The Everyday Millionaire Show
The Everyday Millionaire Show
Transforming Lives Through Financial Literacy: Timothy Smith (Full Podcast)
What if your financial knowledge could transform not just your bank account, but your entire life? Join us as we welcome Tim Smith from Aurora Private Wealth, a pioneer in the investment world since 1985, who shares his inspiring journey from overcoming personal financial challenges to leading a nationwide advisory firm. Delve into Tim’s insights on investment strategies, with a focus on ETFs and the impact of groundbreaking technologies like DeepSeek AI in China.
With financial literacy as a recurring theme, we question why such a vital life skill isn't prioritized in education, and address the broader implications this has on economic well-being. Tune in for insights, inspiration, and the potential for collaboration as we explore the intersection of finance, technology, and education.
Welcome to the Everyday Millionaire Show with Ryan Greenberg and Nick Kalfas. Hi guys, welcome back to another episode of the Everyday Millionaire Show. We're here with Tim Smith. Tim, your company's called Aurora Financial Advisory, or what?
Speaker 2:was it Aurora? Private Wealth Aurora.
Speaker 1:Private Wealth yes, awesome wealth. Private Aurora, private wealth Um, awesome. So give us a little uh, a little background on who you are and kind of what got you started in finance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, um, I got started in finance because my parents had no ability with finance and, uh, I so I really wanted to live a life where, um, I you know, there weren't constant financial questions and problems. So I went into the investment world right out of college in 1985. So I've been at it for a little while and I'm a certified financial planner, spent 10 years as a frontline financial planner with another firm in New Jersey, then I started my own firm in 1995, an investment advisory firm, and ultimately I started this firm a few years later when some friends of mine wanted to join with me, and it is now a firm of 100 some odd financial advisors that we support around the country. It's a broker dealer investment advisory operation. We have about 60 offices, I guess something like that, and I operate it day-to-day while I also do a few other things that you're familiar with, like the financial dad and financial literacy concerns and educational things of this nature. So that's a quick, quick, down and dirty background check on me.
Speaker 1:Nice. So you said before you're heavy on in like stocks and securities and that kind of investment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, the type of investment that we primarily do is for people who want their money managed by a third party. So it typically involves a clearing firm account like a Schwab or a Fidelity, and mostly things like ETFs of various kinds, and that can. That includes real estate, but you know, stocks, bonds, international, just the typical kind of things you might imagine.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So I got a quick question, a stock question, because the last day my NVIDIA shares got crushed by this new deep seek AI that China apparently came out with. Do you have any insight on that? I did buy more NVIDIA today, blindly, kind of just bought more, but what's your take on that?
Speaker 2:Well, so DeepSeek is a software, not a chip manufacturer. I think the critical issue that I've seen a little bit about this, but not much is does DeepSeek take less computing capacity than all of the other AI folks out there, such that NVIDIA's extra capacity to their chips that makes them so special for AI, not as necessary, potentially? So if that's the case, then you could see where this could be a threat to NVIDIA's market share. But I think there's just a lot of unknowns still with the whole thing. A lot of unknowns still with the whole thing. Um and uh, deep seek certainly has some serious issues from the standpoint of chinese control of information. Yeah, chase.
Speaker 1:How do you? Because chase is our chief technology officer over here. He's the technology guy and he worked for the air force doing technology stuff. So what's your take on that? Because I heard about they did a test where they they didn't. They put in like a question about communism into the deep sea thing and it wouldn't answer it. They put in a question about the tiananmen square issue and they wouldn't answer it.
Speaker 3:So yeah, well, I think, first of all, you know when, when the chinese government is manufacturing something right like, there's some type of alternative motive. Um, I mean, that's the way we have always looked at it. So I I think the united states is going to be more cautious on how they handle that. And just allowing that on any computer and the open source of it is good. Um, it'll help, you know, manufacture competition through the AI space. However, like you were saying, tim, they were able to figure out a way to use that and basically have the same software as ChatGPT, but on a fraction of the computing power that ChatGPT uses, which, like Tim was saying, would cut N nvidia's market share.
Speaker 3:So, um, yeah, I think it's. It's interesting. We'll see, like, if elon or anybody else like dives into, like the open source script and like bounces off that. I mean, elon had the same type of business model where, with electric cars, he did like an open open source to it. So I think it'll be interesting, but you got to be careful with it. You know anything coming from the chinese?
Speaker 2:it could end up being another tiktok situation, exactly you know so what's your price target?
Speaker 1:your price target for nvidia?
Speaker 2:I, I, I don't, I don't do price targets of stocks. I, I'm afraid I'm more of a traditional, very vanilla, boring asset allocator. So I hold NVIDIA through ETFs. Primarily, that would be cybersecurity related or AI related ETFs, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like living life a little bit on the edge with a very, very heavy nvidia portfolio. So, um, when you are doing these sectors and these etfs, how like we just had like a change in government, for example, did you have a change in your investment strategy when we had the new government come in? Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:So the way that I choose things people call it a core and satellite approach primarily, the core of most of it is the S&P 500. So there's always some kind of positions that are oriented to what would be called large cap blend or large cap growth, the S&P 500 index, and then I thematically look to apply some things around that that have the potential to outperform the S&P 500. So I have personally talked to people about what I see in the last really 10 years as a change in technology to the point where you know it's a revolution. We had an agrarian society, then we had an industrial society and now we have a technological society, and now we have a technological society. And so I, going back before the election, I had moved significantly into technology as an additional hold for most people, beyond just general large cap or small cap type holdings.
Speaker 2:With the election, one of the things that I started doing before the election was following a series of sectors that you might think would be most impacted by either a Biden or a Trump I'm sorry, a Harris or a Trump administration. So, for example, on the Harris side, it was things like biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, cybersecurity, generally those types of holdings, and it has been, obviously since Trump won. It's those stocks that have done pretty well. So, for example, I follow an ETF called it's ICLN. It's a green energy ETF and that one has been absolutely pummeled since Harris lost the election, whereas cybersecurity and the symbol escapes me, but cybersecurity there's a very nice ETF for it is sort of the top of the pack since the election. It's performed better than financials, defense and security, even AI stuff since the election. So the answer is yes, and that's sort of how I did it. So I moved some things that were not as high performing out and moved, you know, took a couple of positions in those types of sectors where you would expect under a Trump administration they should do well.
Speaker 2:So you did that shortly after the election and yeah over the last, you know, over the last two months, depending upon the client and how aggressive they are. Some of it was done in November with some people that are more aggressive, and some of it was done under my discretionary powers in December with some reviews that I did of client accounts, stuff like that.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. So from your experience you've been at this for several different presidencies have you found that one side or the other has made investments better or worse, as far as like, republicans versus?
Speaker 2:Democrats to answer that question without losing half of my friends. But I'll just tell you that, in general, no, because of this, of what I really just described, under any given administration, some sectors will tend to do well because more money tends to flow to them from whichever administration, whichever party the administration is from.
Speaker 4:So how much time would you have after the election to kind of move that money out of one sector into another before you would lose too much of it?
Speaker 2:Well, the idea is that it's not to catch a pop of 5% and then, you know, sell it right. The idea is, over the next four years you're expecting the earnings of those companies in that sector to do well, and so you would position relatively early and hope to ride up the next four years in the market with that. So whether it's three days or three weeks or a month after the election, I mean unless there was some meteoric change in a very short period of time, you know I'm investing for years, not for short term windows, with people, so you know it typically doesn't matter very much to me very much to me.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the one that we had a financial advisor on here a couple, maybe a month or so ago and they said, um, that they've found the best investment time I guess throughout history with, statistically speaking, is when the government is split, Like right now. I guess Republicans they have the house, the Senate they have a whole side, the whole thing, yeah, and he said that remember that guy, I forget his name, but he. He said that remember that guy, I forget his name, but he basically said that he's found it best when it's a split government. Do you have to track that or have any idea if he's?
Speaker 2:I can't tell you empirically whether that's the case. Uh, I I think there's a certain logic to it in the sense that we have the most compromise in our government. When that is the case right by definition, because either they get something done or they don't. Either they compromise or they don't, and you know when there's compromise and when Washington is working. Smoothly is typically a good thing for the country and for the economy, for the country and for the economy.
Speaker 1:But I can't tell you from experience or what I have sensed, or you know from having looked at data, I can't tell if that's the case or not. Okay, so the overall market what's your kind of, what's your take on it right now? Do you think we're overvalued? Do you think we're in a good position? Are we setting up for a? And that includes, like, real estate and everything. I don't know how much insight you have about that, but, like, are you bullish on the next couple of years, are you? What are you thinking?
Speaker 2:In general, I'm bullish. I think we've had a pretty good run up and I think a correction was due. I didn't expect it to be a one day thing, like NVIDIA. I mean, it's normal after a 25% market move to get a 10 or 15% pullback and for prices to readjust to reality and then to move forward from there. So in that sense, I would expect something. I think there are still some interest rate issues out there that are going to hold back the market somewhat. We have a lot of debt that has to be refinanced in the very near future and there are probably some bond market turmoil with all of that coming.
Speaker 2:But in terms of the next two to three years, I think the big issue will be whether there is a real doge pullback in spending by the government. So if you think of it as a $23 trillion economy, something along those lines in the United States alone, if they cut $2 trillion in spending if they were able to, I don't think they are, frankly, but if they were able to, you're talking about a you know, I don't know 6% reduction, 7% reduction in GDP. So by definition, that would be a recession if it were to happen in a quick period of time. So I think, if they basically go as we've been going, I would expect the stock market at least those sectors we're talking about to rise and do well over the next few years. If we really are able to cut from the federal budget and if that does really reduce spending in the economy barring some other spending which there'd be no point to it, which there'd be no point to it then theoretically you should have a recession from that much of a cut in spending by the government, and as to where it would impact the most, you'd have to look at what gets cut right.
Speaker 2:Part of the reason I don't think much is going to happen with this at all is because so much of the government spending is entitlement programs. Those are sacred cows. The next chunk is defense spending and if anything, I would expect this administration to put more money into defense. So you're left with, you know, some oddball sorts of areas of the government you know, like if we get rid of a department here or there, you know, maybe you save hundreds of billions of dollars, something like that. But I don't think you're going to see two trillion certainly not two trillion dollars a year of spending. Now, maybe they're when they're using these terms. Maybe they're thinking 200 billion a year over 10 years.
Speaker 1:Well, that's that has a nominal impact on the economy, but wouldn't have a positive wouldn't have a positive impact when they stop spending that much money because we're our debt to other countries and the you know the debt ceiling that we have is is an issue.
Speaker 2:Obviously wouldn't it be better. What it should do is help interest rates fall, and that should be stimulative to the economy, right, and interest rates should fall because we would be issuing less debt, so less demand or less supply of debt, um, lower interest rates in the marketplace, and that should be stimulative to the economy. But whether it stimulates it to the tune of another $200 billion or not, that's anybody's guess, right? So, listen, I'm a conservative and I'd love to see some fat cut out of the federal budget. I'd love to see a smaller federal government, but I would certainly want to see it done in a way that is as unimpactful as possible to GDP and the overall economy. So, yeah, there are consequences of spending less money that are positive, but wherever that money was going, whoever those employees are that are now not spending or have to move out of their houses because they don't have enough, money or have to find a job in the economy.
Speaker 2:you know, all of that is, on the spending side, reduced, even though we borrow less. I mean, right now we're borrowing a trillion dollars a year, so we're nowhere close to cutting enough. To get to fiscal solvency is the wrong word, getting to a flat budget and so we're going to be issuing debt one way or the other. It's just a matter of how much.
Speaker 4:I got two questions, two questions for you. So why? Why do you think financial literacy is so important? And if it's important, as we all know it is, why is it not taught or seen as much in school?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great questions. Can I tell you a little bit of the story of how I started getting into financial literacy for young people in particular? Is that okay if I go there?
Speaker 2:right now seven or eight years ago, seven years ago, and as he was graduating and mind you, he was, he was actually doing a combined bachelor's, master's in computer science and his friends were all doing a similar thing. They were all headed off to DARPA and Amazon and Microsoft and you know tremendous companies where they need computer scientists and terrific careers and everything else. He called me about a month before he was going to graduate and he said hey, dad, my friends and I were all talking and we've come to this realization that we've just gotten through all this years of schooling and we're about to join all these companies and these companies have company benefits and 401k plans and all these things and we don't understand anything about all of this stuff Nothing. Would you mind coming in and giving us kind of like a personal personal finance seminar and just teach us some stuff, because we really really could use it? My father was a college professor for 57 years, so I I think I have a little bit of teacher in my genes and if I don't have teacher, I'm Irish, I can talk forever, so I'm very good at standing up and just you know going. So I went in and I did the seminar and I covered topics like income taxes and, you know, buying a car, buying a house and buying a car, buying a house, renter's insurance, 401k plans, company medical benefits, company disability benefits just a wide range of things they were all about to get involved in and they loved it.
Speaker 2:And my son said to me afterwards, and my daughters as well you really should do something with this for young people, because we are not getting it in the schools and it's critical to our lives, and so my belief system about it is that young people need it as badly as anybody else. Most of them don't get it at home because their parents don't know either. And as to schools, there are about 20 states that do require some kind of financial literacy coursework to graduate high school. My own youngest child went through that with pardon me, one second, went through that with her own high school, and she said to me several years later oh, was that what that was? I didn't get anything out of that.
Speaker 2:So I don't think that, even where it is being taught, I'm not sure it's being taught well or in a way that it sticks with kids. I'm not sure high school is the right place. I really think college is a much better time for kids to learn it because there's a kind of a clock ticking in their minds that they're going to need all of this shortly, you know, three years, two years, one year, six months, when they know they're getting out of college and they have to do this thing called adulting, and so I think college is really a better time, but I think it's not taught because it's not the arts or culture or literature or you know sort of. We come from a society that at first loved classical education. Personal finance was just something that you had to either get at home or, you know, learn on your own, and I think it's. It's just been an overlooked area and it hasn't been well done even when it's been done, and that's why I've gotten involved in it at this point.
Speaker 3:I would like to chime in cause. I'm probably the youngest here. Yeah, no, Tim, that actually is funny. Hey there, young man yeah exactly, I'm 27, just turned 27.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 3:It does resonate with me, though, because I come from a low to middle income family and your parents don't really just sit you down and say, hey, we got to have a talk. It's usually about other stuff, and you have to be inspired to learn something of that nature and in bigger pockets. That's where majority of real estate investors come and they find their passion, and for me, it was like my grandparents had always been. My grandfather and my grandmother were from the trailer parks in Roanoke, believe it or not, and my grandfather started a muffler business in his 30s and he ran that business and my grandma ran it alongside of him.
Speaker 3:And then, you know, as I was growing up, like they were always going on vacations and different things and I always wondered like, wondered, like nanny, how did you like get to where you are in life? And she was like she had a very like dave ramsey approach to life. Like they paid everything off very fast, they invested into the business as if it was their 401k, and so I was. It like intrigued me as a kid and that's why I got into like investing in real estate and the financial side of it, but like if I never had that, like my wife, for example, is 23 and I handle all of our business, or all of our bills, and I have to teach her things and I'm like this is nuts, like you should know this out of college.
Speaker 1:Well, the other thing too. I mean, Chase, you didn't go to college? Right, I didn't go to, yeah, I went to community college. So, Tim, I guess to like argue your point a little bit, what about the people that don't go to college? Because, I'm finding so, I own a general contracting company as well as multiple real estate companies. But the plumbers that I have, the HVAC techs that I have, they're making way more money than my high school teachers made.
Speaker 1:They all went to college. My wife went to college for six years. She has a master's plus 30. Full disclosure I actually used to be a public school teacher. That's how I started my career and then realized that I was going to be poor if I did that. So I started investing in real estate and, long story short, I shortly then after quit my job and went full time in real estate.
Speaker 1:But the time I feel like to teach the kids is gotta be before college, because some people college doesn't make sense, like it doesn't make sense to go to college if you're going to be a plumber or an HVAC guy. And I'm telling you right now, the guys that I have doing my plumbing work are making a whole lot more money than the people that I know that went. Even my peers and friends that went to college for five, six years have masters, have this, have doctorate degrees for God's sakes. I know one of my buddies has a doctorate degree from Hopkins and I make way more money than him and I didn't have to go to college for any of the stuff that I'm doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah. By the way, I went to college for communications and film and television production, so you know my degree is other than a nice piece of paper on the wall. I didn't get an awful lot of business, you know. I took a few courses.
Speaker 1:And the difference, I think too, when you went to college versus when we went to college. Nick and I are 33, about to be 34. Like, college was a lot more expensive for us.
Speaker 1:Luckily, my parents paid for me to like my parents covered that bill. But I did the math and like, if I had not had them covered the bill, I would have graduated with like $200,000 worth of debt. And me I was my first teaching job was making like 36 or something thousand a year. I wouldn't. It would have been my whole life to pay off just the college debt. It doesn't make sense for some people. So if you didn't have your parents to pay for your school and you went to trade school, then where is that time where you're going to learn this financial literacy?
Speaker 2:So, by the way, I agree with your point and I hadn't thought about that that for those who don't go to college, they don't that would not be something that they would be getting, so maybe I'll rethink the idea of whether it belongs in college or high school, or both for that matter, I do feel like most, a lot of, not most, I see.
Speaker 1:I feel like people now in our generation, because my parents generation they always pushed college, college. You need to go to college, you need that piece of paper. But I do feel like the pendulum is starting to swing, where people are realizing especially with like YouTube and just different forms of information, I feel like people are realizing, hey, maybe college isn't the right move, if I don't know exactly. Or maybe you go to community college for a year and just figure it out and then you realize you know, chase went to the military instead. Maybe that's the path for some people, maybe it's trade school, maybe it's something starting a business. That I feel like needs to be talked about in the early high school years so they can, that they could be set up to make that plan.
Speaker 3:I'll jump in real quick and I'll say that the Air Force does an absolutely amazing job at teaching you financial literacy, like they put you through classes. They teach you how to buy houses, they teach you everything. I think the biggest thing is they don't want you going to debt because you have like a top secret clearance or something. And then all of a sudden an adversary is is asking you hey, you want a hundred thousand to give us the secrets you know. So they're they're very, I guess, motivated to teach their members how to be financially literate and not go into a massive amount of debt. So I would say the military does a good job of that. But you know, if you don't go to college or the military, kind of SOL unless you wanted to learn it yourself.
Speaker 4:I personally think it should start in elementary school and I think it should start with a game such as Monopoly or something similar, that the kids can interact, because, as you mentioned, you know when you get to high school you may not be interested in it, but if you're just like, if they're slowly chipping at them and feeding them that information for 12 whole years, eventually part of it at least is going to stick to them when they do get out there in the real world.
Speaker 2:There is actually an app that is for young kids. It's more focused on saving money and, you know, putting money in the bank kind of concept, and, uh, understanding what that means and, um, and the name of the um the app escapes me. But, uh, they market to schools with the app and I know somebody who knows the owner I can't remember you who it is. It's out of texas, I think. Um, so you know there are things for this, but it's not, you know, sort of nationally solidified or standardized or uniform in any way. Certainly yeah.
Speaker 1:So I have a funny story about financial literacy. So this was like my last year of teaching. I was asked I was teaching in a really rough school, really tough kids, tough families, and I was asked to teach. I was a PE teacher. So the kids like liked me and respected me.
Speaker 1:But the fifth grade teacher quit because the kids were so crazy. And then the substitute that they had while they were trying to hire somebody else quit because the kids were so crazy. So then they asked me. They were like, hey, it's really much easier for me to find somebody to put in the gym and you can handle these kids. Like you go in there and teach fifth grade. And I was like I don't know anything about teaching fifth grade besides, you know PE stuff. So I I at that time I was like heavily invested in real estate. I was pretty much it was my last year teaching because I knew I was getting out of it to go full time with my businesses. I taught them it was fifth graders. I taught them compound interest and how to calculate it.
Speaker 1:That was our math. And then I literally had them on Zillow. I had them looking at. This is true story. So I had them figure out what they wanted to do. I called it life, that was my unit and I actually had to get. It's funny because I had to get observed, which was a moot point because they knew I was leaving. But to check off the box, the principal had to observe me and you're supposed to teach the curriculum.
Speaker 1:I was not teaching, I was teaching my own made up curriculum and the principal like loved it so much that she wanted she started like telling the other teachers to integrate it. But I had them find a job, research how much it made that job. Then I had them research what degrees they needed to get that job. And then I had them look for a house that they wanted in the neighborhoods that they were living in or wanted to live in right around us in Annapolis. And then I had them look for a car and they had to figure out how much car insurance was. And if they wanted a dog, I put in a stipend, you know, $50 a month dog food bill. And I had them do all this stuff and people were like the kids were super, super engaged and they loved it, but nobody really. I mean, that's not in the real curriculum, but I feel like that's something that should be. In my opinion, and I think part of the problem is the teachers, for the most part most part are broke unless they married.
Speaker 2:Well, they're not the ones to teach it, they're not the ones to teach it Right.
Speaker 1:You're not going to take, like, health advice from a fat person. You're not going to take financial advice from a poor person and teachers are all now very low income compared to what you know. With inflation and all this stuff, like it would be tough to be a teacher and starting out with any kind of student debt, trying to buy a house right now. I mean it.
Speaker 2:Just it doesn't happen, especially not where we live well, I applaud you for what you did because, instead of teaching theoretical math, you taught practical math right you gave them practical skills and that's what engages everybody.
Speaker 2:you know it's something they can relate to and understand and see how it's actually going to impact them in their lives. You know, you learn algebra in what? Eighth grade or something? And most people will say when the hell am I ever going to use this going forward? And calculus, you know, in college, when am I going to use that? If I'm not planning to go into physics or the sciences or math or something like that, when am I going to use this? So, um, but things like what you did, I think the kids understand that they can use it. They. They see their parents have, you know, bought houses and done things like that, um, and you bought houses and done things like that, um, and you, so you, you really related. You gave them something relatable, a real life skill and learned math.
Speaker 1:I think that's missing. I think that's missing right now, like in, and if you don't have, like, parents that are really educated in it, it's not, uh, it's not really ever getting taught to kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, to back to my point about the cycle, if you will, of um, children not learning from parents, because the parents don't know either, and so they grow up, they don't have skill, they have children and they can't teach their children, um, so, yeah, I, I mean, however we do it, we certainly need a more standardized focus on financial literacy, financial education for young people. That is a requirement because everybody needs it, everybody's going to use it. If you want to have the American dream and buy a home, you need to know what a mortgage is.
Speaker 2:Most people are not going to buy for cash, right? So got to understand what a mortgage is and how it works. And what does it mean? And, and um, I mean real estate investing itself. Most people would have no idea how to do, even if, um, you know, even if they understand the concept that you buy a piece of real estate, somebody pays rent to you and you know it goes up in value over time, but the additional equity you gain by having them pay down the mortgage with the rent over time, and those concepts are just foreign to people.
Speaker 4:So I guess back to my question as to why they don't teach that. Do you think it weighs heavier on the side of that? They try, but then the teachers just aren't financially literate themselves to be able to teach it. Or do you think there's something higher up, like the government, that says, look, if we have too many people that are financially literate, it's not going to make our world go around how they want it to.
Speaker 1:And the tinfoil hats come on.
Speaker 2:I think the issue gets back to. What are the pressures on school systems? Okay, so in the school systems they are trying to get kids to be able to read and do math and get the best possible scores at the high school level to get them into colleges. That's what most school systems are focused on. So their time, their allocation of resources, their allocation of monies you know the money can only go so far and most of them are struggling to do that well in our society. And look at the test scores for reading, for math, ap test scores, everything.
Speaker 2:So we we have a general education problem in the country, in addition to the fact that we're teaching some stuff that is standardized. That's why they call them standardized tests, right? Um, it's standardized that we think everybody should be learning this to progress in life. And the bottom line is not everybody needs to learn those things. To progress in life, you need basic arithmetic skills to do virtually anything as an adult, unless you're in a highly skilled area that requires higher level math. The average, you know, 95% probably of Americans only need to know how to add, multiply, divide, subtract. So it's sort of like we're elective classes.
Speaker 2:I guess it was like junior high school or high school and you know, this was sort of an attempt at giving people some life skills and I applaud it. But at the end of the day, if, if everybody had been taught financial literacy with that time you know, the 90% of the um guys that took a woodshop, who are not going to ever use a band saw in their life, would have had financial literacy instead, which they would use every month of their life, you know, to to balance a checkbook or to pay their bills or, you know, get a car or whatever. Um, so I, I, I see it as misplaced priorities. And uh, to your point, ryan, earlier, about college in general, uh, that emphasis on college, getting kids into college, getting them into better colleges, therefore the emphasis on standardized testing, therefore the emphasis on those topics that are only there is no AP exam on personal financial literacy.
Speaker 1:There should be. Yeah, right, there should be yeah.
Speaker 2:The thing, the one thing that we basically know every one of these kids is going to use for the rest of their life money, we don't teach it yeah, yeah, that's.
Speaker 1:That is actually part of the reason that we started the. The podcast in general was to just kind of like spread that word and I got started learning about real estate investing through podcasts, through the bigger pockets podcast, and then, um, I had, I was, I found a private money lender through another job that I had in the summertime and he's the one that held my hand and loaned me money to start real estate investing in general and taught me how to do the refinance process and all that stuff. Um, because he had interest in it, like I was paying him interest on the loans and, uh, if I didn't have him, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't have done any of it. So, yeah, yeah, it wasn't public. Well, I mean, I guess it was public knowledge, but it wasn't, uh, taught in any kind of you know, traditional way. It was. It was all done kind of by luck and by choice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, if you think of it, every little building, every building is its own unique little business in a sense. Right, you have costs to carry it. You have revenue for it that's attributable solely to it. It's almost like a small entrepreneurial thing. It just happens to involve real estate and financing and renting and leases and things like that, but it's a terrific way to accumulate wealth for those people who are inclined to spend the time and effort at it. And yet again, what's a mortgage? You know how does refinancing work and how does real estate grow in value over time, or how does the equity grow through the amortization of the loan balance. You know those kinds of those are all things that we just nobody's teaching anybody, this kind of stuff. So you know we're certainly on the same page, we're.
Speaker 4:we're compatriots in the financial literacy problem. What if the responsibility was put on big companies who hire these employees? Because when they're in college, they're just learning about and they're focusing on what their job's going to be and being good at their job, but they're not learning anything about financial literacy. So, like, what if the bigger? What if they made it like a mandate for the bigger companies?
Speaker 1:I think that's that would de-incentivize, de-incentivize, de-centivize people to like. Think about it If the big company taught you about real estate investing right, if I taught, if my school-.
Speaker 4:No, it's not about like let's just say just how to manage your money and what's next if you're coming out of, you know, college, you don't have a house yet you don't have. You know things that you're going to run into as your general financial education yeah, I just feel like by then it's one too late.
Speaker 1:And two, those companies then wouldn't be incentivized to teach you that because they want you to be living off their teeth, they want you to be be, you know, relying on that paycheck, where most people that work for companies big companies, small companies, that are living paycheck to paycheck nowadays. So why would I? Why?
Speaker 4:would I think what you mean Cause if you became? Too, financial literate, then you're not. You might not work for them as long as they need you to.
Speaker 1:I mean I quit my job. Why would you?
Speaker 4:not quit. You know, maybe that's why it's not taught in the school system.
Speaker 2:Then it's too small a sector Chase? That would be my answer to you. In other words, first of all, there are 30 million self-employed entrepreneurs in the United States.
Speaker 1:How many did you say?
Speaker 2:30 million.
Speaker 1:Damn, that's actually not that many.
Speaker 2:But all of those people would not have access through that. Then there are all of the people who are employed by small companies rather than, or midsize companies rather than very large companies. So you just have a very large swath of the population. I think you'd be missing with that. I think you'd be missing with that. Now, on the other hand, there are some large companies that provide financial literacy training. I actually had a client once who had a large construction company, you know, like the kind that builds airports and highways and things like that, and he would have us come in twice a year and do seminars for his employees on personal finance, because he thought it was that important to you know that his people be educated. And his argument was if they're not worried about their personal finances, they're more focused on their work. You know, so you know. I think that's fine. But back to the point, if there's just a very large portion of the population, I think we'd be missing if we left it to the large corporations.
Speaker 4:Business owners definitely have the advantage. So I'm just talking about the everyday employee Business owners. They grind to where they need to know it, or else the business is going to fail and they're going to be that employee and then they'll learn it. So I feel like, as a business owner, if you don't learn it on your own which a lot of us do then you're not going to be in business anyway, and then you'll go work for that company that's going to teach you but yeah.
Speaker 3:So there's only 30 million people out of what we have 300 million people so yeah, it's not going to work for everyone, but that's just you know and then the other people that work for smaller companies, like I think I think, too, something that we're not thinking about is you could lead a horse to water doesn't mean they're gonna drink that's so I mean true as well yeah, we could tell people not to eat mcdonald's, and they're still gonna eat mcdonald's, you know I mean.
Speaker 4:So, at the end of the day, it is what it is that's yeah, that's 100 true, like you have to be in the mindset and willing to learn that information. A lot of people, even like friends that I have, who want to get better, and then you try to explain things to them how they should do things and they just don't listen and don't take the advice. Then it's not much more.
Speaker 3:Do you ever have this type of clients where you're like advising and they're just not cohesive to it?
Speaker 2:Sure, they don't necessarily stay clients forever, right, you know there has to be a good match between styles, right? So, or I'll call it chemistry. Chemistry can mean that you gel with the person on a personal level, but it can also mean that you are uh, I'll call it culturally aligned. Uh, what I really mean by it is that my approach to things matches how they're looking for someone to operate. So, as an example, if somebody wants to call me every day and talk about the market and whether they should buy more NVIDIA stock, that's not what I do, I wouldn't have time for it.
Speaker 2:I spend probably 80 or 90 percent of my day in scheduled meetings, appointments, phone calls, et cetera, as a corporate executive, in effect. So you know, I'm not a stockbroker who just pounds the phone and is ready to talk to people all the time. Number one. Number two I encourage people to think more long term than to be watching every daily move of the stock market. Quite frankly, I don't pay attention every single day to the stock market. I pay attention to trends and how they're changing over time.
Speaker 2:Somebody, a friend of mine, once said you got to watch the tides, not the waves. With the stock market or, frankly, with any investment vehicle, you know, um, if you have a real estate market and it takes a short-term downturn for some reason, okay, you know, is that really material or is it just going to pick up again when whatever caused the downturn uh, turns around? Um, so you, you, you can't judge things based upon very short events. And you know, even when COVID first hit, the stock market dropped like 37% in three weeks. But there's a history of these types of shock events turning around almost as quickly as they happen. And that's basically what happened. The stock market was back up in like four to six months and you know it moved back up after that, even as a million people died in the United States. It still, you know, went over well. So you know some people are more active. They want something more than what I can give or more than what I think they should have.
Speaker 1:I would say Got it, or more than what I think they should have, I would say Got it. So before we wrap this up, I know you have your own podcast, so a couple of things. If you want to plug the Financial, dad is the name of your podcast.
Speaker 2:That's what it's called yep. So my children told me that they want me to become the financial dad and be like a dad who gives advice and education and help to their children.
Speaker 1:And your daughter is a co-host, is that right?
Speaker 2:I have two daughters and they're both co-hosts Sweet. They both are on their own in the working world. One runs a PR organization and the other one is an actress in LA and has a kind of a side gig thing as well. So they they really have been wonderful running this with me, and we started with 22 videos on personal financial topics for people aged about 16 to 30. That was the sort of the target zone for that.
Speaker 2:That morphed into the idea of a podcast instead, or in addition to, as more of the delivery vehicle for it all, rather than just having this bunch of videos sitting there and the podcast. So the Financial Dad podcast, which is available on YouTube. The handle is at thefinancialdad underscore. I don't know why, but there's an underscore. The podcast is about conversations with young entrepreneurs about personal financial topics and how they can manage their companies better.
Speaker 2:We've been interviewing some really successful friends of ours who are business owners, having them tell their stories and having them tell what worked and what didn't work over their careers in terms of the decisions they made and the challenges they faced, and so the podcast is really pretty cool from that standpoint, and I'm trying to get to the point where we've combined the availability of the videos with the podcast episodes. We launched the podcast episodes earlier this month. I think we've put up eight or something like that. We have like another 12 in the can or something like that. But you guys know, editing and finalizing the actual podcast is work in and of itself. That, um, quite frankly, I didn't appreciate all that. When you know when the idea, when the idea came up, I was like oh yeah, I can sit and talk for 40 minutes about anything you know.
Speaker 2:So, um, but yeah, that's what we're doing and um and um, you know, starting to try to get subscribers just like anybody else, and hopefully we'll help a lot of people with it are you only posting on youtube right now? No, they're. I think they're posting on instagram also what about like apple podcasts and spotify oh yeah, I don't know the reach from the uh in terms of the podcast platforms. Um, that's a that's a good question. I should. That's something I should know, isn't it? Um?
Speaker 1:probably, yeah, probably.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think isn't there a? There's like a software that allows you to post it to multiple ones at a time? I somebody's one of my daughters spoke about that software.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a couple of them. We use Buzzsprout, it's called.
Speaker 2:That sounds familiar actually. So I think I think we're using that, I think you could. It would be fair to say we expect. I expect that we'll be on the major podcast platforms in addition to YouTube, like Apple, etc.
Speaker 3:What are your thoughts on posting on like TikTok and like social media pages like that?
Speaker 2:On posting on TikTok.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, setting aside all the political stuff going on with TikTok, you know TikTok is a very short form. I'm not a real TikTok user in any way, but as I understand it it's a very short form. I'm not a real tiktok user in any way, but as I understand it it's a pretty short form thing. I would view it more as an advertising medium than an actual information provision platform. Does that make any sense to you? Do you know what I'm saying like?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, I see your outlook.
Speaker 3:I mean I'm a little biased just because I got 150,000 TikTok followers TikTok and then translate them over to Instagram just by having like the little Instagram logo thing in your TikTok account. So they would click over to Instagram and then go follow you on Instagram and then you, from there you have your you know your YouTube link, your podcast link, and then they go to watch. You know the long form content on YouTube. So I think you could reach a lot of young kids on TikTok maybe just like and this is just an idea of me spitballing here- no, no, it's great info.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:I love the financial dad thing. I think that's super cool, like you're like just one-on-one talking to like this kid on the phone and he's like you're like hey and you know whatever your advice is and it pops up on his screen. I think that'd be super cool. There's a, there's a mortgage lender, her, uh, her handle. Her handle is not your daddy's lender or something like that. She does amazing.
Speaker 1:So Tim, you are in fact on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker 4:So for our listeners, you are on there, it's a green background.
Speaker 2:Thank you for telling me.
Speaker 1:Yes, I figure you got a couple of 30-year-old daughters. I imagine they're probably the ones that are spearheading the effort, oh yeah, oh yeah. But yeah, so yeah for the listeners out there. The Financial Dad Podcast is on Apple Podcasts, it's on YouTube. I'm sure it's on other platforms if it's there. So make sure you check out. Tim, and what are your daughters' names?
Speaker 1:Bridget and Hallie Okay. So, uh, bridget and hallie okay. So, tim, bridget and hallie um, check them out. And uh, tim, we appreciate you coming on the show today and sharing that insight and we'll have this episode edited and out and you know, we'll uh, hopefully, uh be able to collaborate on some stuff that'd be awesome.
Speaker 2:Thank you guys very, very much. It was a pleasure to talk to you yes, you too.
Speaker 1:Thank you thanks.
