are at a restaurant with friends. The bill is being split evenly, but you ordered the cheapest item. How do you feel? A physically pained. I'll likely mention that I should pay less. B, a bit annoyed, but I'll pay it to keep the peace. Or C. Fine, it all will even out in the end.

[B]

I'm between B and C. Really. I might feel a little bit annoyed, really, but I wouldn't cause a fuss about it.

[A]

I'm C again. Fine, It'll even out at the end. Number three, which statement describes you best? A, I have trouble spending money even on things I actually need. B I balance my spending and saving pretty well. Or C, I often spend more than I intended and regret it later.

[B]

I got B.

[A]

You said B, which is I balance my spending and savings pretty well. I would say I'm C again, but again, the caveat here is I actually don't. I don't spend money on stuff anymore. I don't buy stuff anymore, but I can spend it on like travel and experiences and stuff.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Last question. When you buy something expensive, your primary emotion is A anxiety or regret, B satisfaction in the utility of the item, or C excitement and a rush.

[B]

I think I'm B again.

[A]

I reckon I'm B as well there. So scoring your results. If you're mostly A's, then you're a tightwad. If you're mostly Bs, you are the unconflicted. And if you're mostly Cs, you are the spendthrift. So I guess with that you are unconflicted, you're in the middle. You have a healthy relationship with money where you can save when necessary but enjoy the fruits of your labor without guilt. And I am a C, which is you feel very little pain when spending. You enjoy the moment, but you might struggle with long term saving goals or buyer's remorse. That's so fucking true. Everyone should do that at home. Okay, that makes sense.

[B]

So we know that tightwad and spendthrifts are incompatible. I do think it's an interesting concept. Like how do you have that discussion with a potential partner? Or do you just observe it and

[A]

kind of infer on a date you can say to your partner, say, oh, there's this great podcast on YouTube called the Diary of a Sea Air. We should listen to it then. Listen to this episode. They're listening with you right now. If you've done this and then just play along, Play along with your partner. Are you looking for your partner to be the opposite then? Because you said opposites attract. No, they don't do that over time.

[B]

No. Opposites end up together but then have conflict because of that.

[A]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

Yeah. I think if you're a tightwad, being with the same is probably good. If you're a spendthrift and you end up with another spendthrift, you have to be really careful about your household finances.

[A]

Yeah, I don't think my partner's a spendthrift. I think she's in the middle with like you.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Doesn't really care.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is useful.

[B]

We do have one more card in the mistakes, which is underinsuring catastrophic risks. And I think that's one Particularly for people who are not currently financial independent, that's really, really important. If your household income relies on your income to maintain the lifestyle of the household, it's really important to have sufficient life insurance where if you die, your human capital, your ability to earn income in the future is replaced by the insurance and also disability insurance, where if you lose your ability to work, you have insurance to replace that income.

[A]

Do many people think about this?

[B]

Probably not enough. And it's cheap. Well, disability insurance is not always cheap. Life insurance is generally pretty cheap if you're buying low cost term life insurance, which is what most people need.

[A]

You made a video called the most controversial paper in finance.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What paper was that?

[B]

That was a paper. We didn't have it out here, but that was a paper on life cycle asset allocation.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

So it's answering the question of how should your mix of stocks and bonds change throughout your lifestyle? Conventional wisdom says that you should start out riskier in stocks and then move towards safer bonds as you get older. This paper took a huge amount of data. They had data from 39 countries going back as far as 1890. I believe they sampled from that large set of data to simulate a million potential sort of hypothetical lifetimes that you could live through. And then they asked the question of, in this simulated data, which asset allocation gives the best outcomes? And they tested target date funds which increase the weight in bonds over time. And those are. A lot of people have those through their retirement accounts. So it's just one fund. And it starts out when you're younger with more equities and then transitions to bonds over time. That's a target date fund. They tested, I believe a 60, 40, 60% stock, 40% bond asset allocation. There might have been some other stuff in there too. They might have tested only domestic stocks. And what they find in this paper is that the optimal portfolio from the perspective of retirement, consumption, utility and bequest utility.

[A]

What does that mean?

[B]

It's like the satisfaction you get from retirement spending measured with a formula so that it can be studied. And then likewise for the amount of money that you have left over at death, they measure the probability of running out of money as well as a whole bunch of different metrics. They look at and they find that a 100% equity portfolio with a big chunk of international stocks is optimal. One third domestic, two thirds international stocks.

[A]

When you say domestic, what does that mean?

[B]

That's a great question. So the way they set up domestic in the paper is that it can be any country. So the way they do the simulations is that for each draw, so they're drawing on average 10 years of returns, or say we're in the U.S. they'll draw the U.S. returns measured in U.S. dollars for a 10 year block. That's the domestic return. And then the international block is going to be 10 years on average of all the other countries, samples, returns measured in US dollar. So I've got the domestic return, the international return, the next block might be 10 years from Italy, measured in whatever the Italian currency was at the time. And then the international portion is going to be all the other countries excluding Italy, measured in Italian currency. And so they're weaving together all these blocks. That's called bootstrap simulation. So domestic, to answer your question, is whatever country you live in.

[A]

So the outcome or the conclusion from this should be that you should invest. I mean, if we're following this and if it was 100% accurate, what, 60% in whatever country you live in, in the stocks of whatever country you live in.

[B]

30%, 30% domestic. So yeah, one third domestic, two thirds international.

[A]

Okay, so if I'm in the United States, one, so I get 30% of my capital and invest it in the American companies and then 60% in international stocks.

[B]

Yeah, well, yeah, 67%. Yep, yep. So that one important finding in the paper, and I talk about this in the video, is that the curve for how optimal the domestic amount is is pretty flat, if I remember correctly, between sort of 10% and 50%. So they do say in the paper that for a US investor, you don't necessarily have to be a third domestic, even if you're 50 or even if you're just market cap weighted, which is currently around 60 or 65%, that's probably fine. But for a Canadian investor or someone who's in a country other than the US 1/3 in your domestic country ends up being a pretty big home country. Bias.

[A]

In these simulations, are they saying that you need to invest in international stocks? Because sometimes in the simulations your domestic country, your home country has problems.

[B]

Yeah, high inflation tends to be bad for retirement consumption. You're spending a lot more and for domestic stock returns and international stocks protect against that.

[A]

So it diversifies you a little bit.

[B]

Yeah, well, it's exactly what it is, a diversification. And that paper, it was controversial. I mean, we had the co author on our podcast twice to talk about it, but it was met with a lot of controversy from everybody, from a lot of professionals, from other academics. Why? It's an extreme finding. The conventional wisdom that you should be allocating more toward bonds throughout the life cycle is so ingrained in everyone's thinking that a finding like this that shows that that's basically wrong. Of course it's going to be met with controversy, but at the very least, I think it's an interesting paper. It's telling us that stocks are a little bit safer for long term investors than we probably thought. And bonds, which are typically considered safe, are actually a little bit riskier than we may have thought for long term investors. The reason being that during periods of high inflation, bonds get absolutely decimated.

[A]

What's a bond?

[B]

A bond is a debt instrument. So you're effectively lending money to a government. You're receiving interest payments over time and then your principal back at the end.

[A]

What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that your audience come to you to understand?

[B]

Well, a lot of the things that I talk about are financial products that you should not invest in.

[A]

Okay, tell me some of those, which

[B]

I always think is fun. A big one that I spent quite a bit of time on last year. I did three videos on. It was on covered calls.

[A]

What's that?

[B]

So that's where you own a stock and then you sell a call option, which is the option to buy the stock. You're selling that option to somebody else, which gives you an option premium. And so you get some income from having sold the call option. But it also means that if a stock that you own appreciates sufficiently, you were required to sell it to the person who bought the call option from you at a preset price. So the stock's whatever, $40 and you sold a call at $50 and the stock goes to $60, you have to sell it at $50. So you're giving up a big chunk of your upside. And this plays on one of the big biases that investors have, which is a preference for income. It's the mental accounting bias where investors separate capital and income. And so there's a huge proliferation now of covered call products where they do that strategy that I just described inside of an etf. They charge usually a higher fee. And these are being marketed really heavily to investors on the premise that you're going to get appreciation, capital appreciation, and you're also going to get income. But I think my view on this and what I tried to explain in those videos is that you're giving up so much upside that I don't think most investors realize that they're giving up, that the implied cost of these products is enormous.

[A]

On that point of fees, I've got this graph here which I think is pretty pertinent to what you're saying, because when we start investing in ETFs and various index funds, we often don't think about fees. It'll say, oh, 0.5%, we think, okay, whatever, 0.5% is fine, 1% fine. Small numbers. But when you look at that graph, you see how that can impact your outcome over time.

[B]

Yeah, fees compound. Any rate of return that compounds over long periods of time can be very impactful in dollar terms.

[A]

And some people choose to keep their money in cash because most of us are never educated on this subject of inflation and what inflation means. So some of us, we might keep $10,000 under the bed. What do you say to those people?

[B]

Yeah, so inflation is everywhere. It's been around for throughout history and it's probably not going to go away. We have central bank policies in most developed countries that actually target a low but stable rate of inflation. And there are reasons for that. But what it means is that if you have money sitting under your mattress, its purchasing power will decrease over time. And that can be very damaging to your wealth. You can maybe keep pace with inflation using short term government debt instruments which are going to pay you a little bit of an interest rate. But again, periods of high inflation can cause even that to decline in real value. So one of the best ways to fight inflation for long term investors, something we've been talking about, is just investing in low cost index funds to avoid the fee issue and participate in the stock market, which throughout history has far outpaced inflation.

[A]

One of the smartest things a business can do is build like a bigger company without actually hiring like one. But the problem we all face is that most companies don't have every skill in house. So when I look at the businesses seeing real success today, the consistent pattern with all of them is how quickly they move. They bring in specialists with skills in emerging areas to keep themselves ahead. Even in our company, we spent the last year pulling in talent across areas like AI, native strategy, no code builds and product workflows. And we find this talent through our longtime partner, Fiverr Pro. Their premium service only shows you vetted talent. So you've already always got the safeguard that anyone you pull in to help you with a complex project has the skills that you're after and will deliver to the same high standards as your internal team. And most importantly, they'll keep up with the pace. It's a simple strategy, but it lets us stay agile without compromising on quality. So if you need these kind of skills in your business, head to pro.fiverr.com to find pioneering talent to fill your business's gaps. That's pro.fiverr.com this is something that I've made for you. I realize that the Diavisio audience are strivers. Whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is We've made these 1% diaries, and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before. Before they all sell out once again. And you can get [e-mail] and if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Is this broadly accurate? This graph here shows the impact of inflation on cash kept under the mattress over 20 years. And you start with $10,000 in terms of purchasing power, and 20 years later, if that cash is under the Mattress, you have $5,336. It doesn't show me the inflation rate. Oh, that's at 3% inflation, you're losing half of your money effectively. And the Source here is St. James Place. So a lot of people who are just holding onto cash don't really realize that over a 20 year period, assuming a 3% inflation rate, they're halving their money.

[B]

It ties back to, I don't remember which number it was, but it ties back to one of those biggest mistakes in personal finance we talked about, which is not investing, not taking the right kinds of risk with your investments and just holding cash. Hoarding cash is in its own way taking a type of risk. You don't have an expected return. When you hold cash, you in real terms have a negative expected return.

[A]

Do you think we should all be thinking about retirement planning?

[B]

I think it ties into the perma thinking and designing the life that you want to live. But at some point, at some point we can't work anymore. It's rare for somebody to be able to work into their, you know, I don't know, 80s. I think that it's sensible to plan for that. But beyond that, a lot of people don't want to have to work forever. People might choose to work forever, but they might choose to do lower paying work. But the idea that you will be forced to work forever I don't think is very attractive to anyone. So from that perspective, building financial independence by saving and planning for retirement. Yeah, I think it's important for everyone

[A]

to think about is the sort of social contract of retirement changing based on how the economy is changing. Because I hear a lot of people saying you're not going to be able to retire and get a pension because there's not enough money or you're going to have to work later than ever before.

[B]

I think the onus has been put back on individuals. Pensions used to be much more common from companies and governments. So retirement's changed from that perspective for sure. But I don't know if we can say we're in a crisis. I think people have more personal responsibility now than they've had in the past, but they also have better tools than have historically been available. Thirty years ago we were just starting to get low cost index funds proliferating and being readily available to everybody. Prior to that you were paying 2% or more to invest in a mutual fund. So the tools people have available to them are Better today than they've been in the past. But there's also a lot more responsibility that people have to take for their own personal finances.

[A]

You're naming the things that people shouldn't invest in. The first is that cool thing?

[B]

Yeah, Covered calls.

[A]

Covered calls. What else?

[B]

Another one that I think is really problematic is thematic ETFs. And so that's like an AI ETF or, I don't know, a space or energy, like any specific ETF that's targeting a specific theme.

[A]

Why?

[B]

What tends to happen with thematic ETFs is that something becomes really hot. So maybe it's AI, maybe it's cannabis. Electric Vehicles was another one.

[A]

Sustainable energy.

[B]

Yeah, that was another good one. Clean energy. And so what happens is asset prices in that theme go up because there's a lot of interest in it. Everybody wants to invest in that space. Asset prices go up. An index provider creates an index for that hot theme and then an ETF gets launched. But it gets launched when the asset prices are up here. And what tends to happen is the asset prices come down and the returns on thematic funds tend to be very poor.

[A]

Okay, yeah, I think I was guilty of that in my early career. Was like, oh my God, a sustainable energy etf. I believe in sustainable energy. I should invest in that. But you're right, they created that when it was hot. So you should have invested. I guess you're saying just invest in the FTSE 100, the S&P 500 instead. Or technology, which is a broader basket.

[B]

Technology's tough. Technology has performed so incredibly well, but it is still one sector. Okay, I have trouble saying you should invest in tech. If you had invested in tech for the last 20 years, well done. Should you choose to invest only in tech or have a big concentration in tech today? I think that's a lot less obvious.

[A]

One would say, well, look at all this AI stuff. How do I invest in all the AI stuff?

[B]

A lot of it's private right now, although a lot of the public companies do own chunks of some of these private companies. We'll see how that plays out. But that's another one that's been tough recently where a lot of investors are interested investing in, investing in some of these private companies, a lot of them AI related. But SpaceX is another one. It's really hard for retail investors to get access to those types of things. But there are companies who are creating products that say that they can give you access to these things. They're charging high fees. It's not obvious that they've been able to buy the underlying securities that they're saying they have access to at good prices. But it's just another example of financial companies preying on the desires and biases of investors. Financial firms are very good at seeing what investors want, even if that thing is not good for them, and then creating a product to fulfill that desire.

[A]

So if someone listening now is, let's say they're 50 years old and they've got $20,000 in savings in cash, and you had to be decisive. You don't know the nuance and the detail of their life. You don't know their perma framework necessarily. But your job was just to make the money in the next 10 years. How do you think you would allocate that? Let's say $10,000, it's easier. $10,000 in cash, how would you allocate it? That's a, that's a tough question.

[B]

In 10 years, I don't know if it's answerable. Especially over 10 years.

[A]

It's tough. What about 20 years if they have

[B]

a long time horizon? So I can tell you personally, I like to invest in stocks. I have a globally diversified stock portfolio with a Canadian home country bias. Kind of like what that paper, the controversial paper found. We were doing that prior to that paper coming out. But I think that general concept of a globally diversified portfolio, maybe with some home country bias makes a lot of sense for most people, including for retirees. But there are so many. What's his risk tolerance? If he's going to panic when the market goes down and sell everything, then it wasn't a very good idea and he's not going to get the outcome. But the good long term outcome they may have otherwise gotten.

[A]

And would you go all in on

[B]

stocks all at once?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like dollar cost averaging versus lump sum?

[A]

Yeah. How would you invest? Would you go 100% in stocks or would you even diversify there?

[B]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think 100% stocks is personally a portfolio that I'm very comfortable with and I'm not old enough to be thinking about retirement, but it's a portfolio that I don't expect to change throughout my personal life cycle.

[A]

Is that how you allocate your personal finances? Now I know you have a home, but otherwise the money you do invest is in the stock market.

[B]

Yeah. So I've got my home, I have my stock market investments, and I do have a pretty significant chunk of equity in the company that I work for.

[A]

No crypto.

[B]

No crypto.

[A]

No crypto.

[B]

I never touched it.

[A]

Never touched it.

[B]

That's not true. When I was researching Ethereum and Bitcoin, I remember when that was. It was a few years ago. I bought $1,000 of each just so I could feel like I was participating while I was learning about it.

[A]

What do you think of Bitcoin and Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies?

[B]

I think that they solved a really interesting problem. The premise of digital cash is something that the cypherpunk community, the kind of libertarian community of privacy focused computer nerds where they were trying to solve this problem for many, many years of digital cash. How do you create digital cash that doesn't require a trusted third party to mediate transactions? And they solved that. Satoshi Nakamoto solved that. That was cool. And he used a bunch of different pieces like you can kind of see in the paper how he used Adam Back's ideas that he had created to stop email spam. And it's just how it all came together. It's unbelievable. Fascinating story. The technology was really interesting. I think it has become an ideological vehicle where people who believe that the world should be a certain way or believe that government's role in money should be a certain way, they can invest in Bitcoin and feel really good about it. I think it's got that component to it and then the other component that it has to it is that it's a speculative asset. People buy Bitcoin because they think it's going to go up.

[A]

So it's not a good investment. Is that what you're saying?

[B]

I personally wouldn't. We don't allocate to it for our clients at pwl. We manage quite a bit of money for quite a lot of people and we've decided not to touch it. And I personally don't touch it.

[A]

I had a phone call actually from a friend of mine. She's very well known in the UK and she was. Cause there's lots of wars going on everywhere and there's the Strait of Hormuz is closed and there's Russia, Ukraine. There's all of this stuff going on. She was asking me for financial advice on what she should do in such a moment. I don't know why she's calling me. I just thought I'll ask you when you come here. But it's interesting because my team found this article from 1847 which was in a magazine and it almost sounds like today the article says this things are bad all over. It is a gloomy moment in history, not in the lifetime of any man who reads this paper, has there ever been so much grave and deep apprehension? Never has the future seemed so dark and incalculable. In France, the political cauldron seethes and bubbles with uncertainty. England and the English empire is being sorely tried and exhausted in a social and economic struggle. The United States is behest with racial, industrial and commercial chaos, drifting, we know not where. Russia hangs like a storm cloud on the horizon of Europe, dark and silent. It is a solemn moment, and no man can feel indifference of our own troubles. No man can see the end. An apt description of things. Very apt. And that was on October 10, 1847, in a magazine. And it very much sounds like today.

[B]

It could be today, yeah.

[A]

So as we zoom out on the cycles, the big sort of economic cycles, the geopolitical cycles, my friend that called me and said, listen, there's lots of stuff going on in the world. Should I be thinking about my money differently, my investing strategy? What the hell's going on? What would you say to those people?

[B]

Yeah. Well, as the clip that you read suggests or tells us, the world has been through a lot of crazy stuff. A lot of crazy times, a lot of wars, a lot of turmoil, a lot of political upheavals. And we've come out okay. In general, there's been pain and suffering, and not everybody's had good outcomes. But generally speaking, here we are. And if we think about that from the perspective of financial markets, stock returns have been positive despite all the craziness going on in the world. There's lots of interesting charts that overlay news headlines about all the madness going on in the world. On top of the stock chart that's just going up. It doesn't mean the stocks are always going to be up. They will go down when things get crazy, like when this war started, stock returns did get a little bit negative for a while. They've since come back, but there will be volatility in financial markets, volatility up and down day to day. But in the long run, stock returns, they should continue to be expected to be positive. So for your friend, I don't know how their assets are set up, but someone who's globally diversified, exposed to the stock market, they don't have to make changes to their portfolios when the world's getting crazy.

[A]

I remember what she said to me. She said that she was going to remortgage her house because I think she'd paid it down and she was wondering what to do with that money. She was saying Do I just go buy another house or do I invest it in the stock market? Now my bias is the stock market, but I don't know, what would you say to someone in that situation?

[B]

I want to know why she's mortgaging your house. But given there's a good reason for that, I would probably go in the stock market, not into real estate.

[A]

Do you think people shouldn't remortgage their houses?

[B]

This is a tough question. Leverage. Kind of like how exposure to the stock market is good. Borrowing money to invest in positive expected return assets like the stock market is actually kind of a good thing. On paper. Borrowing money generally improves long term expected outcomes. But it's stressful. You can have bad outcomes where you lose all of your money. So should people borrow money to invest? Should people mortgage their house to invest? That's a very personal question. It's kind of like the stock bond question. Should you invest in stocks or bonds? Should you invest in stocks with leverage or not? It really depends on your goals and your situation. But generally speaking, if we just look at what do the data say about borrowing money to invest, it's not a terrible idea.

[A]

One of the things we haven't talked about is AI. And does AI change any of this equation? A lot of people are worried at the moment about losing their jobs. Anthropic released a report who are one of the big AI companies saying that entry level people in particular are going to have a hard time. And I think they said they're already seeing 13% of entry level jobs being disrupted because of these new AI and AI agents.

[B]

To be clear, not a labor economist. It's not my area of expertise. I do think though that when we look back through history, I like looking at history. There have been lots of technological revolutions that have been major upheavals to the entire economy. Yes. So ATMs. ATMs are one of those fascinating examples. People thought that ATMs were going to wipe out bank tellers because ATMs could do everything that bank tellers do. But it was automated and you didn't have to pay a person to do it. So there was a lot of concern. And what ended up happening was very counterintuitive. Is that the cost of operating a bank branch decreased because you needed fewer people to do all the bank teller stuff because you had the ATMs. And banks opened more branches because it cost less and their customers liked that. And the end result was that there were actually more bank teller drops. At the end of the day, the cost of providing the service decreased, which caused it to proliferate more, provide that service to more people, and it expanded the market instead of shrinking it.

[A]

Similar story with Jevons Paradox, and it's the same concept. What's that story where coal became cheaper at a time when they used coal to ship freight on trains, and the coal engine got more efficient with coal? Coal industry panics, we're screwed. But then what it meant is people used trains not just for shipping freight, but also for other things like travel. And people started traveling on trains because it got cheaper. So the coal industry actually boomed. In the end, that's it. I have thought a lot about this Jevons Paradox idea, and I think it's. I think it's going to be true for artificial intelligence, for sure. I. E. There will be lots of other jobs created. And actually companies like mine, if we save money, we invest it in something else, which then would probably create jobs, whatever that is. The part that I sometimes struggle with is the speed of adoption in AI and then also when you factor in robotics, like my car in LA drives itself, and I think one of the biggest employers on Earth is driving in all its forms. But then if you look at warehousing and supply chains, a lot of those are ran by people all over the world. And there was a video that I played the other day, we can throw it up on the screen, which shows that in factories in certain parts of the world, now they're having their labor force wear cameras on their head showing what they're doing with their hands, because their robots are ultimately going to replace that labor force. And I just. I haven't. I guess this is maybe something that happens in history. I haven't been able to think about where those people go and what they then can go on to do, especially if it happens in short order.

[B]

Yeah. So I've heard you ponder this in your other episodes, and I agree that the speed of this is likely to be different. As you've said, we're talking about the Internet, so you can deploy these things at the snap of a finger, and that is different. But where do those people go? This is one of the interesting things I don't know. We don't know.

[A]

And through history.

[B]

We didn't know exactly through history, it's been the same sentiment where people worry about where are these people going to go? And they might be unemployed for a while and there might be hard times, but things have worked out. And so two ways to think about it. One way is, as an individual, what should you be doing. We talked about earlier having complementary skills that make you very unique I think is important. Personally. Content, as you mentioned, has been a big part of that for me. Not everybody can necessarily do that, but finding those things that you can do when combined better than anybody else in the world, I think is very valuable. And then the other perspective is, as an investor, how should we think about this? And there I would come back to again. We have seen many technological revolutions that have changed the world. They've changed financial markets, they've changed our culture, they've changed the way we interact with each other. The world has changed so many times due to technology. And the same cycle has repeated itself. There has been unemployment, there has been social unrest, there has been wealth inequality, but this happens every time.

[A]

Are you expecting the stock market to collapse? Because there's been a huge overinvestment in artificial intelligence. And at some point, the investors that put their money into these sort of speculative AI startups that raised tremendous amounts of capital at crazy valuations at some point through history, doesn't the market always contract at some point?

[B]

There's a great book by an economist named Carlotta Perez. The book is Technological Revolutions and Financial and she documents this exact cycle throughout history. And yes, that's part of it. Part of it is asset prices getting really high and then coming back down. Now, am I worried about a catastrophic market collapse? I think that's always a concern. I think that's part of the risk of investing in stocks. We never know when it's going to happen or what the trigger is going to be. So it's not something that you can do anything about. You need to have an asset allocation that you can stick with even if that outcome is going to materialize.

[A]

And in that book, does it suggest that the writing is on the wall for the current economy and the way that we're heavily investing in AI and data centers and a couple of years ago everyone was investing in crypto and web 3 and NFTs and all this stuff. And all of the money seems to have been sucked out of that industry. Really honestly sucked out of almost every industry and into AI.

[B]

I remember when Defi was going to kill banking and finance, and that was

[A]

only a couple of years ago. In fact, a lot of the developers have moved from that industry into the AI industry. But I think I do think about this a lot. I've got a few startup friends who are getting a little bit nervous and are raising a lot of money now because they think that in the next couple of years, maybe in the next 24 months, there's going to be a big market contraction. When investors who invested in some startup idea that had a $100 million valuation realize that they're losing their money and some domino usually falls in the market. Some catalyst moment means that there's a contraction. Stock markets go down. It gets really hard to raise money. Clients who you might be relying on now to pay your advertising budget, start to lower their budgets. And in such a scenario, you're going to want to wish you'd prepared a little bit. Some people are.

[B]

This is part of the cycle, the cost of capital for bubble companies, we'll call them. I don't love the term bubble, but for companies who are in the industry, that becomes the focus of a technological revolution. So now we're talking about the cost of capital gets really low, which means asset prices get really high, and a lot of people want to invest in that space. But those asset prices are not typically sustainable, and they do tend to come down. Does that mean a total market collapse or catastrophe or panic for diversified investors? No.

[A]

Is the writing on the wall?

[B]

I don't think we can say that if the writing were on the wall. The way that I view financial markets is that if the writing were on the wall, prices would reflect that today.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

If we thought market prices were going to drop in the future, they would drop today.

[A]

So it happens at a time when no one is expecting it.

[B]

That's exactly right. You mentioned earlier.

[A]

So the writing is never on the wall.

[B]

That's right. Some new piece of information. Something changes, and that's what causes prices to come down.

[A]

My brother said something to me. He's a very smart person. He's worked in sort of investing for the last 15 years. He said something to me early in my career. He said, stephen, when you go to invest in something, assume that the price you're paying for that investment. So say I'm investing in Facebook stock at $10 is the total accumulation of everything everybody on the planet knows about that company, and they've priced in everything the world knows about that company today. And he was like, so even if you think it's going to go up, that's also, by the way, priced into today's price. So you better know something that no one else knows when you're thinking about buying an investment. I've totally butchered what he said.

[B]

No, you didn't. He is describing the concept of an efficient market. An efficient market is a market where price is always. And this is a sort of a theoretical concept. It's not actually true, but in theory, an efficient market, a perfectly efficient market, is a market where prices always fully reflect all available information, including your thoughts about what the price might do, really, if you trade on those thoughts.

[A]

So what are you investing in then? If the futures are already priced in and all the information about the company's already priced in, what are you investing in?

[B]

You're investing in discounted future cash flows. Companies produce cash flows. They earn profits. When you invest in a company, you are buying those expected future profits at a discount. That's called the discount rate. It's getting pretty nerdy again, but that's how it works in finance. What is the value of a stock? It's its discounted future cash flows. Riskier stocks will tend to have higher discount rates. But you buy this asset and now you've got this discounted bundle of cash flows, which you then hold, and you receive the discount rate as a rate of return as you continue to hold the asset.

[A]

So a lot of people will invest in Tesla. They'll go, listen, I've got a Tesla. It's amazing. I'm going to buy some stock. What is the fault in my thinking

[B]

there in buying Tesla stock?

[A]

Because I've got a Tesla, I think it's a great car and I think they'll do well in the future. So I buy the stock.

[B]

It's what we just talked about. That information is already included in the price. Everybody knows that it's a pretty good company making pretty good cars that are selling really well.

[A]

And that's why it costs $10 today. Whatever it costs today.

[B]

Whatever the price is, yeah. If you look at the data on professional money managers who are trying to beat the market, most of them don't. And the ones that do. This is a crazy part. The managers who do beat the market over a period of time don't tend to go on to beat the market in the future. And these are professional investors who are. And you can look at this before or after fees. The data are actually pretty similar. It's worse after fees, but the distribution is pretty similar.

[A]

So what's the point in a money manager?

[B]

Well, ones that are trying to beat the market by picking stocks and timing the market. I don't think that there is one. That's why I talk about just buy index funds, buy the market, take the market's return, accept the market's return, which

[A]

has been very good, and then don't do anything. Don't check the fucking thing. Don't check it, don't open the app. Lose the password. I said this about my fiance. I said, she's really good at investing because she always forgets the password. And then we spent four years later, we'll be like, babe, you should check your investment. And she goes, I don't know the password. I go, fucking. And then we have to do the whole password reset thing. And then we open it, we go, book a baby rich.

[B]

That's probably good.

[A]

And she goes, oh, amazing. And then she forgets the password again. And then four years later, we take a look again at her investments.

[B]

I like to say you want to focus on the things that you can control. You can't control markets, you can't control your performance relative to the market. And trying to outperform tends to make you worse off rather than better. But the things that you can control are a lot of the things that we've talked about. Having an appropriate financial plan, having the right goals set, having an asset allocation that makes sense for you, even if markets do decline, having emergency savings, tax planning, those are things that you can control. And that's what people should focus on.

[A]

Do you think women are better investors than men?

[B]

I'm not super good on these data, but I believe what the data say are that women tend to be a little bit more risk averse, but they tend to be a little bit less

[A]

overconfident, which I assume gets better results.

[B]

Yeah, I think women are probably better investors. I'm going to give the simple answer right there.

[A]

I've just got some numbers here. Fidelity said that across 5.2 million accounts, women beat men with their investments. Warwick Business School women outperformed men by 1.8% per year. Over a three year period, UC Berkeley men traded 45% more often than women, leading to annual returns that were 1.4% lower than women's. And Revolut, which is a big bank founded out in the UK, says that women's investments in the UK outperformed men's by 4%.

[B]

Incredible. I believe it.

[A]

Give your money to your wife.

[B]

One of those data points is specified, but I would assume that a lot of that is related to overtrading. Men tend to be overconfident. They tend to trade more. They try to pick stocks. They think Tesla stock's gonna go up because they like the car.

[A]

They're also the biggest gambling addicts in the world are men as well. So it kind of correlates for sure it is, yeah. Ben, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next not knowing who they're leaving it for in the diary of the CEO. And the question that has been left for you is what experiment can you propose whose outcome could completely contradict your current beliefs?

[B]

Oh, man. An experiment that I could run. If I take my current beliefs as one of the big things that we talked about is markets being efficient and it being quite hard to outperform the market. I mean, the best experiment that we can run is trying to beat it.

[A]

People have done that, but it's being

[B]

run all the time.

[A]

Isn't there a story in the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel? Where was it Warren Buffett bet someone?

[B]

Yeah, Warren Buffett bet Ted Seides, who we've actually had on our podcast. He bet him that his index fund portfolio, which I believe was just the S&P 500, could outperform any hedge fund portfolio that Ted picked. And they had a specific timeline.

[A]

It was 10 years, wasn't it?

[B]

Yeah. And then they were going to donate an amount of money at the end of the period and Ted lost the bet. Warren won. But that was one of those instances where the world kind of got to see, hey, this index fund thing. Buffett has been a big advocate for index funds, but that was a big example where I think a lot of people were exposed to that idea.

[A]

Where do people find you? I've got your YouTube channel here, Ben Felix, which I'll link below for anyone that wants to continue to follow you on YouTube. Is there anywhere any of the resources that we should direct people to?

[B]

Yeah, another place where I post actually a little bit more frequently with longer form stuff is the Rational Reminder podcast. People can check me out there. And then I do have some interesting tools for the rent versus buy calculation. We have a goal setting app. I don't think it's up yet, though. And we've got some other really interesting tools on the PWL Capital website, pwlcapital.com

[A]

I'll link all of that below for anyone that's interested. And the rational reminder podcast, Rationalreminder CA podcast and your YouTube channel will be linked below as well.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Thank you so much, Ben. Thank you for doing what you do. Because finance is such an important part of our life, and I think a huge percentage of the population, for whatever reason, choose to avoid the subject altogether because it causes a little bit of anxiety. But also, we just don't get taught about finance in school, which I think is a great shame. And in my case, it wasn't until I destroyed my credit rating, my credit score, that I started to figure out what finance was and by then kind of like brushing your teeth, I'd done a lot of damage. And so since then, from doing this podcast and speaking to smart people like you that are good at demystifying complex things, but also in your case, that use academic research as the basis for the claims they're making, it has helped to turn the lights on for me. And in this domain, I think control or like understanding and information is power, really, like knowledge is power. And a lot of people are disempowered because they don't have the knowledge and they kind of, they're on that sort of rollercoaster of their life circumstance and they don't feel like they have control, especially considering that the world feels so uncertain right now. So thank you for doing what you do, Ben. Really, really appreciate it and hope to speak to you again sometime soon.

[B]

Thanks. So,

[A]

Something we think about a lot on the Diary of a CEO is distribution. Because we could have the most interesting guests in the world and the most thought provoking conversation, but if nobody can find us, none of that really matters. And this logic applies to pretty much any business. Whatever you're selling, however good it is, distribution often is the determining factor of whether you win or whether you lose. And this is why it's interesting to me that so many vacation rental owners are essentially invisible to a huge chunk of their potential market without even realizing it. Let me explain. Booking.com is one of the most downloaded travel apps in the world, and since 2010, it's helped over 1.8 billion vacation rental guests find places to stay. That's a huge pool of travelers actively looking for places to stay. So if you've got a vacation rental that isn't on booking.com that means you're missing out on being seen by millions of travelers already searching their platform. Getting listed takes 15 minutes, and nearly half of new hosts get their first booking within a week. If you need that kind of global reach for your listing, which I assume you do, then head to booking.com to start your listing today.