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You heard about it here. Again, that's longangle.com. Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I am so excited you're here today. It's a bit crazy to think that I'm already at episode 50. For those of you who've been with me on the journey, thank you so much for listening.

And for those of you who are new today, looking to upgrade your own life, definitely don't miss out on the previous 49 episodes. They cover everything from travel hacking, maximizing your credit card points, honing your negotiation skills, mastering your charisma, optimizing your health, and so much more. I am certain that if you scroll through the archives, there will be an episode that speaks to you and improves your life meaningfully.

And in today's episode, we're not only going to talk about improving our own lives, but improving the lives of others. Because I'm joined by my good friend, Adam Nash, and we're going to be talking about giving and philanthropy. Adam is a seasoned executive, investor, and advisor. He sits on the board at the investing company, Acorns.

He teaches a personal finance for engineers course at Stanford, and he was previously the president and CEO at Wealthfront, though it was before my time there. But most relevant to our conversation today, he is currently the co-founder and CEO of Daffy, a not-for-profit community built around a new and modern way to give.

It is a fantastic product that I love, and I'm not an advisor or investor in the company. I am just a fan. In our conversation, we're going to talk about all aspects of philanthropy, how much people give, the friction in giving, how to pick and vet charitable organizations, the tax benefits of being charitable, and ways to maximize those benefits.

There is a lot to cover, so let's jump in. Well, after I remind you that Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront. All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions.

Adam, thank you so much for being here. Chris, great to be here. Excited to talk about all of these topics. Awesome. So I just want to kick us off. What do you think is one of the biggest misconceptions people have today when it comes to philanthropy? You know, there's a lot of things about philanthropy that people don't know, but the most common misperception in my book is that people think it's something just for billionaires.

They get so obsessed with what billionaires are doing with their money and how much they're giving. It makes the news. It's in your feed. You don't realize that actually the research shows that almost everyone gives. Almost everyone was raised to believe that to be a good person, you remember that no matter what's going on in your life, there are people out there less fortunate than yourself, right?

And that everyone can make a difference. And the data backs it up, right? In the U.S., somewhere between 60 to 70 million households every year give proportionally. People with less money actually give a higher percentage of their income and wealth than wealthier people. But the conversation tends to be dominated by a few billionaires when really, from my point of view, what's helpful for people is understanding what you can do and what you should do and what makes you feel good to do.

And so that's probably the biggest misperception I see out there when I talk about giving. One of my favorite stats, I guess it's not a stat, but a piece of research on giving was from a book called Happy Money. And if you haven't read it, they try to break down like things you can use your money for to be happy and giving is one of them and helping others.

Is there any kind of framework that's generic enough to apply to anyone about how to think about giving or how much to give? I don't know if there's one answer, but it's funny, I actually just wrote a post about this a few weeks ago about my own personal experience, which I actually have found that is shared with a number of people.

It was about 10, 11 years ago that LinkedIn went public and I was the head of product there for a number of years. So that was actually my first exposure to a donor advised fund, like an account dedicated for charity. And the minute you have to open one of these accounts, you face this question that you don't know, which is like, well, how much do I put in there?

How much do I give to charity? And it sounds like such a simple question. My accountant said it was simple, right? You know, you've had a big year. LinkedIn's going public. Think about how much you give to charity every year and multiply it by 10. And that's a good place to start for funding your account.

But that didn't make it any easier because I don't know how much I gave to charity every year. I could look at my Quicken. I'm like one of these old time people, like I have a Quicken file that goes back to 1994, so I actually can go back and look at these things and what my spending is.

But it actually was a great moment for me and my wife to actually talk about what we wanted to give and how we thought about it. The biggest thing I advocate for people and recommend is just to have a goal, just have a number, right? Like we have goals for all sorts of things.

You and I both know, right, like saving for retirement, saving for college, saving for a house. There's two things that you do to make that one is you actually figure out what your goal is. And second, you automate it. Right. And giving can be the same way. And so that question of how much you should give actually was amazing.

Doing user research for Daffy, I had the chance to ask dozens and dozens of people what they think they should give to charity every year. And the amazing thing is that almost no one agrees. Like some people use percentages, some people use numbers, big numbers, small numbers. For some people, it's about where they are in life and if they can afford to do it.

But the thing that was universal is that actually almost everyone does have an opinion about it. And almost everyone I talked to thought it should be something, not nothing. OK. And so I try not to be prescriptive to people on how much they should give as much as asking them how much they think they should give every year and actually spend a little bit of time setting that goal.

And then, of course, we all know great ways to stick to goals once we set them. Yeah, automation is great. Are there benchmarks even for people who are not sure what's even normal? You know, the data actually exists, right? So the IRS publishes data every year based on zip code and a number of different factors about how much giving happens.

There are also private institutions. I'm actually an investor in one private company called Zest is This for Nonprofits, etc. So the data is out there, but almost no one accesses it. It's not easy to come by. In fact, one of the features we put into our initial release is that it's a mobile app, right?

So based on the zip code, the city or state you're in, we tell you what the median household in your city gives to charity every year. OK, but it's a very natural question. I think most of us want to be good people. We want to do the right thing.

I actually think one of the problems in philanthropy is that there isn't enough information available to people, right? Like, think about how many calculators there are out there that help people figure out how much they should save for retirement or save for college or how much they need to do to buy a house.

There's probably too many of those calculators out there, too many articles. But when it comes to giving, it's all amorphous. The only data you see published tends to be about the largest gifts. I mean, maybe if you go to university, right, like and you get the alumni booklet, you can see the tiers of who's giving and how much.

But we really don't have a lot of information about it. I think it makes us all a little uncomfortable and we feel a little guilty, I think, because we don't know if we're doing enough or doing the right amount. And I think that most of us want to do the right thing.

Well, it sounds like the the best part is if you're just doing it, that's great. And similar to saving, when I give people advice for saving, I say, well, first off, just start saving. And then if you're not sure what to do, start small. And if it feels like you could do more, increase your savings rate.

And I assume you could just apply a similar metric there. I don't know how much I can afford to give, but I know I could give a hundred dollars a month. It's like, great, do that at the end of the year or at the end of six months. Does that feel low?

Maybe try to increase the number if it does. If it feels like too much, you can dial it back. But just starting somewhere and tracking it might give you some place to kind of compare and contrast what changes you'd make in the future. Yeah, I can't agree more. This is one of the things I love about this space is I think we've learned a lot in the last 10 or 20 years about how to help people save, how to help people invest, how to help people hit their financial goals.

I'm really excited about this idea of applying all those lessons to philanthropy, to giving. And most of those lessons apply. So, yeah, just get started, right? Like, how should I get started saving for retirement? The first thing to do is actually to start saving for retirement. And the rest comes pretty naturally.

And I think with giving, it's even better than saving or investing in a number of ways. I mean, I love saving and investing. Let's be clear. I do. But when you give money and you feel that your money went somewhere, had real impact on real people, on something you care about, it's a different kind of reward.

And so I actually agree with your advice. I think that you get started giving to cause to an organization you care about, right? Not just a checkbox on a window, something that you actually meaningfully care about. And no matter how much the amount is, it can be just a few dollars.

In general, when you do it, it's a good experience and most people want to do it again. And so, yeah, getting started. Well, that's that's the right place to start. I remember I had given to a charity water birthday thing, which was all the rage, maybe five, 10 years ago.

And then they tracked you and said, hey, here's that well that your money a year or two ago contribute to opening. And I remember, oh, wow, that felt really good. And that level of kind of follow through from the organization was really cool. One of the questions I think a lot of people have is how do you even decide whether an organization you might want to give to is a responsible one, is going to follow through and use the money wisely?

I know there's some sites with ratings, but is that the best way to do it? Is there a way you recommend people do diligence if they're thinking about where to give? Well, I think this is another problem that people have and talk about is while everyone wants to give, everyone has a little bit of an anxiety of, well, how do I know that this organization is legitimate?

How do I know if this organization is good? And then, of course, is it where my money will be best spent? There are a lot of sites and there's a lot of information available. Once again, the IRS does publish a list of all the valid registered charities for the most part in the US.

But this gets back to us a problem we have in the US in general, which is that we're not comfortable talking about money with each other. We don't talk about giving as well. I mean, the reason those birthday campaigns are so effective on Facebook and work is because actually it turns out it's not just social proof.

It's that if you know the person and they think that that charity is a good one, well, you've outsourced a little bit of that validation, right? Their reputation, your relationship, you decide to say, well, this is clearly a good enough organization for them and it's meaningful to them and I will support them.

And it also feels good to give. And so I do think that that is part of the process. I think people should be less afraid to ask each other what organizations and causes they support. I think people should be less afraid to share the organizations that they personally support and why.

I mean, last year in the fall on Twitter, I did campaigns for different events where I talked about some of the charities that I support. I even did matching campaigns where I said, you know, hey, everyone for this month, if you give to this charity, like I'll match it type of thing, which you've probably seen on Twitter from a lot of celebrities and other folks.

And I think there's a lot of value to that and elevating these charities. If you talk to the folks who run these charities, they're desperate for people to talk more about what they do. Like there's no amount of marketing they can do that really has the same impact of actual validation and endorsement from people who believe in that charity, believe in that cause.

But yes, for people who want to look at the data, there are a number of sites that do good jobs of ratings and percentages. We built them into Daffy, for example, but there's a number of other sites that do this charity Navigator and other ones. And I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

I'd also encourage people to consider giving locally, right? Some great organizations are within a mile of where you live, of where you work. And it's not that hard to find local organizations and certainly not that hard to check them out and validate them. But many people tend to just stick to the big names that they've heard of, right?

Because they think that they're safer, right? Like they've heard of this organization that's been around for decades. Once again, this gets back to whatever gives you comfort giving probably is a good thing. The odds of you giving money to a bad organization are much, much lower than the odds of you just not getting over the hump to give at all.

And remember, that is the point. The point is to get resources to people and to causes that you believe in. - We talked briefly about how to pick a number, but do you believe people could be giving more? - It depends how you look at it. I mean, the US is known in philanthropy circles as a very generous nation.

And that's because if you look at the percent of our economy that we actually give, it's very high. So in 2020, it was $471 billion in the US. That roughly worked out to be about 2.3% of GDP. That's a big number. I mean, all of agriculture is less than 1% of GDP in the US.

So that's a very big number. And so you could ask the question, like, why do other countries give less or give more? Is it about economics, does it tie to economic inequality? There's all sorts of reasons. Is it because of religion, right? The most common donations that people make tend to be to religious and academic institutions.

But I think overall, Americans are generous. But when you ask the question, could we be more generous? I mean, absolutely. There's no question. You know, one of the things that I was surprised to find out was that there's very good research. You mentioned behavioral finance earlier and like automating things, etc.

But there's actually very good research that suggests that the amount that we want to give as individuals is quite a bit higher than what we actually give. And actually, I validated this myself, just in user research, etc. If you ask someone how much they think they should give every year, they give you a number.

You ask them how much they actually gave last year, you get a little bit of a pause, a little bit of guilt, because the truth is, we have busy lives, right? We don't get around to it. And so it turns out this research says that we would give about 32% more if we actually just gave the amount that we think we should, like not even stretching ourselves, not pushing us to give more than we think we should.

Just if you're the type of person who thinks you should give a few hundred dollars to charity every year, or a few thousand dollars, or whatever your number is, it turns out for the most part, we don't stick to it. And I know you know this, but it's pretty obvious why.

It's the exact same reason. How much would we save for retirement, if you had to write a check or manually make the transaction? We all know that it's like, no, no, no, have the 401k come out of your paycheck, right? That actually helps people stick to a plan. And it hasn't been applied to giving.

But yeah, definitely we could all give more, even though we do give a lot. And like I said, if you look at it, that $471 billion, over $330 billion of that is from individuals, right? These aren't foundations and corporations giving all sorts of money. I mean, they are. I mean, more than $100 billion a year.

But individuals are generous. I think they would be more generous, though, if they came up with a system for giving. Are there other hurdles or barriers other than just the hassle of following through? Is it finding the right places? Or what do you think else holds people back? So you bring up a good question.

You actually brought up some of the issues earlier, which I agree with. I'm a product person at heart. So I think of product problems. And when I looked at giving, it was very clear to me that at minimum, giving is two very hard problems for people. There's the how much can I afford to give, right?

Which is a hard problem. I guess that's tied a little bit to how much you should give. But people are not very good at budgeting. They're not very good at allocating numbers, not even very good at understanding what their income is or their expenses are. So there's this hard problem of how much to give.

And there's a second set of hard problems around who to give it to. And this is actually one of the reasons I actually really love the idea of separating those two problems. So to our earlier conversation, I think the best thing you can do for that first problem is just set a goal and put money aside for charity, just like you put money aside for a number of other things.

Have it somewhere separate so that when people ask you to give or when you find an organization or cause you believe in, you're not struggling with that first question of how much you can afford. You already have it set aside. It's there for you. That second question, though, of who to give it to, I don't think there's any shortcut there.

I think social information can help, knowing who your friends and colleagues give to. I think research can help. But I think the truth is most people build those relationships over time. And that's actually very good for nonprofits, because the truth is they don't want a donation from you just once.

Most of these organizations have budgets they have to run every year. So what they really want from someone who supports them is someone who's going to support them regularly. They would probably much rather get money from you, a smaller amount, regularly every year than a one-time birthday raise where they never see that money again.

It's the reason that nonprofits actually spend a lot of money and time fundraising. It's a very heavy sales process for them, because it's very transactional. They always have to convince someone to reach in their wallet, pull out some money, give it to them. It's a very hard process to get through.

So I tend to recommend people that not feel the pressure to give all the money away at once as much as build these relationships, find organizations that you support, be comfortable supporting them, give them your regular support. And over time, you'll add more and more organizations. One thing I learned when I was going through this process myself of just evaluating some organizations is there is a lot of information about every organization.

Not only do they have to file, I'm going to maybe get it wrong, is it a 990? Is that the right number? That's right. With the IRS. So there's a document that's here's who we are. Here's how much we spend. Here's our expenses. Here's how much we pay our directors.

But almost all of them also have annual reports summarizing the impact they had. So if there's an organization, I would say there might be charity scams. I'm sure there are, but there is a lot of validating places like IRS websites, validating the tax ID numbers to make sure that you're giving to somewhere good.

And there's just a lot of content about who and what is happening within an organization. So as much as someone might say, like, I don't know about this organization, I feel like it's if you're thinking that in your head, I feel like it's not a great excuse because there is information out there.

And with the advent of the Internet, it's never been easier to find it. I agree with you. I think it's not hard to get to conviction about different organizations, given how much content is out there. That being said, I understand the anxiety. It's the same thing that happens with sensationalism in every industry, right?

You only read the worst stories. And there have been stories over the decades of nonprofits where directors embezzled money or self-enriched themselves in private planes and that sort of thing. So that anxiety, I think, is real. But to your point, it's not hard to validate local charities if you're really interested.

It is not hard to ask around of what charities other people support. And certainly for the national charities, it is not hard to find ample information about them. And so I think it's a solvable problem. I don't want to pretend it's not a problem. I think it's reasonable for people to have questions of where they're sending money.

But yeah, you're right. I mean, it's very funny. The amount of research people want to do to send $100 donation somehow is a lot higher than the amount of research they do before grabbing that random ad on Instagram for $100. This is actually one of the opportunities, I think, in the industry is there's no real reason it has to be that way.

For some reason, we've convinced people that buying that random item on Instagram, that they can just do that with tap, tap, tap. We should make giving that easy. There are reasons why you can't trust a random company on the internet. One of my first jobs on the internet was at eBay.

And believe it or not, there was a time where it seemed crazy that you would buy something from a stranger that you'd never met and you would send them money and just you'd assume that the item would be good and not broken, like as represented. We take it for granted now, but that seemed ludicrous 20, 30 years ago.

I think that some of that friction we got rid of, right? Like people now trust, for the most part, e-commerce. Now, sometimes bad things happen. There's no question. I've made a purchase or two online that turned out to be a mistake. But I think there's no reason why we can't use the same techniques to give people confidence that hey, if you want to send a gift for a cause or to an organization, we've already filtered them, it's going to be fine.

Like it's going to be a very rare situation where something goes wrong. And in the most common case, you will have helped real people with something that matters. One tactic I had, so in the past month, there's been a lot of giving support for Ukraine. And I was thinking, gosh, I had never done any research about nonprofits that support Ukraine.

That was just not something that last year or any previous year had come across my radar. And one option was, okay, well, let's spend a lot of time to figure this out. And what I ended up doing was through both, I think, some of your posts, other people's posts, I came up with a list of 10 organizations, I took how much I wanted to get, I divided by 10.

And I was like, "Look, if one of these organizations isn't as great as the other, well, I gave to all 10. So it's okay." I played the diversification game. I crowdsourced the information from friends, from people online, from articles, and gave to all of them. And I know that probably doesn't bode well for the recurring ongoing relationship.

But if you're out there thinking, "Gosh, I want to give to this cause, and I'm not sure how," and you don't want to do the research, maybe pick five organizations that do it. And the risk that one is bad is now one-fifth as much. But I would guess if you look at the numbers, the risk is already very, very small.

The risk is small. And more importantly, I think we have a situation like Ukraine, more important for the bias just to be to help, to give, to do something rather than nothing. And so your process sounds good. I mean, we did a Daffy tweet out a list of nonprofits that we thought were well-researched and advocated by other institutions.

This is one of these areas that on the one hand, I say, "Listen, yeah, the most important thing is you find institutions." I actually like the idea of portfolios or several institutions in an area. I think that there's something very interesting there for people, I think, about not picking one organization to give to that actually might make it easier to give.

But at the same time, it's still too hard. We're not all experts. But I think what you did sounds like the right thing to do. They're reputable sources, crowdsource a list, come up with the amount you want to give. And whether you split it across different organizations or give it to one, the point is you've actually helped.

And we can debate how much, but you've helped. And it made it easier. It was funny. I'd find another one. I decided an amount and split it amongst 10, and then an 11th popped up. And I was like, "Wow, I can't not give to the 11th. This one looks good too." So then I ended up giving 10% more to that 11th one than I'd originally planned, and it felt great.

So I want to take a little bit of a turn. Okay, if you've been listening to this episode, you already know that I'm a huge fan of Daffy. They're a not-for-profit community built around a new modern way to give, and they have a mission I think we can all get behind, helping people be more generous more often.

A Daffy account makes it easy to put money aside for charity. You can make a one-time contribution, or you can set a little aside each week, month, or quarter. And because Daffy Charitable Fund is a registered 501(c)(3), all your contributions are tax deductible. Then, whenever you want, you can give to more than 1.5 million charities, schools, and faith-based organizations in a matter of seconds.

So you can separate the decision to give and get your tax deduction from deciding exactly which organization you want to support. And my favorite part is that all the contributions to your Daffy account are invested in a standard ESG or crypto portfolio, so they can grow tax-free to let you have even more impact in the future.

So head on over to allthehacks.com/daffy if you want to start giving today, and for a limited time, if you visit that link, you can get a free $25 to give to the charity of your choice. Again, that's allthehacks.com/D-A-F-F-Y. It seems like with every business, you get to a certain size, and the cracks start to emerge.

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That's allthehacks.com/netsuite to get your own KPI checklist, allthehacks.com/netsuite, N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E. And talk about, you know, this is all the hacks. One of the things that's interesting for people who have W-2 income is that there aren't a lot of hacks, right? I get lots of questions, "Oh, you know, I have a job, you know, what are the hacks to save money on my taxes?" And I'm like, "Well, okay." So it's like retirement accounts, pre-tax accounts, like HSAs and FSAs, and charitable donations.

If I'm missing anything, let me know. I know there's some like technical high-end trust stuff, but for the broad strokes. And I think I find that people often misunderstand what, you know, some of these tax deductions, how they work. Could you just, at a high level, explain the tax benefits the government offers people for being charitable?

Yeah. And I want to be careful. I'm obviously not an accountant, as it turns out. So I'm sure they are. Of course. Take... Me either. I don't have to make a disclosure here, but I will. Do not take what I'm giving you as financial advice. Not a professional accountant, et cetera, but no, actually, it's well known that the charitable deduction in the US is one of the most generous.

And the reason it's generous is because it actually is a deduction against AGI, against your income, right? Which tends to have the highest tax rates. And so it's a very useful deduction. You can deduct right now up to 50% of your AGI, actually, in some cases, 60%, which is a really high number.

If you think about where most deductions tap up now, the one catch is you have to be someone who itemizes their deductions. And ever since the 2017 Tax Act, there are fewer people now. But for most people who live in high tax states who have a mortgage, they probably itemize deductions, or could very quickly if you make a charitable deduction.

So the great thing about charitable deductions is that they are an incredible benefit from taxes. The problem is, as you know, the tax year is one year. And because our tax rates go up, our system isn't very good for dealing with what happens when people have lumpy income, right?

You have big years, you have down years, even though that's becoming more and more common across the United States. People's income isn't steady every year, there really are good years and bad years. The charitable deduction is most valuable in those good years, right? Because those are the years when you tend to be worried about taxes.

But that stresses that other part of the problem, which is, wait, do you know who to give the money to? And that actually catches a lot of people. There's a lot of people in November, December, who realized that they had a good year, that their tax bill is going to be higher than expected and say, "Wow, this would really be a good time to give some money to charity." But unfortunately, they don't have enough time to pick a charity.

And that's where donor advised funds come in. Donor advised funds are basically a special type of account. You know, the way that an IRA is for retirement and a 529 is for college savings, a donor advised fund is for charity. And the great thing about donor advised funds is because they're offered by nonprofits, by charities, you get a tax deduction immediately when you put the money in the account.

And so as a result, the best tax hack around charitable deductions is to make that commitment to give, put the money in a donor advised fund, get the tax deduction, and then you have time to figure out which organizations to give it to. And then for many of these donor advised funds, that money can be invested.

So it's not sitting idle while you're figuring out who to give to. The money is still invested and growing, but now tax deferred, like a Roth IRA or another tax deferred account. My first experience with donor advised funds came in the scenario you described where I was like, "Oh, it's a higher tax year, which is always a good year." And I was like, "Gosh, we should just donate." And funny enough, you said earlier, your advice from your accountant was 10 years.

My advice was also like, "Well, I don't know how much to give, but this is a higher tax year. I'd rather give next year's donations this year. And I'd probably rather give the next year's donations this year." And I was like, "Well, let's just go 10 years out, take what we were going to give for the next 10 years." Which we had to figure out also because we didn't even have a number at the time.

And we put that in a donor advised fund. And I learned a few things in the process. And I want to go get to one in a minute, which is about donating the most appreciated things in your portfolio. And we could talk about why. I also learned that even organizations that seemed like they had decent products at the time when this happened, Vanguard, Fidelity, they had websites, you could log in, you could buy stocks.

And then I logged into their donor advised portal and I was like, "This is just a different company." And I think legally, it actually is a different company. But I was blown away that the innovation on donor advised funds, even for organizations that have innovated their investing products, was just completely absent.

I assume that might be part of the founding story here. But what about the industry did you find that made you say, "We should go build something," despite there being lots of organizations out there? Well, there's a lot of reasons. I think there's two things that lead to the effect that you saw with existing donor advised funds.

One that's pretty simple and one that's probably more nuanced. The simple reason why it is true is that to offer a donor advised fund, you have to be a non-profit. But non-profits have trouble investing in technology and operations and all the things that they need to do to run a donor advised fund.

So they almost always partner with a for-profit company that helps them operate and fund the development of the firm. And so Fidelity Charitable partners with Fidelity Investments, Schwab Charitable with Schwab, of course Vanguard Charitable partners with Vanguard. And so they're all partnered with investment firms, right? Not technology firms.

And so it is a little bit of the founding story with DAFI. DAFI, of course, stands for the Donor Advised Fund for You. But we said, "Well, what if instead of partnering with an investment firm, you partnered with a venture-backed technology company, right? Could you have the same type of engineers, the same type of quality design that we're used to seeing from Facebook and Google and Apple and the best kind of companies in the industry?

Could we see that here?" And so that's a little bit of the founding story. The second reason, though, is more subtle, which is that because they've partnered with investment firms, almost every donor advised fund out there, their business model is charging you a percent of assets. And that sounds fun.

It's a very normal thing in the investment industry, right? Even Vanguard does it, right? A percent of your fund. The problem there, though, is that because they are charging a percent of assets, they really are only interested in very large accounts, right? And so when you think about this, like you might have a large account, say, for retirement.

That's your whole retirement. College is expensive. You might save a lot for college. You have to be very wealthy to have six and seven-figure or even bigger accounts allocated for charity. I mean, it's fantastic, but that's a very big number to put out there. And so as a result, those firms mostly optimize their services around the very wealthy, those biggest accounts.

I mean, Vanguard, I love Vanguard. It's one of my favorite firms, changed the industry, idolized. But even their donor advised fund, you can't even open with less than $25,000. That's their minimum. And they charge 60 basis points all the way up to $500,000. And so I think that's the other problem that you see that the reason they don't invest in technology heavily there is they're not hitting a mass market audience.

They're mostly hitting people who already have financial advisors and accountants who probably do it for them. That makes sense. And is the reason why a firm like Vanguard, which is known for low fees and for their consumer products, doesn't charge as high as 60 basis points, can they get away with it because it's already money that's been given away and there's just not as much scrutiny over the fees?

Because it's like, "Look, I'm going to give away, in their case, $25,000. The fees are coming out of money that's not mine anymore. I'm not paying the fees. They're coming out of what would otherwise go to charity." Does that make people less frustrated with high fees, or how are a firm like Vanguard getting away with charging so much when I can't imagine there's a lot more overhead to operate this than a regular investment account?

Well, let's be clear. I think Vanguard has such a great corporate culture and structurally set up. I don't think that those are their motivations, right? I think there are other real reasons where because of their lack of investment in technology and because of the way they run their donor advised fund, it might actually be very expensive for them to operate.

And so those fees actually reflect their costs. But I do think that some of the things you talked about are correct. I think there is a problem. We've all grown up through this industry. There was a time where people didn't know to look at how much their mutual funds were charging them.

And we had to socialise this idea of actually looking at the expense ratios, right? And all the fees tied with mutual funds, 401ks. We had to teach people to look at the fees around 401ks, advisors. How much is your advisor charging? I've asked dozens of people how much they're paying for their donor advised fund.

Most people don't even know. It's not on the account statement. There's no number there. I've talked to people who are paying literally hundreds, sorry, hundreds of dollars, even thousands of dollars a year for their donor advised fund, but they don't even know it. So I do think that with most donor advised funds, the reason they charge what they do is because they can.

The tax benefit is high enough that it usually is a net positive for wealthy people who open donor advised funds, right? So if you were lucky enough to have stock in one of the companies that went public in the last couple of years, or you invested in crypto, right?

So you have Bitcoin that you bought for $1,000 that's now worth $41,000. There's so much tax benefit from donating those assets and not having to pay those capital gains taxes that it's true, probably the high end market for donor advised funds just isn't that fee sensitive. But I think a lot of the problem has to do with structurally what the industry has done to date.

And you're right. At Daffy, we're hoping to change that. And you mentioned donating those appreciated assets. Could you walk through maybe an example of the kind of impact donating something that's been appreciated would have on your kind of financial situation and the impact it would have on the organizations that it would ultimately go to?

The reason the benefit of donating assets is because you really win both ways. We already talked about the fact that the charitable deduction is a great deduction to have, right? So if you were going to donate $1,000, getting $1,000 off your income on your taxes, I mean, especially if you're in a high tax state like California, New York, etc, that can be more than 50%.

That's a huge number in the aggregate federal state, etc. But when you donate an appreciated asset, stock, crypto, you never have to pay the capital gain as well. And so it ends up being not only better for you, it ends up being better for the nonprofit. I wrote a recent post about this with real numbers kind of running through, but it's very, very clear.

Use that Bitcoin example that I gave. If you bought a Bitcoin for $1,000, and it's now worth $41,000, right, well, if you sold that Bitcoin, right, you'd owe quite a bit in taxes on it, state, federal, like capital gains, etc. And if you donated the money left over, you would have money left over, but it would be minus the taxes, right?

If you donate the Bitcoin to charity, you get the full charitable deduction for that $41,000 amount. You never pay the capital gain. So you have more money now to give to charity, plus you are getting that $41,000 charitable deduction off the top. So you're winning both ways. So it's very clear how the numbers work out.

If you are in the fortunate enough position to have appreciated assets, and you can donate those, it's better for everyone involved. And then of course, the one problem with it is it turns out not every nonprofit is set up to actually accept stock or crypto. And this is actually one of the benefits of donor advised funds.

One of the great things about Daffy, one of our first donations was actually to a local synagogue. One of our constituents wanted to donate Bitcoin to that synagogue. The synagogue wasn't set up to take Bitcoin, but they were able to download the Daffy app, contribute the Bitcoin to their donor advised fund, get the full tax deduction, of course, and then they let us take care of actually getting the money to the synagogue.

It's a fantastic benefit. I think most tax advisors, most financial advisors you talk to will recommend at the end of the tax year that if you have appreciated assets and you want to give money to charity, donating appreciated assets is clearly the best way to do it. I love that you can disintermediate this question because one of my things at the end of the year is, okay, what in my portfolio has enough gains that it would make for a good donated asset?

The stock that you might have bought 12 years ago could almost be in anything if it was 12 years ago is probably appreciated quite a bit. And that's something that I've taken advantage of. Or if you happen to work at a company and you've been there a long time and you hold some stock from the early days, there are circumstances I've had friends where it's literally almost 100% gains and you kind of get the most maximum effect.

So I love that. Yeah. And there's a fun hack there. It's actually one of the examples I use. So my first job out of school was actually at Apple. Clearly I should have held more of that stock because it turned out the run from the 90s to now is once in a lifetime.

But fundamentally, yeah, for employees, people who hold company stock, it doesn't have to be all or nothing either, right? Like to use your example, if you have 500 shares of Apple, for example, and a lot of it has a lot of gains, you can donate a hundred shares of Apple, get that great tax deduction, and that can actually help cover the taxes from selling some of the rest of your stake, those other 400 shares.

And so a lot of people actually do that thinking at the end of the year, if they have an advisor, they help them with it. And if they do it themselves, though, it's very much thinking about, okay, what's my tax bill going to be? Do I have some appreciated assets I could donate?

Or if I want to liquidate something, do I have other appreciated assets I can use to help defray some of those taxes? And to your point, it doesn't have to be some go-go stock, it doesn't have to be Bitcoin. In some years, I've actually donated old ETF shares, a VTI that I've had for a long time, because it has appreciated quite a bit and has a very low cost basis.

So once you get that in your head, you realize it's something you probably should do every year, right? There's no time between Thanksgiving and the New Year's. You should probably think about what your taxes are going to be. If they're going to be higher than you expected, think about, is this a good time to give money to charity?

And if it is, look for appreciated assets to do it, and then just put it in a donor advised fund. And now you have an account dedicated to charity. So anytime you want to give, you have money already set up to do so. It's almost like the opposite is you've got tax loss harvesting, and then you've got tax gain harvesting for the purpose of donating.

Yeah, this is this is exactly right. And you know, I know you're a Wealthfront, and I have always will have a soft spot for Wealthfront, etc. One of the things we learned at Wealthfront is that people don't always think of the tax liability that's sitting in the shares they own, right?

They remember what they bought the stock at or what they bought crypto at. They know where it is now. They don't think enough about what the taxes are going to be when they sell it, because it turns out you have to pay them. Once you have this idea that, oh, I can donate assets to charity, it doesn't have to just be cash.

It really opens up your thinking of how to make sure that, you know, you invest for the long term, you have these assets with a low cost basis, and then you can do a lot of good with them by donating them to charity. If you have, like I did, a donor advised fund already at another institution, you can donate that to another donor advised fund.

So Fidelity Charitable, if you're listening, sorry, I no longer have a donor advised fund with you. I moved it all to Daffy. So that was one thing that I didn't realize because it is also another charity. So you can move them around. So while you can never get the money out, right, you've donated it, it's irrevocable, you can move it to another donor advised fund.

So you're not locked into whatever you're using today. Yeah, this is another thing. You know, I remember one of the things that's kind of the bane of the industry a little bit is somehow rolling over 401ks is still incredibly difficult. We've been talking about this for decades, but somehow the firms that hold 401ks just make it really, really hard to get your own money to another institution.

Donor advised funds aren't quite as bad, but they really do not make it obvious that if you ever want to move any of the money, you can move all of it, you can move some of it, you can always move it to another donor advised fund. And yes, of course, I'm biased.

You know, with Daffy, I've had a lot of friends, they have donor advised funds. Actually, it was a feature we missed in our launch. When we launched a few months ago, we didn't have support in the app for transfers. We now do, of course. And it was really surprising how many people wanted to move money over and they didn't know how.

And it turns out it's really simple, right? If you have a donor advised fund, Daffy Charitable Fund has an EIN. It's another nonprofit. You just make a grant to us. And listen, Chris, totally appreciate moving the whole account over. That's fantastic. But the truth is from our point of view, anything that makes you comfortable with is great.

So if you want to move over $1,000 to test it out or a few hundred dollars, if you want to move over half the account, it's all easy. You just pick the amount, make the grant to Daffy Charitable Fund. They end up mailing us a check. A lot of the industry still runs on checks as it turns out.

And we credit it to your account and it gets invested in your portfolio, however you selected when you signed up. It was pretty easy. I mean, obviously, on the behind the scenes, it sounds like it was less easy and that a check had to go in the mail. For me, it seemed pretty straightforward.

Well, you probably saved a lot of money doing it because those AUM fees are actually quite high. For me, it was save money and it wasn't my money because I've already donated. So save money for other organizations. The other thing that I thought was interesting with the product you built, I don't know how many other donor advised funds have apps, but I don't think Fidelity Charitable did.

They actually do. Believe it or not, Fidelity Charitable, Fidelity is always well known for some of their investment in technology. I realize in the brokerage industry, it's hard to give anyone the gold medal, but Fidelity has a decent reputation for investing in technology. But even they, they have an app where you can make donations.

But if you want to open an account, contribute, change your investments, you can't do any of that from the app. When we launched Daffy, that was actually one of the big differentiators up front and still is. We are the only fully functional donor advised fund in the app store, one where you can open an account, contribute, cash, stock, crypto.

You can invest the money and of course, make donations to any legal charity in the US. So yeah, it's hard to believe that in 2022, that's a rare thing. But I think that's because most people don't know about donor advised funds. Like I said, historically, it's been this attach rate kind of bespoke product that advisors use, right?

Like most of the energy at the institutions for it is just a way for them to make sure the assets stay with them. Fidelity knows that if you're going to donate stock and you're going to put it into a donor advised fund, it's better to put it in the Fidelity donor advised fund, right?

And they optimize for that experience. As a result, they don't really think about the fact that a lot of people start their experience these days with an app, right? They started the app store, they don't necessarily start it with a search or by walking into a branch. I found that one of the great things about an app experience when it comes to donating was in this Ukraine example, we were like, "Oh, we found an organization." My wife's like, "Oh, I found this one." You didn't have to go to the website and type in all of your name and your billing information.

It was almost too easy. And that's not a criticism, but it was like this organization, yes. And I remember sharing a note that I assumed someone that follows me could see, but it was like, "Done." And it was like, "Okay, let's do another one." It made it easy enough that hopefully, it will help remove some of the friction because I know it did for us.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And I love that. I mean, our mission as an organization, as a company is to help people be more generous more often. And it's true. There's a lot of times we have the instinct, we have the urge to give, but all that friction gets in the way, right?

I'm going to go home, I'm going to get an email, I'm going to have to go to a website. There's all this extra work. How often do you end up, like I have kids, I have four kids, I can't tell you how many back to school nights I've been at and sat through the presentation, where they walk through and they have a fund.

Maybe it's to support after school sports or art supplies or something that supports the school. And you're like, "Okay, I'm going to give to support." What you write a note to yourself, I'm old school, so I send myself an email so that when I get home, at some point, I remember to like go to the website and donate.

But when you have the app, tap, tap, tap, you're done. In downtown Los Altos, a couple months ago, there was a minister doing a bake sale for his organization, which is actually in Oakland. And I had a great conversation with him, found out more about the organization, wanted to support them.

Actually didn't want the bake sale because it turns out I shouldn't eat as many things for bake sales right now. But I wanted to give some money and the fact that I could pull out my app, type in the name of his organization, put in $100, donate that money, have it go to him.

It made it easier to give and it actually felt great because I didn't have this thing also hanging over my head. There was no to-do item. There was no weird anxiety. I wasn't worried about keeping track of the donation. I knew it was all in my app. Actually, surprisingly, one of the features people seem to love a lot, we just went through our first tax season.

And so just the fact that you don't have to chase down donation receipts at the end of the year for your account, it's amazing how many people hate whatever system they have. They print out receipts and keep them in a folder by their desk. They have like a Gmail search that they do.

So it just turns out to be very convenient. I think the app is a game changer. I think it's fantastic. I'm a huge fan. Anything we missed? One of the things I've run into is that there are some people out there who like this idea of putting money aside for charity, like theoretically, and they like the tax benefit, but they don't like the idea of money sitting idle, right?

In their head, they feel like there's this return that money should have. And so one of the things we designed into Daffy from the get-go was the ability that when you open your account, you can pick from one of nine portfolios to invest your money in. We have standard ETF portfolios, low cost, all Vanguard ETFs, only four basis points for the entire portfolio.

We have ESG portfolios, which are mostly BlackRock products. They're slightly more expensive, but for many people, they want to align their investing with their giving and their values. And then, of course, we have, because it's 2022, we have pure crypto portfolios. Coinbase is one of our investors. And so if you want to put your money into a diversified portfolio that includes crypto or even a pure crypto portfolio of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we do that for people.

And that's been really popular. It turns out that that's a very hard feature to get. Most donor advised funds out there do not have crypto options, either for contribution or for investing. And a lot of the transfers we've been receiving for donor advised funds, existing ones, are because we actually have crypto as an option.

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Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. I also want to jump into the course you teach. So I looked up, you wrote a blog post and you shared some of the ratings and it seemed like everyone loved your class.

There was like seven questions and no one said this was not well or extremely poor. And I'll send a link. You actually publish all the slides for the class, which is Personal Finance for Engineers. I'll put the link in the show notes. People can check it out. But outside of philanthropy, outside of giving, what do you think people are getting wrong about personal finance?

What I always see repeatedly is people looking for this secret to get wealthy. This one trick. I'm old enough to remember the infomercial age, you know, late night, the guy on the boat telling you, like, you could be rich tomorrow and do whatever. But I know it sounds silly, but I feel like it's an evergreen market.

Like I see every cycle, people looking for this kind of get rich quick. It could be get rich quick with crypto. It could be with real estate. All these different options, the right type of account, the right type of insurance, etc. And I think the biggest mistake that people make is not realizing that the most likely path to success is to focus on your career, which by the way, has a high tie to your income, right?

The top line is actually a big deal. For many people, it's easier for them to figure out how to make an extra $10,000 than it actually is for them to figure out how to save $10,000. It's one of these funny things about society. Focus on your income, your skills, your career, that top line.

Spend less than you make, right? And by the way, to your point earlier about increasing things over time, increasing your savings rate over time, right? How many people actually save 10% of their income because they live off their salary and they don't spend the bonus, right? That's a very easy way in some ways to just not build up a lifestyle that assumes you're making that money.

And so I think that a lot of people get the basics wrong. They want to jump to these special things and they focus so much on things that if you actually do the financial work, will earn them basis points, right? One hundredth of a percent, 10 basis points, half a percent, 1%.

And I'm not going to pretend that doesn't matter. You compound an extra percent over 30 years, it's a lot of money. But it's not as big as just focusing on the basics. And then by the way, this gets even worse with couples and with households, right? Like the amount of dysfunction with the way spouses treat money or the way people fail to plan together or even talk about money with each other probably has a lot more to do with financial problems people have than the fact that they didn't buy Tesla stock five years ago.

I think that tracks with some past conversations we've had. But one thing that keeps coming up and I noticed it was interesting, your final course seems to be a grab bag of what do people want to talk about? That's right. And it's probably no surprise to anyone listening that it's like, let's talk about venture capital and crypto.

And, you know, I even saw a slide that talked about NFTs. Where do you think some of the more exciting things fit into place? And I'll use you as an example. Obviously, you know, you've been fortunate with some of your career choices and the companies you've worked at, but eventually you got to a point that you're doing lots of angel investing.

How do some of these alternative investments fit in and not necessarily to the path to wealth, if you will, but to your investment portfolio? You know, you've thought a lot about investing at Wealthfront, also at Daffy for your own life. How do you think things like investing in startups fits in?

Yeah, that's a great question. And I don't want to pretend that I think that those things are irrational or not worth doing. If you do the math and you think about the system, a lot of these investments can make sense in some situations, right? The idea of having a small percentage of your portfolio in private equity isn't outlandish, right?

Like, you know, some of the best money managers in the world who run endowments, etc, allocate money to private equity and venture capital for good reason. Same thing is happening, by the way, with alternative asset classes, right? You know, it's been more than 10 years, but the data is coming in.

And I have to be honest, from my point of view, it seems like this argument on crypto, which you saw in the slides, that says no, digital assets seem to be a different asset class, they behave differently, they have different basis, they are not completely correlated with other asset classes.

And as a result, they might be an interesting addition to a diversified portfolio is a very rational question to ask. Actually, I cover a lot of this in my class, I don't have a problem with these assets. Like I said, the problem is less that people stay away from these things irrationally.

It's usually the opposite. They, you know, I got a question asked on Twitter just the other day where, you know, I was talking about crypto, acorns actually added crypto as an option to their portfolio similar to the way that Wealthfront did. And the question came in, well, if crypto is so good, why don't you put all your money into it?

And it's like, whoa, like, that's, that's actually never the answer. Diversification turns out to be a pretty good deal from most perspectives. But I do like the education to it. So each of these topics are different. It's a Stanford class, right? So not talking about venture capital and private equity and a Stanford class, Stanford, I mean, it would just read wrong.

So it's not surprising that students always want to know many of them are going to end up going to work for startups or venture backed startups, etc. Some of them will go into venture capital. Crypto is one of these interesting overlaps where I mean, I will tell you, as someone who came out of school as an engineer, you know, computer science, etc.

I've run into digital assets many times in my career. My first startup that I joined is like the fifth engineer was on digital software distribution, encryption, and how do you do this and this hard problem of what do you do with the fact that software can be perfectly copied for free is actually something that was endemic to the entire industry last 50 years.

Like how can you make money on software, if people can make a perfect copy for free, right? This has affected music and all forms of media. Even at eBay, I remember doing a strategy once on what eBay's digital asset strategy should be digital goods strategy. And at the time, it was not solvable.

Because if you didn't have a central authority, like what Apple did for iTunes, you couldn't build that platform. So for me, crypto is a very exciting technology area. There's a lot of interesting work being doing, the energy is phenomenal. But from a financial point of view, the simple argument is like, let's, let's go to first principles, right?

Like, do you think digital assets are a thing that have unique value? Is it a different thing? Does it have value? And will it have value long term? And then what are the characteristics of that type of investment? To me, those are actually perfectly appropriate for a class. And I think a lot of the students enjoyed going through it.

I was actually surprised crypto was not as popular a topic in any of the previous years as I would have expected. I expected every student to vote for it. It turns out the most popular topic with students that they asked for in the beginning continues to be real estate.

I don't know what branding or marketing is going on that's pushing real estate. But maybe it's just that you're in Silicon Valley, it's one of those areas where no one can figure out how you could ever buy a house. And so, you know, real estate is just one of those options.

But I actually dedicated a whole class to real estate, because there were so many requests for it. Yeah, there was a slide you had that was interesting, because I feel like every time I talk to people, there's people who are like, the path to wealth is to own rental properties.

And then there's everyone else. And that cohort of people believe that that is the best investment class. Yeah, that's an area that I flipped around on. If you had talked to me 10 years ago, I probably mostly would have said there's some really unhealthy marketing push that's across society in the industry that keeps pushing people towards rental real estate as somehow the best path to financial freedom.

That being said, I mean, the Federal Reserve, there was a paper that came out at the end of 2017, I shared in my class, etc, that kind of exposed the fact that most of the data that historically been aggregated about real estate did not include rental income, right? So most of the data you saw about real estate as an asset class, covered the idea of the capital gains from it and not the income from it.

And so they did a very good job of looking across 20 different cities in the Europe and the US over 100 years, all different timespans, etc. And it turns out there's actually a pretty fair argument that says that rental properties are actually a very interesting asset class. They have lower volatility than stocks.

They don't quite have equity like returns. But when you do that sharp ratio, right, when you look at the risk adjusted return, rental properties are better than I think the industry gave them credit for. And I'm just saying this as, you know, a personal story of what we cover in the class.

But I'm not totally surprised it has the draw anymore. I mean, the truth is a lot of people want control over their financial lives. Yeah, look, I'm a founder, right? You've been a founder. I think there's a natural instinct from a lot of people, a dream of running their own business.

And in many ways, owning rental properties sounds like a financial investment, but really it's running a business, right? And I think there are a lot of people who like running a business and they like the idea of learning how that business makes money. And they like learning how to be successful at it.

And so it is an investment, but it's also an occupation in a way. It's a lifestyle. As much as owning a restaurant would be or for you and me, it might be a venture backed software company. But I think that I've grown to accept the fact that the reason it's so attractive is because people don't look at it purely as an investment option.

They look at it also as a better way to live. Now, I think where people go astray is, you actually even mentioned this, I think, briefly, considering rental property is some form of passive income. I think it's too idealistic. It's a job, right? No matter how much you invest in property management or whatever, this idea that somehow you're going to be sitting on the beach somewhere and collecting checks does not match the reality that most people who get into rental properties have to think about.

I think the questions are reasonable. And especially, I think, by the way, I don't think those questions are going to wait. Looking at what's going on with real estate prices, not just in California or the Bay Area, but nationwide, I mean, we're, everyone got a crash course in real estate in the last 20 years.

You had the incredible boom in the 2000s, you had the incredible blow up in 2008, 2009. And now we're seeing real estate across the country surge again. And now guess what? Inflation's back. So everyone has that topic. And something that seemed like one of those stories that, you know, your parents and grandparents told you, at least in the US, historically, seeing that come back has people looking at real assets again.

So I think for better or worse, you're going to see a lot of interest in real estate, probably too much, given the realities of it as an asset class, but it is reasonable that people are interested. As I said, most lawyers are not going to find financial success by investing in rental properties.

They're going to find financial success by being great lawyers, and actually spending less than they make and investing that capital prudently. That's just something that I see in the data. It's something that I believe and it's what I teach in the class. I asked Morgan Housel for his best hack, and it was like, spend less than you earn and wait.

Like, that was, you know... Well, you know, Warren Buffett may not be perfect, but I will tell you, sometimes he has just the right quotes. And this, I forget which talk show host it was, that question of like, you're very upfront with what you do. Why don't more people invest the way you do?

And he says, well, I found in my life that very few people want to get rich slowly. And it's just, it's true, right? And by the way, you look at his results, most of his money, over 90% of it was made after he was 70. I think some incredible amount of it was made in the last 10 years, right?

That's how compounding works. Everyone has an urgency to it, and I understand why, right? When you're young, you're young. You want money now. You want success now. You want to build your life now. So I think that tension is always going to be there. And so that's why I'm so bullish on software and systems, right?

I think that humans are never going to get their emotions out of the way when it comes to money. As much as you can tell people that this is the way they should reinvest their dividends, and this is what they should watch in their expenses, and this is how taxes work.

We're busy. We have other priorities. Even if we were fully rational, we probably wouldn't get around to doing it. And the fact is we're not fully rational. And so this is why I like apps and services. I like what Wealthfront did for financial advice and for investing. I like what Acorns does for saving, getting millions of people have some money at the end of the month that they wouldn't have.

And I'm hoping that's what Daffy ends up helping to do with giving. Just systems that make it easier for people to do the right thing with their money. I want to jump last to the quick few questions outside of finance, outside of giving. I always like to ask people, if someone's coming to your neck of the woods, where would you tell them to go for dinner, grab a drink and something to do?

The number one challenge I usually have when people come in to visit is they are always focused on San Francisco, but I grew up in Silicon Valley. When it comes to places, I mean, it depends. There's a little place in Los Altos called The Post, which I like to take people for lunch.

When I take people for lunch, I found that they have a broad enough menu and it's nice enough that no matter where you're from, no matter what diet you're on, no matter what you're avoiding or doing or what, like there's something for everyone. And so it tends to work when I have people from out of town.

Of course, if you're meeting me for coffee, I'm super boring. It's always going to be at the Starbucks in Los Altos. But for dinner, I mean, I like steakhouses. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Alexander's Steakhouse. There's several of them. There's one in San Francisco, of course. There's actually one in Palo Alto called The Sea and there's one down in Cupertino.

The Cupertino one is the original one. But if you're looking for a really high quality steak with kind of a more Japanese elements to it, it's really hard to beat in my book. That's fantastic. Any, any, any suggestion to spend a weekend or an afternoon doing something outside of San Francisco in the Bay Area?

Oh, I'm always a big fan of getting outdoors. I like taking people, walking them around Stanford. Stanford's still a beautiful place that I think actually captures a lot of both California and kind of the environment. It's almost always warm and full of life. But I like getting outside, actually, like, you know, hiking the Dish, walking shorelines beautiful.

There's so many parks around that you can actually go to. But I'm also going to preface this by saying I'm super boring. Like there's a reason why most people don't plan their vacations around me. No, I think these are some good tips. I really appreciate it. Before we head out, where can people find the stuff you're working on, the stuff you're writing online?

Oh, for sure. So the best place to go, of course, for Daffy, of course, is go to Daffy.org. All the content is there. A lot to read up on the articles that I've written are on the Daffy blog. We have some evergreen resources there. So if you're interested in philanthropy or giving or anything, I talked about the generosity, the tax savings on donating stock or crypto, you can find that all in the Daffy blog.

I do blog personally still, although it turns out building a startup takes time and so not as much as I used to. But yeah, my blog has been running AdamNash.blog has most of the information I've published in the last 15 years. And then, of course, if you're interested in that Stanford class, it's really meaningful for me to push financial education out as broadly as possible.

One of the reasons to do the Stanford class was to make it more normalized, that there would be personal finance education. And so if you're interested in any of those decks that Chris went through, if you actually go to CS007.blog, all the slides for all the last five years are there.

Yeah, I'll link to all that in the show notes. And we said it before, if you if you're going to sign up for Daffy and you want to get an extra $25 in your account, allthehacks.com/daffy. Adam, thank you so much for joining me. No, thank you for having me, Chris.

It's great. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show questions for me or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or @hutchins on Twitter.

That's it for this week. I'll see you next week. I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money. That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement. It's called the Personal Finance Podcast, and it's much more about building generational wealth and spending your money on the things you value than it is about clipping coupons to save a dollar.

It's hosted by my good friend, Andrew, who truly believes that everyone in this world can build wealth and his passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining. I know because I was a guest on the show in December 2022. But recently I listened to an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your mind.

And it was so crazy to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating in their employer's retirement plan. And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared. The Personal Finance Podcast has something for everyone. It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with your money and grow your wealth.

So I highly recommend you check it out. Search for the Personal Finance Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts and enjoy.