Welcome back to Ask the Compound, where today we're going to be talking about hyperinflation and the end of the U.S. dollar as you know it. Sorry, I'm still stuck in anti-Ben mode there. I just can't do it, Duncan. I'm a Glass-Cephal guy. Today's show is sponsored by our friends at YCharts.

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Yeah. That's true. Let's do a question. Good questions today. A wide range of topics. I think we're now past the point where we're just getting topics zoned in on one specific topic. They're all over the place now, which I think is good. Yeah. I mean, I'm seeing... I was looking through...

We'll talk about it later, but yeah. I'm seeing a lot more crash calls in the last couple of days, which I guess that makes a little more sense. I guess you move your crash call up when the market starts soaring, right? Because then you can call even a 5% pullback a crash.

But yeah. Interesting stuff happening. Thanks to everyone in live chat for mentioning my haircut. I get a haircut and I go home and no one even notices. So, at least the people on YouTube... We don't notice because it always looks good. Thank you. All right. But wait, before the end of the show, can we pull up the picture of you with the haircut from...

What's the guy's name? The country singer. Nicole Kidman's husband. John's going to pull it up before the end of the show. I'm drawing a blank on this. Emo Duncan. Is it Keith Urban? Keith Urban. Yes. You have a Keith Urban haircut from when you were like a teenager. Oh, you're talking about when I was a freshman in college.

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Yes. By the end of the show, we got to find out. We'll see what John can do. Next question. Okay. Up first today, we have a question from Andrew. My father-in-law recently came into a decent size inheritance and is trying to decide what to do with it.

He doesn't know a lot about finance and can be stubborn. So, giving him suggestions mostly falls on deaf ears. Recently, he told us that he found someone at a local financial firm who gave him an idea on what to do with the funds. I asked a few questions and he said the guy couldn't email the details.

I told him I thought that sounded suspect. Now, he wants me to come along to this meeting with this person. I'm above average with personal finance, but I don't know how to really get a sense of whether this is a good idea or not. Can you share some questions you'd ask in this meeting?

I'd like to help him avoid making a decision that he regrets down the road. This is a good question. I like this. Yeah, it is. I'm going to give the advisor the benefit of the doubt that hopefully the reason they can't share is for compliance reasons, but unfortunately, people who come into a decent size amount of money have a target on their back, and I'm sure that's probably what happened here.

I think investment decisions with family are always tricky, especially when you're talking about the in-laws, but I think there are certainly questions you could ask this advisor about the specific investment, whatever it is, to do your due diligence process, but I think first, you should go into that meeting and think about questions the advisor is asking your father-in-law.

The questions they should be asking him are what are your goals with this money? What is your appetite for risk? How much risk are you willing to take? How much risk do you need to take? What's your time horizon? What are your current financial circumstances? What does the rest of your portfolio look like?

What's your experience like in the markets and investments? Have you ever done this stuff before? How have you reacted to losses and gains in the past? What are your expectations for returns on investments? Because there's a million different investments that could be good under the right circumstances for the right investor.

That doesn't mean they're necessarily right for this person. You're not just going into investing thinking, "I'm going to earn 9.5%, and if I do that, I'm going to be happy." Real people aren't like hedge funds, right? So, it's impossible to make an investment recommendation to someone without understanding their goals and their circumstances and their emotional makeup.

So, a doctor doesn't come into the office and say, "Here, here's your prescription. Go fill it. Now, let's check out and see what's wrong with you." That's how a lot of people who sell financial products work. So, you always have to diagnose before you prescribe. So, I would just go in there making sure that this person at this financial firm is asking the right questions of your father-in-law.

If they're not asking those questions, that's when the red flags go up for me. So, I just think it's a good opportunity to understand that. That's when you say, "All right, hold on a second. You're trying to push this product on us without understanding where my father-in-law is coming from.

What do you want us to do with the money in the first place?" Those are the red flags that would be to me. Is the first meeting too early to ask about how they get their alpha and how they outperform? Risk-adjusted returns typically don't come up in the first meeting.

But that's the difference between someone who's trying to sell you a product and someone who's trying to offer you financial advice. Most financial advice back in the day, call it, I don't know, pre this century, it was people selling products. Stuff was made to be sold and people just kind of pitched stuff.

It was a pitch, right? That's why a lot of financial advisors were called producers back in the day because they were producing commissions and making money. I don't know if this financial advisor is doing this, but that's kind of stuff I'd be looking out for. Do they have your father-in-law's best interests at heart, or are they just trying to push a product at them?

This is the time that you would find out about fees and all that kind of stuff, right? That's all stuff that would be a first meeting. Yeah, but again, the first meeting is just the feeling out process. Is there a good fit here? And then we can talk about specifics and details.

That's the thing, is you don't want to go in saying, "This thing is going to give you 7% and it's going to cost this much." That stuff is for down the line. Before you even ever get to the details, you want to make sure there's a good fit and this person is looking out for you in the first place.

When they give you financial advice, they're thinking about your goals and needs as opposed to, "I'm going to sell someone this product." It seems like a dangerous recurring theme I've heard over the years, though, is people who are like, "Oh, but they're such a nice person," or, "I like them a lot." How do you try to block that out?

Because it's in our nature to like people who are nice to us, right? This is something Josh always says. Whether this is right or wrong, people work with people that they genuinely like or respect, right? It's not always the smartest person. Sometimes it is, but most of the time it's someone that, yeah, is endearing to you or shows some empathy or whatever it is, and it's not always the person that's specifically right for you.

People do have a hard time sometimes turning someone down and saying no. I think it's okay to take your time here and make your father-in-law realize that they don't have to rush into anything. There's no hurry with this stuff. Get it right the first time so you don't make a mistake.

Yeah, it seems like kind of a potentially lose-lose situation for the son-in-law, right? Yeah, because if they talk him out of it, it is a good investment. It makes him money. Then you look like a jerk for talking him out of it. That's the kind of stuff I would tell your father-in-law to look for is, is this person actually offering advice or are they just trying to pitch you a product?

Yeah. There's a big difference. Good advice. Next one. Up next, we have a question from Durga. "I know that owning a home is not for everyone. I particularly appreciate your point about maintenance and upkeep after visiting a fairly recently constructed home that within about 15 years needs a lot of repairs.

If I've decided that I'm a renter forever, do I think about investing in REITs to get more exposure in real estate? If yes, what do you think would be the pros and cons, and what percentage should it be? I'm a target date fund investor in my retirement and brokerage accounts." And just for everyone, like all the young people that are new here, maybe just explain what a REIT is real quick too.

Real Estate Investment Trust, and it's typically a fund that invests in commercial real estate. There could be a little bit of residential in there, but mostly it's commercial. And because of the way they're structured, 90% of the money has to be paid out. So it's a high income fund.

So it better to be put into some sort of retirement strategy because it's going to be paying out a lot of income. If you own a target date fund, you probably already have some REITs in there. You're probably pretty well set. Even if you own a total stock market index fund like VTI, or a total world fund like VT, REITs make up 3% of the total.

So you already have some exposure to REITs. So, John, show up the first chart here. But I don't necessarily think you need REITs to offset owning housing. So this is the Vanguard Real Estate ETF versus the total stock market index fund for the US. You can see the performance from, I don't know, the early to mid 2000s, when this fund first came out.

Pretty much through COVID, we're pretty similar. The stock market has outperformed since then. John, show the next one. This is correlation. I'm doing some portfolio management stuff here. There is some diversification benefit here. But most of the time, these things are going up and down together. And it's 0.66, almost 0.7 correlation.

That means there's a strong correlation. It's not like one to one. So there are some diversification benefits from year to year. You can do a chart off, John. So, in 2020, REITs were down 5% when the S&P was up almost 20%. The next year, REITs rallied more than 40% when the S&P was up 28%.

2014, REITs rose more than 30% while the S&P was up a little more than 13%. And in 2013, REITs were up just 2% when the S&P gained 32%. So, there are years where you could use REITs for rebalancing purposes. So, from a diversification portfolio management perspective, sure, I could see REITs adding some value.

I wouldn't necessarily compare those benefits to owning a home, though. REITs are, again, mostly commercial real estate, not much residential. They're more diversified, so that's nice. And there's some leverage involved in these commercial real estate transactions, but not nearly as much as most homeowners take out when they take out a loan.

And one of the biggest benefits of owning a home is that fixed rate mortgage. It's an inflation hedge, right? REITs are also more of a liquid market. So, there's pros and cons to that. The pros are, it allows you to rebalance and trade more often if you need to get the money in or money out.

But, John, let's throw up the drought on chart. This is the drought on chart for the Vanguard REIT fund I was talking about. In the housing bust from 2006 to 2012, the U.S. housing market fell something like 26% or 27%. In 2008, REITs fell 73% at the bottom of the ...

way worse than the stock market. During the COVID crash, REITs fell 30%. At their worst point last year, they were down 35%, I think, 30%. So, the housing market is not nearly as volatile as REITs. REITs act like the stock market in terms of risk. So, I like where this person's head is at.

They're trying to think about diversification and all these things. But I think if you take the savings from renting and not having to do down payment and not having all the ancillary costs like property taxes and upkeep and maintenance and insurance and throw those into a more diversified portfolio, that makes sense.

So, do you need REITs? I don't think so. If you have a target date fund, if you want to have REITs to be more diversified, sure. But I don't see REITs as a stand-in for owning a house. I think that's two completely different assets. Yeah, the thing that confused me when I first got into the market, I probably did what a lot of people do and I would just sort stocks by dividend and just started buying a bunch of those.

You were dogs with the Dow guy. And they were like ... Well, these were mortgage real estate trusts or whatever. Oh, yeah. So, Annali, they have 15% dividends or something, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. That was one of the first ones I bought. So, they have to pay out the majority of their income in dividends.

I actually wrote a chapter in my first book, Wealth of Common Sense, about this showing that these stocks had 15% dividends and people were just throwing ... Couldn't believe it because rates were at 0%. But on a total return basis, a lot of these stocks did absolutely nothing because the price went down.

So, that's why the total return thing matters more than the income. But, yeah. I don't necessarily see REITs as a stand-in for the housing market. I think it's different assets. If you want them for diversification purposes and portfolio management, that's fine. I don't think they are a stand-in for housing.

It seems like there's not a good one, really, because you've talked about how you bought Zillow and during a roaring housing market, it really hasn't outperformed it. Even the home builder stocks, you could think that those are a stand-in. They've been offsides from where the housing prices are. Housing is just a very unique financial asset, unlike anything else.

I think as long as you're diversifying into a portfolio of financial assets, I think that's probably fine. All right. Next question. Another housing question next. Yep. Okay. Up next, we have a question from Octavia. Every personal finance blogger ... A lot of good names today. Yeah. I'm liking this.

We've got some diversification of names. Every personal finance blogger says not to prepay a low-interest mortgage, but what if you're carrying PMI, which is mortgage insurance, right? Private mortgage insurance. Yep. I'll explain it. I have two of 30 years with a 2.6% mortgage with a low down payment in the home.

Should I at least try to pay down enough extra principal to pay off the PMI and then resume the monthly payments? If not, what would your advice be? I think Octavia was saying they're two years into the loan of 30 years. Good question, and one that's likely relevant to a lot of home buyers right now, because I think a lot of people are putting down less than 20% because housing prices are so high and mortgage rates are so high, they want to save some of that savings.

So PMI essentially protects the lenders from borrowers who are looking for a larger loan relative to equity. So if you put less than 20% down, you put 10% or 5% down, it's a little riskier because they're letting you borrow more money. It's typically a requirement for those loans that don't have the loan to value of 80%.

So most lenders require you to pay PMI once a month, and it's an escrow account. And if you have PMI, usually they make you put your property taxes in there as well. So you're going to be paying per month your property taxes, your mortgage payment, and your PMI, sometimes your house insurance too.

And the amount you pay is usually determined by the size of the loan or your credit score. It's a percentage of the loan, kind of depends, something like 1% around there. For most borrowers, we're probably talking 100, 150, 200 bucks a month for PMI. So it's not nothing. Compared to mortgage payments today, it's smaller, but it's not nothing.

The good news is for home borrowers in the past few years, home appreciation could help. So let's say you bought a house for 400K with 10% down two years ago and took out a $360,000 loan, and the house is up 20% since then. Just on a price appreciation alone, the house is worth 480K.

Even if we don't assume how much ever you paid down in principle over the last couple of years, you have 25% equity now that the house went up 20%. So you're pretty close to there. The problem is a lot of lenders have rules in place to how to get out of PMI, and they can be kind of stringent.

I had one a few years ago where I'm pretty sure they low-balled the appraisal because they didn't want me to get PMI off. We ended up selling the house anyway, but I was pretty mad about it. That's a racket I can talk about for another time, the home appraisal industry.

I feel like Zillow could do it way better than most home appraisers do, but I digress. So the first step would be talk to your lender and figure out ... A lot of them will have you have to have the loan for two years. That's typically a requirement before you can do it.

So this person does, so I think they should be okay. Then you go to them, and they have to do some sort of appraisal to figure out if you have that 20% equity yet. If you don't, then they can let you know at least, "Here's how much you'd have to put down to get to that point." But I would talk to them before thinking about gathering the money and figuring out what the terms of it are.

So go through that process first. If you're lucky, price appreciation for the past few years could save you a couple thousand bucks a year and not have any money out of your pocket. I would talk to your lender first before going through this, but it makes sense to me where then you can do the cost-benefit of, "Okay, I've got to put an extra $10,000 down to get this PMI off, but each year I'm going to save $2,500 or whatever, so the payback period is five years or four years or whatever." Can you make PMI make sense to me?

It just seems like something that is just another barrier keeping younger people from being able to buy a house. It does sound like a little bit of a racket, but the idea is if you're not putting as much money down, if you're putting 5% down in your house versus 20, it doesn't take much for the house price to go down.

If you're forced to sell for whatever reason, then your loan is underwater. I don't know when exactly PMI was instituted, but I'm sure it came into effect in 2008 on a lot of these houses that went underwater and short sales and that sort of thing. It does seem like a racket, and there are ways around it.

My very first loan, I put 5% down on my first house, and they gave me essentially a home equity line of credit, so I didn't have to do the PMI. It was like, "We're going to give you 80% of the loan as a regular mortgage and 20% as a home equity line of credit." We did end up paying it down a little faster because the rate fluctuated a little more, but it does kind of seem like a racket, considering you have the house as collateral already, but that's the way it works.

I'm just trying to make it seem less bad in my head. Maybe it protects taxpayers from having to bail out a private company that would end up in trouble because of defaulting? I don't know. It sounds like more of a racket from the banks than anything. I'm sure there's some regulations involved, but it does kind of sound like a racket.

Again, they make it hard to get it off of there. It does seem like a banking thing, but yeah. I don't like it, but I'm a millennial. We'll never be able to buy a house anyway, so it's okay. I don't have to worry about these things. This is true.

If I don't buy a house, I'm never paying PMI. Yeah, exactly. You can put that PMI money into REITs. It's my life hack. Duncan's best way to avoid PMI. Don't buy a house. Don't buy a house. All right. Next question. Up next, we have a question from Tom. I saw the Dave Ramsey video about 8% withdrawal rates and agree it's a bit far-fetched after reading Nick's piece on the actual numbers.

That's Nick Majulie. I get the sequence of return stuff, but Nick and Dave are using 100% stock portfolios. I'm closer to 60/40. Do the numbers change at all if you use a more diversified portfolio? I was hoping for 5% or so when I retire in a few years. Good question.

We actually get a lot of retirement withdrawal questions from people who are approaching retirement. Why don't we bring Nick in here? You mentioned Nick Majulie, and we can make him appear. Of dollars and data. So Dave Ramsey said, "I can earn 12% on my stock portfolio or something, 4% for inflation.

I can take out 8%," which seemed high to pretty much everyone. You poked some holes into this, but this person's saying, "Okay, I kind of get that because the stock market, you don't want to be selling when the stock market is down because that can really hurt you, especially if you get a crash early on in your career.

But what about a more diversified portfolio?" You actually wrote a blog post about this, so why don't you share some of your numbers? Yeah. Today, I actually released something in some of the charts I think that John will show will really illustrate this. But basically, if you're using a 60/40 portfolio, the probability if you can do it with a 5% withdrawal rate that you'll survive the 30 years is about 84%.

So, it's not 100%. It's not safe withdrawal based on the safe withdrawal definition. And this is using every 30-year period going back to 1926, from 1926 to 2022, an annual rebalance on a 60/40. A 5% withdrawal rate is still a little risky. Obviously, 84% chance means you'll probably make it, but there's still a 16% chance that you'd run out a little bit sooner.

So, keep that in mind. I think if one of the heat maps, I have a heat map here and it shows the withdrawal rate and the percentage of stocks in the stock bond portfolio, U.S. stock bond, and you can see that. Give us a chart on here, John. You can see that.

So, this one's just showing that's just over 30-year periods. That just shows the withdrawal rate and then the survival percentage. I think it's important to tell people how the withdrawal stuff works, because it's not like you're just taking 5% of your portfolio every year. So, why don't you explain that?

You said it at the beginning. How it's supposed to work is like, let's say you have a million dollar portfolio. If you're using a 4% withdrawal rate, or let's say 5%, you would take $50,000 in your first year, and then every year you adjust that for inflation. So, if inflation was 10%, next year you would take 55,000, right?

And then if the next year inflation was 10% again, then you would take, whatever, 55,000 plus 10 more percent on it. Because most people don't want to see their spending each year fluctuate with the markets. It's great when the market is up, like this year when the markets are up, 60/40 is up like 12% or something.

That feels great, but last year when it was 60/40, it was down 15% or 16%. Most people don't want to cut back. So, they want it to be more regular and steady, like a paycheck. Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, the main thing, it's like, "Why can't I just take 4% a year?" Well, you could just look at your portfolio value and do 4% a year, but the problem is it's going to jump around depending on what's going on with your portfolio.

If your portfolio drops by 50%. So, here in this chart, you look at different withdrawal rates at different levels of stocks. So, you did a 50/50, 60/40, 70/30, all the way up and did a heat map. So, what's the sweet spot here? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously 4% is the safe rate for across every portfolio, but you can see if you have a 60/40, you can go to 4.5%.

There's still a pretty good chance, a 94% chance that you would make it through to the end. So, that's just the thing to keep in mind is your withdrawal rate, as you said at the beginning, in reality, people are going to do different things. You can be flexible. You can change it at some point.

If the market comes down badly, you can move things around. In my blog posts, I talk about different strategies. You can use guardrails, flexible spending, etc. Or what most people do, if you actually look at the data, most people don't even use withdrawal rates at all. They just live off their interest, right?

Whatever their investments earn them, they just live off that. They never touch the principal. That's actually how most retirees work. The withdrawal strategies are interesting for people like us in finance to debate, but most people don't actually use them. Their spending fluctuates. A lot of people, we'll talk about it in the next question, I got some data, their spending peaks in their 50s and it goes down from there for most people.

So, it's not a steady state for most people. And you're right, you can be flexible. If there's a really bad year and you feel nervous, then you can always pull back your spending. And when it's a good year, you can spend more or you can bank some and save it.

So, I also think that a 60/40 portfolio gives you some flexibility to, I'm going to rebalance intelligently and when the stock market is down, I'm taking from bonds. When the stock market is up, I'm taking from stocks. So, I think there's ways to think about it in a more flexible way that can actually make your money go a little further than it does just in a backtest like this.

Yeah, I agree. And so, I think the backtests are very rigid, but hey, that's what the numbers say. So, I'm not saying 5% is impossible, but you may have to cut in some years to get to 5%. Just realize that. And the point of this too is that original 4% rule, I want to talk about it for the next question a little bit, because we've got another one like this, but that is your worst-case scenario.

The biggest risk for a retiree is, "I don't want to run out of money." In a decent-case scenario or best-case scenario, you could end up with way more money. So, I have some stats in the next one. So, why don't we go to the next post, because this is, I think, kind of similar.

Okay. Yeah, Viking River cruises are not cheap. Nice commercials though, right? Yeah, they do. I mean, yeah, they look awesome. Okay, last but not least, we have a question from Greg. "Ben, in your recent blog post, you said $1 million of investable wealth makes you rich. I would like to provide a counter-argument to that.

When you retire, $1 million basically gives you $40,000 a year to live off of, assuming the 4% rule of thumb is a reasonable starting point to think about retirement income. So, is $40,000 a year really rich? I would argue that it's middle class at best, probably lower middle class.

I would argue that if your wealth is buying you a retirement, then it takes at least $3 or $4 million to be rich or upper middle class. What are your thoughts?" So I wrote this blog post last week called $5 million is nothing, which was a play from Succession where cousin Greg said he's going to inherit $5 million and Connor said $5 million is nothing.

It's like too much money to work, but it's not enough to be rich. And there's all these surveys that show that these millionaire people with millions of dollars or a million dollar investment portfolio don't feel rich and they think they're middle class or upper middle class. And in fact, I heard from half a dozen people who said, "Your post is describing me to a T.

I have a million dollars or $3 to $4 million and I don't feel rich." So it was interesting. I wanted to run the numbers on this and Nick, I know you have too. Credit Suisse puts out this global wealth report every year and it shows how many people are millionaires around the globe.

So John, throw this up. First of all, this is where the distribution of millionaires comes in. I think this might be why people in the U.S. think it's more common than it is. 40% of all millionaires, almost 39% reside in the U.S. There are more millionaires in the U.S.

than there are in China, Japan, Great Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Italy combined. So there's a lot more wealth concentrated here. Obviously, the bigger population than everyone but China there. But out of the 8.1 billion people in the world, I think Credit Suisse says there's 62 million millionaires.

So it's like less than 1%. If you have more than $5 million, you're in the top 0.1% globally. I don't know how else to say you are very, very wealthy compared to the rest of the human beings alive. And Nick, I think you have some data on how this fits in the U.S.

too. Where does being a millionaire put you in the U.S.? Yeah, so John, can you show the chart of the median net worth? I think this is just good. So this shows median net worth by age and so you can see like, you know, none of these people are necessarily millionaires.

So that's like the middle of the pack. But a million dollars actually using this survey of consumer finances data from 2022 puts you in the top 20% on net worth basis. And just having a million dollars in financial assets would put you in the top 10%. Remember, net worth includes home equity and things which are not as liquid.

But if we just said, okay, who has a million dollars in financial assets, like that puts you in the top 10% of Americans. So American households, right? So let's think about this. So just liquid portfolio of assets besides your house, a million bucks, there's top 10%. Yeah. And so maybe is the top 10% rich to you?

I mean, and I also think like this question, like, oh, 40K a year, that's like a middle class income. Well, let's think about a couple other things. You're going to get social security most likely, right? This person probably works. That's what I was going to ask about. Let's add 20K to that.

Now you're at 60K. A lot of these people with a million dollar portfolio, they've probably paid off their house. So they don't really have a payment outside of taxes. Right? So it's like they have 60K a year in just spending money. That's 5K a month. Right. And just spend like your credit card bill.

Like that is not a quote, middle-class lifestyle. That's easily an upper middle class. I mean, depending on what you're doing, but yeah. And if you were, if you got your million dollars by saving, let's say you were one of these diligent savers, like a lot of the DIY people that listen to us, they might save 20 to 30% of their income.

The rule of thumb is usually you'll have to recreate 70 to 80% of your income in retirement. If you save 20 to 30%, you're already there right? Then you take the mortgage out, social security. And I think what a lot of people forget it's hard for people to wrap their minds around this is in the past people's retirement plan was they literally died, right?

If you have enough money, so you have control of your time and freedom and don't have to work, then I think you're wealthy, regardless of if that's a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars, right? If you just have the ability to sustain your lifestyle. The other thing about this 4% rule that we talked about, you you've mentioned this before.

And I think I looked at it, the Michael Kitsis strategy, he did this study on the 60/40 going back to 1870, I'm guessing he used the Shiller data. And he said that in two thirds of all scenarios for the 4% rule, again, the 4% rule is just kind of the baseline so you don't run out of money.

In two thirds of the strategies, you're likely to end up with more money than you started with. And you're more likely to quintuple your starting wealth than you are to finish with less than your starting principal. So people think about the 4% rule as like, I don't know if I can sustain it.

Most likely if you retire with a million dollars, you're going to have more money by the time you're dead because you're not in, that's the other thing. You don't spend a lot of it. So the problem is, if you have money and the facts do not ever trump your feelings.

So if you don't feel wealthy, unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do. If you still worry about money, you're not really wealthy. But I think by any definition of the term, yes, you are wealthy by all sorts of comparisons. Location matters so much in this too, right? If you're paying $4,000 for a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, then yeah, that probably doesn't sound like a ton of money.

But if you live in the mountains of North Carolina, that's probably going to feel like a ton of money for you. But a lot of it, again, is lifestyle. Unless Asheville. Asheville's expensive. Good live music there, though, right? Right, yeah. I think, again, I don't think seeing these numbers is going to help make anyone feel any wealthier because I don't think facts really change people's feelings a lot.

But I think a lot of it does come down to your lifestyle. There's people who don't have nearly as much money who have control over the people they see and the stuff that they do. So I think that's the biggest thing is what is your lifestyle? That's part of it.

The millionaire stats from Credit Suisse really surprised me. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of people that have that much money. I mean, yeah, even looking at the U.S. stats, top 20%, top 10%, no matter how you cut it. You're definitely upper-middle class. I don't know, what do you define as rich?

Is the top 10% rich? That's debatable. Obviously, globally, it's rich, but it may not be rich in the U.S. It's up to kind of how you define rich. And I did have one guy come to me and said, "You know what? I have a few million bucks, but what's rich to me is driving a Porsche, and I'm never gonna be able to drive a Porsche." And so we sent him, "What's the service, Duncan?

We can rent a Tura or something?" Yeah, a Tura. I told him, "Rent a Porsche for a week and see if it makes you feel any better." And it probably won't, but I don't know. I think you do have to find little ways of making yourself feel wealthy, if that's the occasional first-class ticket on a plane or something.

I think it's okay to treat yourself and give yourself places that are going to make you happier and make you feel like you're a little wealthy if you have that much money, 'cause it's a lot of money. It is. Yeah. I think a GT40 would make me feel pretty happy to be driving around.

What's a GT40? It's a Ford GT40. You watch Ford versus Ferrari. It's the actual consumer production version of that. Okay. Good movie. Yeah. All right. Go check out Nick's blog of Dollars & Data. He has a great post today on the 60/40 withdrawal strategies. Yep. It's out today. It just came out.

I did it just for this episode. What do you got, Duncan? Before we get out of here, I wanted to tell people, the holidays are here and approaching. If you're looking for a good gift to get someone in your life who is starting out in investing or a kid that you want to learn about investing, I have the book for you.

It's from our very own Ben Carlson. This is a great book. We've talked about it before, but those of you that are new here, this is a great book. Plugging, Duncan. Thanks for the plug, Duncan. Yeah. I was just thinking, a lot of people want to ... They get the Oculus or Meta glasses or whatever, and they're like, "I want to get something that's actually nutritious for my kids, too." Give Nick's book a plug, too.

Just keep buying. Just keep buying, too. Sorry, I don't have that graphic ready. It worked again, Nick. Two years of a bear market and it worked again. We're back to all-time highs. It worked again. All the doubters, sorry. Sorry. I'll see you guys in the next drawdown. Thanks to everyone in the live chat, as always.

Remember, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. If you want to send us a question, send us a question. Oh, there's Keith Urban. See, someone sent me this picture, and I did not know it was Duncan. Wait, when is that? College? 2005. That's my freshman year of college, Myrtle Beach, outside of the House of Blues, about to go see String Cheese.

See, you guys both have -- Nick has a long-haired picture, too, and he was like an AC/DC guy. Yeah, his is real. That will not be showed today, but maybe the next time I'm live. I'm the only one here without a long-haired picture. Thanks to everyone for watching, as always, and we'll see you next time.

Thank you, guys. Thanks, everyone.