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Well, I'm actually bribing you to fund the show. And if you'd like to know the details of my bribes, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. Today, let's dig into the topic of financial planning education and let's talk with an academic about it. I have an interview today with Dr. Nathan Harness, who runs a financial planning undergraduate program out in Texas.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Tuesday, March 3, 2015. I'm bringing you an interview with Dr. Nathan Harness from Texas A&M. He's got a fascinating story. He started as a practitioner and then moved over into the world of academia and now is in charge of preparing and enlightening young minds and hearts and sending them off into the financial planning business.

This is an interview that I recorded when I was out in Texas a couple of weeks ago at the T3 Technology Tools for Today conference for financial advisors. It was a really fun interview. I had not met Dr. Harness prior to the conference, but I had been planning and looking to bring some more academics on the show.

And so it was a fortuitous meeting and we wound up with a really interesting interview. I think you're going to really enjoy this. We talk a little bit about his experience and he's got a fascinating story to tell. If you don't listen to the whole thing, at least listen to the beginning about his story of his involvement with 9/11.

It's absolutely fascinating. But we also talk a lot about the academic side of financial planning, the side of academic preparation, what's good about it, what's tough about it, the emerging role, what's involved in it. So I think you're really going to enjoy the interview. And I think I'm going to stop talking.

Enjoy. So Dr. Nathan Harness, welcome to the show. I appreciate you being with me. Thank you. I have been looking forward to bringing on over time some academic, formal academic faculty, people who teach in financial planning. And so you're the guy, you're the guinea pig. You're the first of, you're the first guy out.

So let's kick it off with what's your background and how did you wind up where you are today where you're actually teaching financial planning at the college level? Sure. I bet my story is not that much different than a lot of people entering this industry. My path just ended in academia.

As an undergraduate student or backing up from there as a kid, I loved money. I loved the idea of making money. And that led me to- Go into teaching. Yes. Yeah, exactly. That was not a good move. No, that was a terrible move. That was later in life that I discovered there are more things than money.

But yeah, as a kid, loved money, really enjoyed the process, the creation. And so started working in a bank even at the age of 16. I don't know why they gave me the keys to the bank. And I'm a 17 year old kid. I was actually transporting money around and I thought, man, this is a small town.

How far was I going to get? I wasn't even going to make it to Mexico probably without cash. So I just had a head for it. And I loved the idea. I just didn't have a sense of direction. So I got my undergrad in finance, understood the mathematics of money, but did not understand the relational aspects.

And so after going through that degree, became a stock broker, enjoyed that world to some extent and cut my teeth learning the hard way how to sell. Started off cold calling. As a matter of fact, very first day of work, I remember I was working for a firm and I went into my boss's office and I said, "All right, I'm ready for all these clients.

Where are they?" And he picks up a phone book. Nobody uses phone books anyway. He picks up a phone book, he throws it down on my desk and he's like, "They're right there." And I called so many people. I had callous fingertips. I could tell you based off of last name, likelihood of phone being disconnected.

I learned a lot. I learned how to think on my toes. I learned how to answer objections. So there were positives that came out of that. But I remember even at that time thinking this can't be the best way to do this. And so- What year was that? That would have been '99.

So this was- No, I'm sorry. It was 2000. Was your firm, were you brokering a specific type of industry and- Yeah. So interestingly, my first job out was for American Express Financial Advisors. And then I migrated there to Morgan Stanley. So Morgan Stanley had a training program for brokers at that time where they would put you through a process, if you may.

And they used to ship everybody to New York. So probably a much larger podcast. My second day on the job was in Tower Two of the World Trade Center. And the day was September 11th, 2001. Really? Yes. So talk about a way to start your career of- So were you in the building?

Yeah, I was on the 61st floor. So my second day of work as a stockbroker entering this profession, I had worked for Amex before that. But really, my first entry point is me running down a stairwell. And I made it out with about 15 to 20 minutes to spare.

And so that sets your career in a very unique way. It causes you to think- How would I imagine? Because I was, I don't know, 22 years old, 21 years old. It causes you to think about life in a very different way. And I guess the healthy aspect for me was coming out of there, going in, it was all about money.

Coming out, it became much more relational to me. And me discovering myself that what I wanted in life maybe wasn't the way that I had centered my profession. Wow. Yeah. So it was a real interesting start to a career. Yeah. So that day you got out of the tower and did you evacuate on the boats?

Or how did you get away? Yeah. So here's the crazy thing. So September 11th is a Tuesday. I got to New York on a Sunday. And so they were going to put us up in hotels. You go through about a one month training, and then you may or may not stay in New York, or you may get shipped out to a regional office.

It was a centralized training system. And so I actually, it's funny, I have a picture of me, my ID card for Tower Two, and it just looks like this young little kid. It's so funny to look at. And so, yeah, when we evacuated, because our tower got hit second, but it fell first.

Right. And so the way that we evacuated, I was going east and then north. And so I could still see Tower Two where I had exited when it started to fall. Wow. And so we start running in mass exodus, a bunch of rats running away from the fire. And so I ran for about a hundred blocks, give or take.

And I remember I'd only been in New York two days. Wow. I was so shaken. I didn't remember the name of my hotel. And so I just find a random person on the street after running for a long period of time. And I say, "I just got out of the World Trade Center.

I'm a young man. I don't know the name of my hotel." And it says a lot, I think, about the nature of people. This guy, I have no idea who he is, just starts walking me around. He's from New York and he says, "Tell me what it looks like." And I'm describing this hotel to him.

And he ultimately, I was only about 20 blocks off. He walks me about 20 blocks, make it back to my hotel. And so I'm stuck in New York for two days because I just want to get back to what I called home, which was the town I grew up in just to be with family because I'm thinking into the world here.

And so it took me a much longer story was just getting off New York. It took me, I went in the subway that connects Jersey and New York and was able to, on Thursday, to hitch a ride with a bunch of people that were coincidentally vacating and going in the same direction and ended up in Arkansas where I grew up.

So yeah, kind of crazy. - So you went into that, you're probably a young, aggressive man saying, "I got to make a lot of money and I'm going to go cold call and work with Morgan Stanley." And then it kind of redefined how you thought about money. Tell me more.

- It did. So on the onset, again, my desire was to be a multimillionaire at a very young age and do whatever you can to get there. And I think going through that experience, it took a little bit of time for that to settle because people would ask me, I did a lot of interviews and I don't know, give talks after that on those events.

And people would ask me a lot of life change questions like, "So now what do you think?" Or, "How do you feel about the people that did this?" And I'm a slow processor. So it probably took me a solid year to just sit back and think through those events and how those unfolded to the decisions that I later made in life.

So I really stayed in a holding pattern for about a year. And it was about at that year mark, I realized that life is a limited resource and you have to decide what it is you want during those timeframes. And so for me, money and time were those trade with each other.

I decided that time was more important to me than money. And so now I had to come up with a way to switch those two. And so that's where I went back to school to figure that out. I didn't know exactly what that looked like. I just knew I needed to figure that out.

So I went back to school and I'm like, "I don't know, maybe smarter people than I can tell me how I trade those two off." - Were you broke when you started as a financial advisor? - I was broke. So a broker or broke? - Did you start broke?

- I started dead broke. - Now, what did you do for income during that time? Did Morgan Stanley pay you? Was it a commission? How does that actually work? - Yeah. So back then, there are still companies that do this, but it was a draw. So they would give you about $1,500 a month, something like that.

So a livable wage, but you get about $1,500 a month and then you were expected to generate commissions that would offset that. And so they would draw on that all the way to a year out. So I had to start selling product. And that was new to me as well.

I thought, "I'm going to sell my advice. People are going to want to come to me like they want to come to a lawyer because I have all this great knowledge." And then I realized, "Oh, wait, they're not coming to me for that." As a matter of fact, they're not coming to me at all, first part.

And they're not coming to me for my advice. My company wants them to come to me so I can give them something, sell them something. And that was an awakening for me. It was a rude awakening at that time. So the industry that I entered, I felt like I didn't understand.

It didn't make sense to me. And so I went on to... I thought, "You know what? This sucks. I don't want to do this." And so I wanted to be an analyst at that point, which I apparently did not understand the give and take in time and money because analysts work all the time and have plenty of money but no time to spend it.

So I made it through my master's in finance. And then I was at Texas Tech and I stumbled onto this financial planning program. Somebody told me, "They teach these personal finance classes over there. You ought to go check this thing out." So I go over and I take a class and I fall in love instantly.

I said, "This is what I've been wanting. The gospel that they're preaching over here is what in my mind I've been thinking this should look like. Why doesn't everybody know about this?" And so I stayed on, did my PhD at Texas Tech in financial planning. And really that is the story I don't want to keep hearing over and over again.

What I want to hear going forward is that students don't take all these indirect routes to get to planning, that they can directly move through and into financial planning right out of college because it's very possible. I think this is definitely the new wave. Before we get to that, I want to ask one more question.

Did Morgan Stanley pay you after you got get out of New York? I'm actually interested, did they just keep the draw going? They did. So they were kind of confused. We had about a million square feet, if I remember correctly, in the World Trade Center. We're one of the largest occupiers of the World Trade Center.

And that was our headquarter. So all of our documents were there. Of course, they had them backed up offsite, but the company goes into chaos all of a sudden. It wasn't as bad as Cantor Fitzgerald, but it was a similar "what do we do" scenario. So they didn't really know what to do with this training class.

It's like, these people have been through a lot. Do we send them to a new training program? And so they just kind of sat on us for a period of time. And that was probably part of my issue as well is I'm very confused now. I'm confused at what they want me to do.

I'm confused at what this industry is. And so they sent us to a secondary training down in Texas, funny enough. And I went through training and it was a lot of "hoorah, let's get these people excited so they can go sell stuff." And there were financial planners inside the company that were doing planning.

I just didn't know who they were. Tavis: I'm always fascinated. The reason I'm probing on that is I'm fascinated by strange periods in history and how financial planning adjusts during those times. I'm fascinated with things like World War II. And I often think, "Man, what if I were living in Europe during World War II?

What would my life be like? And how would I apply the financial concepts that I think of today?" Because having lived and grown up in the United States of America, in many ways... How old are you at this point? Ben: I'm 36. Tavis: Okay. So I'm almost 30. So we're pretty similar as far as age in some way.

We've pretty much lived in a bubble. And your bubble was burst with New York City, but mine wasn't. And certainly it affected our national society and culture, but it didn't affect us personally. And I'm fascinated by how do you pick your life up? And if you have to flee from Germany because you're a Jew, how do you pick your life up and move it to another place?

Or how do you adjust during these times? And it's a real topic of interest to me. So when I've got a real life person sitting in front of me who's been through something like that, it really is interesting to me. Ben: It's crazy. My dad told me... Growing up, we didn't grow up with much money.

My dad owned a small business, some off and on, and he actually grew up as a minister. And so we grew up in a large family, not a lot of money. And my dad never went to college, but he seemed to get the basic principles without anybody teaching them to him per se.

And I remember him telling me something one time, it's really stuck with me. He said, "Son, don't ever let your stuff own you. You always need to be the owner of your stuff." And so it was those kind of Aesop's fables that stuck with me. Those little things that, again, it's not rocket science, but it's base principles that allowed me to think, no matter what the outcome, my grandfather was in World War II.

He actually was a medic. He was in the beaches of Normandy and he was in Battle of the Bulge, both. So he survived. And his transcripts at the University of New Orleans, he shook for the rest of his life. He always had a shaking hand. He never really talked about it.

I didn't even know about it. Had I, thank God, somebody transcripted his story or I wouldn't know it. And so I read his story and I read about him marching through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and just his emotions and his feelings, all of his brothers are there.

And I think back to living, he was a dairy farmer, my grandfather was. I think back to living at that time, what would be my principles? What would be the commodities that were important to me? Could I apply this exact knowledge in the exact same way? And I think the synthesis of information never really changes.

The products sure do. My grandfather, to him, hard assets were much more important. His grandfather had lost money during the depression where banks just disappeared. He has a family story. We have a lot of family stories, but one of them was his little thousand, no, it was his little hundred.

He had a hundred in the bank and it was just gone. It just disappeared. So your trust in banks, it would totally alter that thought process. So asset preferences, I think, change a lot across time. Even recently, as we see sort of this run on guns, that's another example.

You've got people that see those as an asset or bullets or whatever it may be, and they want to store these things up because they see them as an oddball asset, even in today's time. So I think as we progress across time, our preferences and the way that we store resources, the concept doesn't change.

What those assets are, are constantly changing. It really is true. And if you look, I know for me, one of the things that I had to struggle to overcome is because I was always interested in personal finance. When I was young, I had similar goals to you. I wanted to be rich.

And so I always read these personal finance books. And what happened is I didn't have the maturity to be able to look back past what the individual doctrine that some writer would preach. They would say, "You must do this. Always do this. Always do that." I didn't have enough ability at a young age to look past that and see the principles behind it.

And then it was after I worked as a financial planner for a while, and I kept always thinking, "Man, it is a heavy responsibility when you're responsible for other people's assets." I think if you take your role as a steward seriously, it's more difficult to care for other people's money than it is for your own.

And so then I started just to really understand more of the principles. And what happened is, I have at this point come much farther. I've come back to try to understand the principles and look to see what's happening, whether it's in the depression. In the depression, if you had a farm and you had food and you had hard assets, that meant that your family didn't suffer as dreadfully as if you were a high-priced stockbroker and all of your investments were in paper stocks.

That's representative of the value of a company, and the value of that company is dramatically changing. And so even though I grew up saying, "Oh, always own stocks, always own stocks," I realized, "Wait a second. That isn't always true." Same thing with, I think for whatever reason, I guess just because the horror of that era in history of World War II and the wholesale slaughter of the Jews is so horrific, it just drives deep.

And I think, "Who were the people that came through?" No matter if all of your business interests were paper assets and it was representative of your ownership of these operations, and the German government comes in and strips you of your ownership rights, all you've got is the gems and the gold coins that you can sew into your coat and the knowledge in your head.

And so you use that to bribe your way out of the country, and you use the knowledge and the work ethic and the principles that worked before to apply in a new era. And I think that it's easy to go to the point where you say, "Well, look, that happened there, so therefore it's happening here." And that can be very dangerous, because then you wind up saying, "Well, I'm not going to own any paper assets.

I'm not going to have a dollar. All of my money is going to be gold and silver coins." That can be very dangerous when you're not in that era. But it can also be very dangerous to just say, "Well, I'm not even going to think about this. History's never happened.

These things that have happened before are never going to happen again, so therefore I'm going to just ignore all of that and put all of my money in the bank, because now we have this modern system that works better." And one of the most challenging things I find about what I do now is trying to understand how can you understand these principles of history and apply them in a way that is careful and accurate in an individual context.

And I find that so challenging. And I don't even know. I'm still trying to figure out where that balance is and where those decisions are, because everything has trade-offs. If you're wrong in one thing, then it means this loss. If you're wrong over here, it means that loss. I don't even, at this point, know how to teach it, because I'm still trying to figure it out.

I think we all are. The downside to diversification is when you try to grab all of these ideas, principles, tangible assets, and you've thinned yourself out. When one thing really hits, the rest of your portfolio suffers. So diversification is a great... I remember reading an article called "Diversification." And when one area is really hitting, you look like a moron, because you have all these other areas where you've spread yourself thin.

And yet, when chaos happens, you look like a genius, because you have just enough stored up in one place or another to bail yourself out. So it really comes down to how do you view the world? Do you view it as a relatively safe and consistent place, or do you view it as relatively safe and consistent with very long tails?

And the tails of the distribution, when you look at the damage that those tails can do, it's innumerable. And I think we sort of experienced some of that in 2007, 2008, the tail risk. And so having... I don't know. Sometimes I sort of laugh at preppers, people that do the prepping.

And then sometimes I think, "You know what? Maybe they're smarter than I am." I'll share with you the best I've come up. And I've never heard this. Feel free to steal it if you find it useful and insert it into academia. But I've never heard anyone talk about this, but I did a show on this some months ago about looking at life through the concept of what I think of as the lens of scale.

And what I mean by that is, if you are broke, and you're 22 years old, and you're just getting ready to get a new job, and you're completely broke, do you need to be worrying about how to expatriate gold coins and own them in an anonymous bank account? That's a total waste of time.

You don't need to, at that point in time, be worrying about what happens if there's a collapse of the dollar, what happens if there's a war, what happens... You don't have anything that's going to make a difference. All you have is your human capital, and your energy, and your skill, and your social network, and those other assets that aren't measured in clear ones and zeros of financial assets.

And so your grandfather, your great-grandfather and great-grandfather, whichever, if your $100 is all you actually have, then, and it loses if the $100 is not a big number in the money of that day, you've not lost much, because the $100 didn't make a major difference in your standard of living.

You still had to go out and hustle, and work, and hire yourself out, and figure out how to succeed within the context of that economy. Now, fast forward. You've got $1,000. Do you have enough money to diversify it? No, you don't. You need to get that money into productive assets, and there's different ways to look at that.

Now, you've got $20 million. Is it foolish if you have $20 million to think about, "You know what? Having an extra $100,000 invested in this paper asset over here is not... The potential return is not nearly as impactful on my lifestyle as is protection from some of these so called black swan events." So in the same way, I can't imagine why anybody who's very wealthy wouldn't have a bunker and a ranch in some place in the world that's a safe place.

But that doesn't mean that I, if I have $100,000, that I can afford to allocate my assets in that way, because we've got a very improbable but plausible scenario that you're planning for. But if I take all my $100,000, that's my seed capital to start a business, or buy the ownership in other businesses, or purchase income producing real estate, and I take it all and move it over here, I'm planning only for one possible but highly improbable scenario while ignoring all of these probable scenarios.

But that doesn't mean that I shouldn't have a couple months of food in my pantry, because that has a low cost. I'm going to eat the food anyway. And hey, if I lose my job, I'm going to be useful. So it's just that balance of scale. Where am I at this stage in my life?

And I can't go when I'm just getting started and say, "That's it. I'm going to get rid of all of my dollars and go buy a ranch in the hills with a bunker on it." But again, it doesn't mean that I can't say, "You know what, if the Jews in Germany who had made some foreign investments, or the..." I don't know what it was.

What would be historical? Like the Persians or the... What's that movie with Thor? Do you remember which ancient civilizations were that? - Oh, I can't remember. - It doesn't matter. My point is, envision an ancient civilization. My ancient history is completely gone. It doesn't matter whether you were a shopkeeper in Babylon and you're saying, "What happens if the Babylonian invasion, or what happens if this empire collapses?" History changes.

And so recognize that, but then at the end of the day, it comes down to my situation. What do I have to do where I am? So I think of that as the lens of scale. Focus on where I am. If I've got $1,000, don't put it in the stock market.

Keep it in $100 bills in my house so that I can go and get a deal on a beater car by putting down $300 when the price is $750. That's a much bigger difference than my 10% return in the stock market. That's my point. I think of that as a lens of scale.

- I think you hit it right on the head, too. One thing I picked up in what you just said as well was human capital. That is a movable investment. And it's one that I feel like, and I use that term very broadly. Let me give you an example that does not include any of my boring lectures.

One of the pieces of human capital that I've picked up is I buy a new house and I have to make repairs to that house. I could pay somebody to do that. Or if I could directly trade my labor, let's say in theory, it costs me $10 an hour and I could earn $20 an hour.

Well, yes, does it make sense for me to hire that person to do it? Of course it does. The reality though is I can't go and always replace an hour of time with an additional $20. It doesn't work that way in real life unless you're selling something, I guess.

Plus, if I go to learn how to do that myself, now I have knowledge capital that I did not start with. So an example would be I now know how to do some basic plumbing. I now know how to do a little bit of wiring in my house. I know how to make improvements to my home that it would have cost me a lot of money when you net all those together to bring somebody in to do those things.

I own some tools now because I invested in those and I can carry those throughout the rest of my life. So there are some moments that you come across where you make an investment that's very transferable and it's an asset that nobody can ever take away from you unless they hit you on the head hard enough, I guess.

It's always up there. So learning how to think on your feet, learning how to synthesize and process and doing it outside of your traditional field as well is something that in any circumstance, no matter what comes down the road, you're going to be able to navigate the path that you need to go down.

Some people have an unfair advantage. They have a high cognitive ability, right? So maybe we need to do some leveling, eliminate a couple of those people so that dummies like me have a chance. In that concept, in my mind, that is the cornerstone of where we should always start with finance.

Teaching finance is the concept of when you are born, you're worth nothing from a financial perspective. You have no financial capital, but what you have is you have a large amount of human capital. It's this time-money parallel is exactly what it is. You have, hopefully, a long lifespan where it's expected.

The time is what you have, but you don't have money. So there in your early age, your entire goal should be to enhance your human capital in a way that's valuable to the market. The way you do that is by bringing on additional skills and abilities. We live in an economy that's a very high division of labor economy.

That's what structures. The whole idea of societal collapse that so many people fear, all that is is a collapse of the division of labor where all of a sudden you go from having this highly specialized, highly technical skill of I teach financial planning or me, hey, I produce this entertaining, hopefully, entertaining show.

But now, we're both chopping wood in the backyard. Well, pretty quickly, that economy gets to reset because the division of labor is what we owe our economic abundance to, is this highly specialized field. So the key is we need to learn, all of us, how to enhance first our skills and enhance our human capital, both in a specialized way with backup areas in case our skills become obsolete.

And then that translates into financial capital over time. So you hit my sales pitch right on the head. Whenever I'm going out and interacting with freshmen on campus, my first pitch is, look, why don't you take a little bit of life skills coursework? It's called financial planning. And this terrible byproduct of you minoring, let's say, in financial planning is you know how to manage your money life.

What a horrible thing for you to come out and have that. You have a backup profession if that's what you're looking for. And so that's one of the sales pitches I hit with students is diversify your human capital, be able to do a multitude of things in case one of them doesn't work out.

What is it? The statistic we change jobs seven times across our life or something like that. Be prepared to be able to make those shifts if you want or need to. Plus, you may find that what you're you think you're interested in isn't so interesting. Right. And so I think you're right.

The ability to synthesize the ability to use very applied knowledge is huge. And that's what I love about financial planning. It's the application of these theoretical financial concepts and constructs. Right. So let's talk about the academic academics of financial planning. You finished a Ph.D. in finance planning at Texas Tech.

And then did you go into practice or did you stay and go directly into academia? No, I went my first job out was working at the University of Georgia. And so I stayed directly in the field. So we have a unique utility model in academia. Our utility is derived in a research one institution, more from our research than probably anything else.

So you spend a lot of your time trying to solve research problems and write papers that five people read. In boring academic speak. Exactly. Exactly. I cannot get through even the three first three pages of some of the papers that you guys write. Imagine how we feel writing these things.

I believe it. So tell me about the development of financial planning as an academic area of focus, because this is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is. You're talking less than 25 years. It's an amalgamation of so many different areas. Think about financial planning. You have insurance over here. There are people who go to school just to learn insurance.

You have retirement. You have investments or people who go to school just to learn investments. You have a state. You have taxation. You have all of these areas that fit together. And so it requires a very broad, maybe quarterbacking approach. That's what we're training these students to do is you can maybe specialize in one of these areas later if you want to.

But today you need to have a general knowledge of how all of these work, how they all interact with each other and how you can make them efficient. So in the traditional model of academia, it fits in a lot of places. For example, we teach financial planning classes in a college of agriculture, which some people may think, "What the heck is that?" It's the applied side.

I have tons of applied economists, agricultural economists that are solving very similar problems. It just turns out theirs are food-based or those are cattle-based. Now I'm taking that knowledge that they already have and saying, "Let's solve a new problem. It's a financial one." And I get some of the most incredible students, one, because they understand if you've been poor, you know what that feels like.

There's a relatability there. That's why Mississippi always comes up as the state that tends to give to charity as a percentage-wise greater than any other state in the country. I didn't know that. Oh, absolutely. It's because they understand it. They get it. They know what it feels like. And so when you have these students that can relate, they become incredible students.

They have less of the entitlement syndrome. They're really, really great students. So we take that knowledge that they already have in place with their micro and macro economy understandings. They understand the way the world works around. Now let's get inside this house and let's talk about some household issues, some very micro, micro, micro, I might call it, economics, which is the working with a family.

So there are other colleges that are like us, Texas Tech, where I did my PhD, is actually in human sciences. And again, I think the core thought originally was all financial planning is going to be in a college of business. Sometimes the landscape, and my prior job was teaching in a college of business.

Sometimes the landscape's a little bit difficult because of the regulating bodies and so many other complexities around housing this in different places. So if you look at universities across the country, you'll see agricultural economics, you'll see human sciences, you'll see departments of finance, departments of accounting. I mean, financial planning is still trying to figure out what it is, and it will for many years to come as we evolve to a profession.

Are you seeing students that go to college to focus and study financial planning, what types of career decisions do they make coming out of college? Are you seeing a trend of a specific type of firm they go to or a specific way that they set their career up as compared to students who haven't studied in an undergraduate degree program?

So the first statement there isn't true, and we don't see students come to college to go to financial planning. So I never got out of sales. I told you I tried to get out of this whole sales game. I just, I do it differently now. No, it's interesting. There's a study I read not too long ago, and it was out of the UK.

I've not seen it produced in the United States. It'd be a great research study if anybody wants to do that. And what they looked at is K through 12, they interviewed focusing more on those close to graduation. They asked them, "When you grow up, what do you want to be?

Would you like to enter financial services?" And the response rate, the positive response rate on that was 9%. Wow. 9%. And so then they started to drill down and say, "Why? What's going on here? Why would none of these students want to enter financial services as a profession?" And when they drilled down, what they were finding was their perception was off base.

Because think about it. When we watch movies, when we watch television, what are they portraying? Wolf of Wall Street, Wall Street, Boiler Room, movie after movie after movie that makes this profession sound pretty dirty, especially if you don't really know what this profession is. You lump it all together.

Secondly, when they go to mom and dad, mom and dad maybe have terrible experiences with their finances. So they say, "You don't want to do that. That's dry and it's boring." Then they go to their guidance counselor in high school, and their guidance counselor says, "I don't know. I haven't really dealt much with that." And so they received no guidance correcting the ill-conceived sort of perception that they have around this industry.

And so when they were even interviewed and said, "I do this with my students, not those who are involved deep in the program, but new ones." I say, "When I say the word financial planning, what's the first thought that comes to your mind?" And some of them, unfortunately, have very negative thoughts.

It's boring or it's numbers or it's greed or it's old white man or it's whatever it is. It's a very homogenous though thought process on what that person looks like that is in this profession. And so when I speak to, let's say females who are in college and I tell them, "Are you interested?" And they said, "Are there any females in financial planning?" I said, "No, but that's why we need you." So there's this perception that we've got to bust through.

And I can't tell you how much of my time is spent correcting bad impressions of what we are. So we started at my university, for example, we started a video series and it's called This Is My Profession. And what I do is I've gone around and I've found some young planners, some old planners, some international planners, some African-American planners.

And I just say, "Tell me how you got here and tell me why you love it." That's it. It's a one minute spot. What I'm trying to do is show the next generation that this is a valuable job. More than just the money it provides, you are changing people's lives.

Step two, we're going to interview some clients as well and say, "How has your planner impacted you?" I want them to get involved and to see it and to get it because they don't right now. And so we spend so much time just showing them what the possibilities are that now I got to actually teach them how to do it.

It's interesting. I need a tagline, a subtitle, a marketing slogan for radical personal finance. And I've really struggled to figure it out because I resist any of the advice that tells me, "Joshua, understand what your niche is and stay niche." And I'm like, "That's too boring to stay in a niche.

I don't want to talk about this every day. I want to talk about everything." And as I've worked and worked to try to figure out what is the slogan of this show, one of the things, and it's a terrible marketing slogan, but it's true, is, and I can't figure out how to put it in words that make sense, but one of the things I think constantly about is practical goal attainment or taking goals from the ethereal to the practical.

And that's what I think of financial planning. We'll have to talk later and you guys can write me a check and I'll be your advertising role for your financial planning program. Because I cannot think of anything that is more interesting than financial planning, because financial planning is what allows each and every individual person to accomplish their goals in life.

And this is how I think of it. Every single goal you have in life involves money in some way, because money is the way that we have our lives structured. There is a certain cost to living. So if your goal is, "I'm going to take a year off and go hike the Appalachian Trail," that is a clear financial planning objective that needs to be planned for.

The question is, what expenses are you going to have on the road? What expenses do you need now? So you sit down and you figure out, "Well, I'm going to spend, I'm going to buy some gear, so I need a thousand dollars worth of fancy gear." Okay? That is an immediate cashflow need of a thousand dollars lump sum at a specific date.

At what date are you going to go and hike the Appalachian Trail? Time value of money does help. Exactly. Now, we've got a date. I'm leaving on, well, you probably wouldn't leave January 1, spring, March 1, or whatever. I don't know when spring is. So I live in Florida.

We don't have seasons. So let's say you're going to go on March 1. Well, March 1 of this year, I need a thousand dollars. These expenses. Now, I need monthly costs. I need a certain amount on an ongoing basis. What's that number and for how long? So now you've got your cashflow needs.

So now we can calculate back from that to a present value need at this date, and you can figure out what you need to save. So there's all of the financial planning technical language that, "Oh, cashflow. I don't know how to do a future value and a present value and a discounted...

This is intimidating." No, it's not. It's normal. It's intuitive. And so we can calculate, if you want to go hike the Appalachian Trail, that it needs a financial plan behind it. It's no different to calculate a 35-year retirement plan. It's just a little bit more numbers, a little more data.

It's a little harder because we don't actually know over the course of 35 years as much as your one year hiking the trail, but it's no different. And so every single goal in life has a financial component. Raising kids has a financial component. Tell me about it. Yeah. Planning for...

My wife, planning for when she... I get questions sometimes on the show about how do I plan for a spouse to stay home. So my wife, she was working outside the house. And then when we had our first son, then she came and she started working inside the house.

Well, that's a financial plan. That's a goal. And so the key is to understand that it's all connected to financial planning. But what happens, I think, is people don't... It's like, why do I want to go and plan for 65 when I'm old and boring? And I say, no, you don't have to do that.

You want to plan to be financially independent at 30 and you're 20? I can plan that for you. Now, it's going to be different parameters and different constraints on the plan than if you want to be financially independent at 70. But financial planning is fun. It's exciting because it's how do I get from this ideal vision, this, "Oh, I did this fancy goal-setting exercise.

This is so fun," to actually, "What's the next action? What is the next action that I need to do today to get me to that goal?" So you said some things there that I think some people haven't thought through. You had some goals that you spit out. I think, unfortunately, with some clients that we come across, and especially with students that I come across, they've never even thought through a lot of goals.

And so this idea of having a goal is almost new to them. And so I actually have to help them with goal discovery of just determining because they have this nebulous idea of, "I want to do stuff, but what is stuff equal to?" Then I can put dollar constraints on it.

I mean, dollar is just a placeholder for time, essentially. So I can put dollars in it and I can associate that with those goals. But for them, I actually spend one of my introductory literacy classes, what I do is I just have them define some goals. I said, "10 years from now, you know what you would do with the client.

10 years from now, how would you define your success? What would that look like for you?" And so we spend some time just doing goal discovery. And even when I was in practice, and I would talk to people who were, let's say, approaching retirement, and they would tell me they wanted to retire.

And I would say, "Why do you want to retire?" "I hate my job." "Well, that's probably a pretty good reason. But when do you want to retire?" "I don't know." And so we could back in and we could add the dollars in to equate to that. But I was finding that I was coming across people that would retire and I would ask them the question, "Why did you retire at this date?" And what I was finding is because their neighbor did.

It was a proximity decision. Those things that were close to them made them make their decision rather than using a rational thought process that you're talking about, which is planning. Attaching dollars and time to that decision. It was just randomly based off of what was close to them and what it looked like.

So that's how they made a decision. So what I love about financial planning, because I'm kind of organized in some ways, not my hair, but the rest of me, an organized guy that I like to have a plan of action. And it doesn't have to be a financial plan.

It can be just a goal plan. Beginning of the year for my wife and I, how do we want to grow our relationship better? You can talk about that all day long, but if you don't really have serious communication about how you're going to do that, you drift apart.

And next thing you know, you don't know each other anymore. So this planning concept, this idea of putting it on paper, making decisions in community with your planner or with your spouse or whatever that looks like, really impacts people's lives. It has a huge impact. And that's what I love.

Maybe I'm making what we do sound better than it is because I'm involved in it. Don't we all do that? We build up how great our profession is. But I really think I've seen it. I've seen it firsthand, how people have come out the other side and said, "Whew." That exhale of, "All right, we're moving.

We're doing something." Two weeks ago, I had a friend of mine call me. I do almost no financial planning. Every now and then, someone's able to get me because I'm 100% focused on building this show. But every now and then, someone's able to get me to have a conversation.

And I watched, and this friend called me and I said, "Sure, I'll sit down and talk with you." And I told him I'd sit down and talk. They came into the conversation so incredibly stressed. The thing was they wanted to start a business, but they don't know where to get the money from and trying to say, "Do I get the money out of a 401k?" And so I sit down and we just have a chat.

And I said, "What are your goals? What are you trying to do and where are you?" And figure out what's the income, what's the debt, what are the goals, what's actually needed for the business. And just a simple conversation took 45 minutes. And I could almost visibly see the stress levels just melt because I said, "Look, this isn't that tough.

We can make this happen pretty quickly." It's so difficult for us when we're in the middle of life to know how to do this. Whereas somebody from the external who's not involved with the emotion of our life is able to basically shut everything out and just kind of calm things down.

And this, in my experience of trying to teach financial planners, casually, I've only done it a little bit in kind of a formal setting, but this is one of those skills that has frustrated me to no end to try to teach financial planners and say, "The number one skill is very much about coaching and about this goal question." What often happens is financial planners say, "I'm supposed to ask about your goals.

So let me have a kind of a cursory thing of what are your goals in five years, personally, professionally, and financially?" And I say, "No, stop. If you don't get past that question, it doesn't matter. And if you have an hour with a client and you spend time and I don't know how you teach students, but I stole Dan Sullivan's question.

He runs a coaching organization called the Strategic Coach and he phrases his question and says, "If we're sitting down, pretend for a moment we're sitting here three years from today, what has to, looking back over the last three years," which is a great way to phrase a question, kind of rearward looking, "What has to happen for you personally, professionally, and financially for you to feel satisfied with your progress?" Now, I blew through that.

But if you slow down and ask that question, if you spend an hour talking about the answer to that question and you as a planner, just write down those questions and then you leave, as far as I'm concerned, that's a successful appointment. Because you know what? I can email over a form and, "Listen, write down how much money you have.

Write down this. Send me your tax returns. Send me your investment statements." I can do all that via email. But I can't, if I can get to shut the world out and just dream for a moment and then figure out where you actually want to go, we can make a plan.

And I just see this as one of the biggest mistakes I see advisors making is they blow through that and say, "Well, I just got to get to the money." No. The money is easy if you know the goals. But if you don't know the goals and you can't connect the plan, then the money will always frustrate you.

And no matter how, what, you know, no matter you know every security in the portfolio, you're doomed if you don't know what the goal is. Because the answer, if you know the goal is, "I want to take this trip around the world," you might need to just sell the portfolio today, put it all in cash, and plan for the trip around the world.

So I think you could almost have a degree in client communication. Absolutely. Because that, and I'll lump my program in there as well. We always, again, start the beginning of the year looking at where we have strengths, where we have opportunities. And we don't like to use the word weaknesses.

Of course not. Opportunities for us are in that communication area. I mean, I can only do so much as a faculty member, right? There's something about real experience too. Absolutely. Until you sit down with somebody, I mean, this is not, I don't usually walk up to people that I meet at a conference like we met and say, "Hey, Nathan, tell me about your goals." Like that's an unusual question.

And so it's one of those things I think that has to be learned in practice. It does. And that's why we push internships. I would encourage people in any arena or avenue that they enter, no matter what you're studying, spend some time. We've lost the concept of being an apprentice.

This seems like some old world idea of being out there and carving stones together or something. The idea of apprenticing under somebody, because we're always in such a hurry today. It's how do I get to where I want to be as fast and as efficient as possible? Sometimes getting to where you want to be requires you to slow down a little bit so you don't crash off the end of the road.

And I found that whenever I, you can start out maybe with just this concept of a mentor. Just having somebody you can bounce questions off of. I force my students into that. And I say, "You got to do that." Taking that a step further towards maybe a internship, that's just critical elements because you learn the pieces, the nuances that I can't teach in the classroom.

My dad, I brought him in a couple of times in some of his little sayings, but one of them is that knowledge comes from books, but true wisdom comes from experiences understood. And if you want to be wise in this profession, you have to have experiences that you draw on.

So you either create those yourself or you go out and you find somebody that's experienced them, and they can share that cognitive capital with you. And so moving from an internship, even into a long-term, maybe an apprenticeship relationship where a student or somebody entering this profession works together with somebody and is willing to forego this monstrous salary and chasing after the big bucks.

So they can truly learn some of the small pieces of how this whole puzzle fits together. Even for me, I'm learning all the time and I have my academic mentors and I apprentice under them. And then I have my financial planning mentors, the Harold Evenskis and the Dina Katz.

So many names could come into play that they've been around and they've seen it and they've seen multiple market movements and they know people, they know the human element. Those nuances are incredible. And we need those things brought together because I think of people like Dr. Wade Fowl. Here's Dr.

Wade Fowl up at the American College spending all his time researching. If he has to go out and meet with clients, I don't see any possible way that you can do great research and go meet with clients. But he completely misses, by being academic, he completely misses that side.

You bring me any 60 or 70-year-old financial advisor who's been an advisor. I don't care the firm. I don't care the practice model. I don't care the fee structure. Give me that person and I'm going to make a pretty solid bet that they have built a stable of clients that love them.

But they may not be technically proficient. And their clients, you know what? Their clients don't care that much that, "Oh, I could have returned this a little bit more." What they know is they have a plan that is meeting their goals. And I don't care whether they're a State Farm Financial Services rep or a Morgan Stanley rep or a Joshua Sheets independent financial advisor.

You bring that person and bring that human experience. And both of those together for a student, man, what an amazing thing to learn from someone that says, "Sometimes you need to put the charts and graphs away and cry with your client. And sometimes you need to dream and just say, 'This is what you need to do and ignore the whole presentation.'" And then you bring sometimes the academic side because you, me as a practitioner, I've got to make sure that I know what's going on.

I need to know the cutting edge science because that's my professional responsibility to my clients. But I don't have to tell them at all, all the time. I just need to make sure I know it. And we've got to bring those things together and gain on that human experience from someone who doesn't have the academic background and the academic.

Well, that's the marriage that I think academia needs to grow towards. Everybody's always talked about the ivory tower and the arrows that academics shoot upon everyone else as they rain down terror on the masses of students. I think we've got to open the front door and especially in a field like financial planning.

If we want to grow as a program, we have to stay innovative. That's part of the reason we come to conferences like the T3 conference with students. Students here are competing where they're doing a case challenge. They're competing where they are doing a quiz bowl. So they're learning some aspects, but they're also learning from the profession.

Simultaneously, I as a professor am learning the latest technological trends. How do I introduce a specific software into my classroom? So the students come out ready to hit the ground running. So secondly, I think it's even in the pedagogy, the teaching aspect, that we cannot be this isolated island out there of teachers.

The reality is like you said it, I don't practice full-time anymore. So I have some connection, but not the direct connection that some individuals that are out there doing it do. So introducing more of them into our programs from a research standpoint, I can come up with research ideas all day.

That doesn't mean that they're practically applicable. So marriaging my research with what's going on in the industry to where we can even get to the point where we're neck and neck and we're leading out with some very practical research that's usable, that's usable in our practices. These are things that we have to open our doors up to.

We have to be willing to change or these other methods are going to take over. We talked a little bit earlier about the concept of what does the university of the future look like. Right. I've been out of practice for seven months now. I've lost, I would say 10% of my sharpness in just in seven months and just my ability to connect because I'm out of practice.

You're at Texas A&M, right? Do you have both an undergraduate and a master's degree program? We don't. At the moment, all we have is an undergraduate and we have what's called an extended learning. So when we sat down and decided what's our core values, what do we want to do?

We wanted to change our campus and we wanted to change or provide an opportunity for career changers. So people who are out there in the field that are, either they just want the designation, they want to stay where they are, they want to get the CFP designation or they want to make a move or they just want to learn about these products or, I said the dirty word, these products.

They want to learn about this profession. That's what we want to train. So what does an undergraduate financial planning degree look like? What does the course work? How is it structured over the course of the years of study? What does it look like? They come into their financial planning classes their junior, senior year.

They're going to build out their other classes just like they would, core knowledge, English, world history. In Texas, we have about 50 Texas history courses that they have to take learning about how we were a country. The great republic of Texas. Then their junior year, they come in and we start to provide some of the financial planning curriculum.

We're lucky that we already have great professors in place that are teaching sort of ancillary classes like sales. We have a sales course where they actually sell and they learn what that looks like, what that interaction looks like. I always tell my students, everyone in here will sell and they get real nervous.

I'm like, if you've ever had a boyfriend or girlfriend, you have sold and some of you really had to sell hard. I'm glad you said that. The biggest thing I see and it bugs me to no end. I mean that in a nice way because I know listeners have emailed me and said, I don't want to sell.

Are you kidding me? You're always selling. Everyone is always selling. If you're not selling, you are broke and bankrupt. We are all selling. The question is, for whom are we selling? If I'm the CEO of any company, I am constantly, my fiduciary duty is to be selling. I expect any person that I hire to be selling for my company.

And for my business, we are all selling all the time. And that is good. Sales is good because it's the essence of the economic engine that provides the standard of living that we all just love so much is sales. And I love to be sold to professionally because a professional sales person is going to understand what I want.

And then if their product or service or whatever is a fit, they're going to sell me like crazy. And sometimes they're going to press me right over that edge where I'm not so sure, do I really want this fancy thing or not? And sometimes I'm glad. I'm so glad that I'm sold and that they helped me.

But that doesn't mean that we've got to be unprofessional where you're connecting people that are a bad fit with a product or service. That's what people hate. But any good, successful, professional sales person, I've never heard one say, well, this is what I do. I always just push people into things that are not right for them.

Now, there is a slippery slope where it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing something right. So take whatever. And sometimes you have to just some people in some professions, I think, justify to themselves, well, what I'm doing is ultimately in the long run, good of this person. And you can kind of create this obstruction for yourself.

But professional sales is a critical element. It's awesome. It is. Oh, no, it's great. And it's usable. It's knowledge that a student can transfer. You get your first job, you got to sell yourself. So in the interview, we teach sales. We have an entrepreneurship class where they actually build a business for my students.

The last two built an RIA firm. So they get to go through those processes and they have that apprentice underneath somebody. It's a very short term project. It's a semester long project. Did they build a firm for themselves? They build a firm for themselves. So they build their own firm.

They actually have to get fake funding, everything, all that you would do to lay out to build a firm up, have a business plan, everything is they're going to go sell to a bank to where in theory, if they really wanted to coming out, they could use that packet to begin to start a business.

And then we go into a lot of the just core financial planning all the way from the introductory fundamentals course to the very end, we do capstone. And what I love about the capstone course is we're introducing them to clients. Last semester, it was actually last summer when I taught capstone, they had real clients.

Now these clients understood the game. They understood the relationship, but they had real clients that they got to interact with. And it was a ton of teachable moments. It was a man and woman and the man tended to have more of a dominant personality, but the woman actually controlled a lot of the finances in their relationship.

Welcome to normal families. So the students actually interacted with the clients online. And so as they're presenting the final plan to the clients, it was so intriguing to watch how even some of my female students spent all their time talking to the male and ignoring the female in the conversation.

And it was a teachable moment where I'd say, let me stop you right here. And I want to explain what's going on because I'm in the room with the two clients. And I'm saying, let me explain the body language that you're not seeing. But many of you need to know this because when you go out and work for a firm, there'll be a percentage of clients that you interact with on the phone or via the internet.

And you need to understand those relationships and what's going on. I said, you have not spent any time talking to the female who actually, because I know them, manages the money in this relationship. You just lost this client. Absolutely. So it was great. Teachable moments, soft place for them to interact for real with real people and get to feel that.

So it was great. That was one. You learned that lesson as a new financial advisor very quickly because I always had a rule. It was okay on an initial appointment to meet with one of the spouses. But if you're married or there's any kind of significant relationship to where you manage money together, would never do a second appointment without both people present.

And you've got to spend a massive amount of time at the beginning of that next appointment, making sure that everything that the one spouse or the one person, one partner described to you is consistent with the other one. Because in my family, I may be the spokesperson. I'm usually the public one, but I don't spend a dime.

A dime is probably too expressive. I don't spend money without my wife's approval because I need that. I know. And I do that out of for my own personal safety and for the safety of our financial plan, because I'm the impulsive one. I'm the one that's, I'm the easy sell.

I'm the impulsive one. She's the skeptical one. So she's my safety net to guard me from myself. And so one of the rules I have is I need her input on every decision. See, I think money is spent well in community. I think we were built to be communal beings.

Whenever you have a backup for your craziness, man, it just is such a wonderful thing. I love, and I think that's in some ways what a financial planner provides too, is just that springboard to say, "We were thinking about buying a brand new Escalade, but we make $5,000 a year.

Does this make sense?" The car dealer told us it made sense. If you're living in Miami, it makes sense. That's what they do in Miami. I want to come back. And I asked you this question earlier, but I wasn't quite satisfied with your answer. So your students, have you been long enough to now where you've graduated students from your program?

What types of jobs and positions have your students who've graduated with a degree in financial planning taken out of college so far? Sure. So I guess like any field, not every student is going to go directly into the field that they graduate from. I think that would be an irrational expectation for us to think that every student exited a degree and went specifically into that field.

Our students are entering a myriad of firms. Some will go into more of the corp side into banking. So I have a number of students who have graduated that go into banking. The biggest bulk though, go directly into financial planning. My push at the moment is RIA firms. I do have some of them go to the larger TDs, Fidelities, because they can hire five students at a time.

But the bulk of my students, the sales pitch that I have is this is your succession plan. And so I'll find RIAs at conferences all across the country, and I'll get to talking to them. And I realized they're 55 and they don't really have a plan out, but they know they don't want to be in business forever, but they can't afford to hire somebody.

And my response is you can't afford not to hire somebody. And so I've built up a relationships with people in Texas and other states across the country where I say, let me tell you what your succession plan should look like. Millennials, what they're looking for, they seem to come across as very aggressive, but what they want in the end is a clear pathway to ownership.

If you can show them this is where you can be and here's how you can get there, they're satisfied with that. They're not just vying for your job today. They just want to know how they can get there. And so what I tell them is here's an opportunity for you to build out a succession plan where somebody can come to work for you and in that process, buy out your firm.

So we've got a number that are going into RIA firms where there's one person. Now they're the second add-on. We've got some that are going to mid-level firms where there's 15. I'd say the overwhelming majority though are hitting RIA firms or the TDs and Fidelities out there. We send a couple out to wire houses, and I'm not one of those that stop students from going anywhere.

I don't feel like any company is, well, there are some evil companies. I don't feel like any company is necessarily a bad place. What I do is inform students and let them make their own choices of, hey, if this is what you want, I want you to understand what you're getting into by going to work at X company.

And so just providing them, my job is not for them to have my opinion. It's for them to have information to inform themselves to make the right decision for them. And so I provide them with the different financial planning models and what I'm finding at the moment, just given what opportunities are available for students, they're trending towards mid-level RIA firms across our state and other states.

Are you hearing frustration from some of your graduates or from their peers working in mid-level firms as a junior planner, where perhaps the founder or founders kind of cut their teeth in the stock brokerage world that you did? Are you getting that frustration? Yeah, we get some of that, of course, everyone does, because the emphasis is so high on you come in here and you've got to, planners, what some planners unfortunately want is for you to be cashflow positive instantly.

You come in this door and you generate the money that equals to the salary that I just paid you, or you aren't worth my investment. And I think that's a backwards philosophy. I think that if you want to hire young, innovative talent, you've got to be, the key word is investment.

You've got to be able to invest in them and it's a long-term process. And it's scary. If you're a small RIA, you can't afford to make the wrong hire. And so that's why they're looking for an instant return of capital. And those are the students that come back to me.

They say, I just started for XYZ company and they wanted me to sell a large amount of product or plan or whatever it might be quickly. And I just didn't have the natural market for that. I just don't know enough people and they didn't provide me with a structure to get introductions into that world.

So those are the people that would come back to me. Yeah. It's a bit of a nervous tension in this business right now, because I personally, and again, I'm not involved in every company, but I see this transition happening where in the past, simply there were no qualified financial planning graduates.

People who had studied for at least, if let's say that the last two years of an undergraduate degree are specifically focused on financial planning. They're coming out quickly sitting for their CFP exam or other industry credentials. And that person is going to have a different expectation than I did when I started.

And I'd never taken a financial planning class. I was just a personal finance junkie and I didn't have any industry credentials. And so I understood that I got to go and learn and I had to learn on the job, but I would have a different expectation if I had spent a lot of time focusing on it.

And when I think about, even as I'm here at the conference, I'm staying with Alan Moore and another young man, both Alan Moore and this other young man, both of them have an undergraduate degree and a master's degree in either tax or financial planning. And so they wind up at this firm as a junior planner and it's like, there's no growth potential here.

And I've spent enough time studying. You can't expect me to either just, A, sit in the back office and do plans or B, just get out and cut your teeth like you did 40 years ago. And it's so interesting. I read a lot of the research about millennials and there is a bit of a generational frustration because my experience, I don't think I don't have a sense of entitlement and I don't know many of my peers that have this sense of entitlement.

Maybe we do, maybe I'm blinded to it. I don't know. And probably it's true. That's the sign of the disease. You don't realize you have it. It's probably true a little bit, but it's like, I don't mind hard work, but I want hard work with a purpose. And I think that it seems as though the generation of people graduating from college these days has a much greater understanding of that life balance idea.

This idea that I don't just want to work and make money. I want my life to be integrated and I want to do work that matters. You see this constantly, you see companies, this introduction of the B Corporation, this development of social good and financial good, of everything integrated.

It's the same thing with careers. We've been preached to do what you're passionate about, do what matters. They want to do what matters and do well by doing good. So there's a bit of nervousness in the industry. And it's interesting to me to watch and see people that can take it on.

Because I think, yeah, if I were a mid-level firm, if you could hire somebody who's qualified from the technical side and maybe they don't have the life experience, but man, if you could start with the technical side and add life experience on, what an amazing growth that is. This is new.

We don't have a lot of those students out. Even if you look at the number of programs there are across the United States and you try to fill the gap. So the 27% growth rate in financial services predicted for the next 10 years, that's a lot of jobs. A lot, a lot of jobs.

We can't produce students fast enough for the fill of that gap to be students. It's not possible. Is that number based upon the- Bureau of Labor Statistics. But is that based upon the advisors that are retiring or is that based upon the growth of demand and then you add advisors retiring onto that?

Both. It's the organic growth and it's also the retirement wave. If you look at CFPs, it's 5% to 6% are below the age of 30 and about 50% are above the age of 50. That's the breakdown. And so we've had this industry where it tended to be older individuals because they were the ones with the natural market.

They knew people that had money and that was the whole industry. You transitioned in here later in life. It's changing now where, I mean, I've heard it in so many conference presentations, even this week on the amount of money that's being transferred into a younger age brackets. So that homogeneity and relatability of young to young makes a ton of sense.

So entering those people into your practice, into your business makes a lot of sense. Things are evolving and they're changing quickly. The question is, how do you attract that solid talent? Especially if you are a small RIA firm that has a preconceived condition on how do we do business.

You want to impart your identity onto that new hire, but you also want to give them some freedom. Their growth is your growth. So you want to come up with incentive mechanisms and ways in which you can encourage them to grow. Give them your wisdom and knowledge that you've captured, but also give them a little bit of rope.

Let them go out. I'm not saying have them pick up the... You can't do the phone book cold calling anymore. Is there anybody that's still doing that? I hope not. I hope not too, but I got a feeling somebody's still trying it. But it seems like that business model is dead.

Maybe not. Maybe it's been dead for a few years and now it's time to give it a comeback and somebody's doing it. Last question that I have and then I'll give you a chance. I want to just talk about... Give you some publicity here for your program because I'd love to see more people going into the formal programs.

But last question. If somebody's interested in switching careers, I've received a number of emails from people who are a lot of them are accountants, working in auditors at big four. That seemed to be the one recently. I had several emails from auditors at big four accounting firms just saying, "I want to make a change." Someone's a career changer or they're just interested in financial planning.

What do you see as a transition scheme? Do you see value in going back to the college level, pursuing a master's degree? Do you think from your perspective, just get the CFP and sit for that and get started? What do you think? There's several different ways to enter this.

I'm probably a little bit biased towards getting the CFP and going and working underneath somebody. I think that's where your value play is. A master's... Boy, the university would kill me if I said this. But a master's degree today, there's so many of them out there. It becomes a net present value decision.

Is this investment in human capital the right one for me just to make this transition in my career? If I come from an outside field, let's say my undergrad's in English, and I think financial planning might be the thing for me, I might suggest going and getting a master's in financial planning.

But if you're an accountant or even a lawyer or... I actually had a neurosurgeon in classes one time. Talk about making you nervous. Interesting. So if you're in a field that's related, my personal opinion is that you go to a program. We have one, for example, an extended learner program where you can take the courses.

Because the courses that you need for the CFP, if that's all you get, those are pretty good. They are. They're intense. Those are pretty good. And you're drinking through a fire hydrant. You're soaking up a ton of information. But it gives you that leveling I think you need to enter this practice.

And then you go out there and do it. So that's my personal opinion. If you're in a related field, you go and you get the designation. And the pathway to that is there are a lot of us out there that are providing online education. A&M has online CFP classes.

We have an online. Yeah. So we have an online extended learner program where students can come in from, you name it, wherever they are. And it is under a traditional academic model. So it's not asynchronous. It is synchronous. We run through semesters. And what we've found, it provides flexibility, but it also provides coaching.

It's that I have a gym membership, but I have a personal trainer as well. So the professor comes in, for me, for example, I'll teach investments. It's run over a traditional semester, but you have things to complete each week. You have a live lecture or an online recorded lecture from a professor.

We try to bring in now and again guests who would come in. Hey, here's an invitation for you. Thank you. Guests who would come in and talk about ancillary topics. We could even do that in an online setting. I mean, you could be wherever you want to be. And we also try to introduce still with our extended learners access to software, access to a lot of the financial planning things that they're going to be doing in business and practice.

So that's what makes our program a little bit unique. But there are a lot of tons of great programs that are out there. I know you've come through the American College model. American College, right. Super, super intelligent professors that can offer, again, the courses that you need to migrate through to set for the CFP exam.

Now you still have to have the experience to hold that designation. Right. I've thought, I mean, I think it's great to have variety. I liked self-study. I didn't do any of the, I did it all self-study. And I like that because I can't stand, like, if it's information, I just want to learn it.

Like I don't go into classes and things like that. It wasn't a good fit for what I wanted. I'd rather just read the book. But I know that that's exactly the opposite of some other people. And it's like, I don't either don't have or don't want to discipline myself in that sense to get up every day and spend an hour studying this textbook.

And so rather I need to go to class, I'd be there, I'd pay attention. I'm a verbal learner or auditory learner, and that helps. So I think there's a great need for. Absolutely. There's several models that are out there and there are some great ones. You just got to figure out, like you said, what fits your learning style well.

Do you need a trainer? Do you need some, and then obviously cost matters too. You look at the cost of the product. That's financial planning 101. If you could be in Texas, then everything's better in Texas. That's right. We're bigger, we're better. Well, the great thing is in our online program, you can be wherever you want.

So we have students in California, New York, even I think we have somebody from Florida. We allowed them in the program. Wow. That's shocking. Dr. Harness, thank you so much for coming on. This has been fun. What's interesting to me is in the science of financial planning, there is this nervous and uncomfortable growth and it takes time.

The reality is the discipline of financial planning is much less mature than many other disciplines and many other types of, many other industries, I guess is the saying. It's a little bit less developed. So it's working hard to be developed. It's a big focus and a big press to provide more academic options.

And the industry is changing. It really is. I'm telling you, when you have a financial planning student who comes out with years of study and experience, it's a big influence on the industry. And as far as where those students are finding opportunities and being absorbed, well, it's a bit uncomfortable right now.

There's a lot of a change. And so it's very interesting to me to be involved in an industry that's in such flux. And I think there's a world of opportunities, though. The demand for financial planning services is massive. It's one of those job professions where there's a massive growth potential.

But yet the barrier to entry is not low. So hopefully this can help you with some ideas and encouragement and inspiration and some background that will be helpful to you. So thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really appreciate it. If you've enjoyed this kind of content, this is a good example of the type of interesting interviews that I can find when I go to conferences.

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