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With no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee, you can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop. Visit Swithop.com today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's the man, the myth, the legend who lives in his mother's basement, Joe Saul Seehai. I don't know what to say about the Friday intro.

It just came to me all of a sudden. It's Friday, everybody. I don't know what's the deal with the maniacal laugh at the moment. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today I have an interview with my friend Joe Saul Seehai from Stacking Benjamins. He calls his show the background noise of financial podcasting.

I don't know if that's quite accurate or not, but he certainly tries to not say anything of value. Today we'll see if he breaks his rule and actually shares with you something that's worth hearing. For those of you who don't know Joe or don't know the Stacking Benjamins show, that's really not an insult.

You'll hear in this interview today, you'll actually hear Joe refer to his show as the background noise of financial podcasting. They don't actually want you to learn something. He jokes with me. He says, "Radical Personal Finance and Stacking Benjamins were like polar opposites, but somehow he has a much bigger audience than I do." So I don't know what I'm doing wrong in this whole deal, but it seems to be working for him.

Welcome to the show, everybody. Today is Friday. This interview is an interview I recorded a couple of weeks ago at Podcast Movement 2015, as I mentioned on yesterday's show. This is going to be interview central around here. So if you don't like interviews, check back around the 1st of October and we should be back to some of the more normal schedule if I can get my things in line and be prepared for that.

So I hope to be back with a normal schedule of me doing a lot of shows and actually teaching something. But for now, these are a bunch of interviews. So today I think you're going to enjoy this interview with Joe Saul Sehai. He is a former financial advisor with Ameriprise Financial, had a career for almost a decade and a half.

I can't remember if it was 13 or 15 years and then retired from that career and became a financial commentator. And I love to bring you this show because one of my purposes and missions with Radical Personal Finance is to pull back some of the curtains from the financial advice world.

And unfortunately, practicing financial advisors can't speak much about the actual world of financial advice because they're stuck behind large giant corporations with massive teams of attorneys and everything that they have to say is going to be sanitized and scripted and basically boring and corporate. But once guys like Joe and me get out from behind the curtain, well, we're a fair game.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy this interview with Joe Saul Sehai from Stacking Benjamins. Joe, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. I appreciate you being with me. Dude, I can't believe I'm here. Am I really on Radical Personal Finance? You are really on Radical Personal Finance. Of course, I haven't committed to you that I'm going to play the episode.

So maybe this whole thing, you better do a good job or maybe this whole thing goes into the can. Oh, the pressure, the pressure. Kick it off. Anybody who listens to your show obviously might have some idea about you, but kick it off with talking a little bit about your history as it relates to financial advice and then how ultimately that led into your hosting a financial podcast.

I was a financial advisor for 16 years. By the way, thanks for having me on. You're still on trial. You better do a good job. And what's funny is, and I know we might talk about this later, I was not a guy who knew anything about personal finance, and yet I got hired into that industry.

Shocking. Yeah, right. Not only did I get hired, within two years of being in the industry, I was talking to big rooms of people because I had been a public speaker. And what was funny was, when I got hired to do that job, I was told, "We'll teach you everything you need to say.

We just need somebody who's not afraid to talk to big groups." And if you think about how scared you should be by that statement, it's awful. What was your public speaking experience? I had been a disc jockey in high school and in college. So my brother and I, when I was in high school, we decided to do weddings.

And so we did wedding receptions and fraternity parties. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for the bride and groom! You know what I told them? I told them when they asked me, this company asked me if I would be a guy that would give speeches, I said, "As long as I don't have to lead the chicken dance, I'm happy." So I actually did one of my random jobs.

I, for a long time, assisted a wedding DJ. And I was his assistant to help set up the gear and take down the gear, and I ran the light board. And a couple times I did the mic. I was scared stiff to do the mic. But he was very good at the cheesy...

He wasn't cheesy. He was actually a radio DJ. But he was very good at it. But I was so scared of doing the mic. So one time I had to do the... What's the dance? The garter thing. And I couldn't remember how to do it. Like, you know, the whole thing that the DJ will do of egging the crowd on and setting everything up and getting it going and all of the lewd stuff about getting a little higher.

And I screwed the whole thing up royally, and I never did the garter again. Did you play that Joe Cocker song? We'd always play the "You Can Take Your Hat Off" or whatever, the "Get Naked" kind of song. Or did you do the garter... It was the brothel music.

The one that's like the standard... Exactly. So absurd. And what's just so horrible, though, is after you go to wedding after wedding after wedding, the theme of US-American weddings is so predictable. It's the same script every single time. And it was a fun job for a while. So I know what you're talking about.

Yeah. So I did that. But I had an engineer personality. I didn't know. I grew up in a really little town. I didn't know what an engineer was. I thought it was the guy that drove the train. And my son is actually in engineering at the University of Texas right now.

And so I wanted to know everything. I loved financial advisors. I loved the people on TV that had all the tips of little things that we didn't know about controlling your utility bill or coupon cutting or all the little things. And so I learned on my own. I learned a ton on my own, and I got as much education as I could.

And before I knew it, 16 years ago, I was managing $65 million. That's great. I had a nice size, not huge, but not small. I had a decent practice. I was one of 12 people in America who were speaking on behalf of the firm I was with then, which was Ameriprise Financial.

And when I say speaking on behalf of the firm, I wasn't an Ameriprise employee. I was one of 12 people who had gone through media training, and I had the stamp that I could speak first and go through compliance later. Ah, the elusive stamp. You were the trustworthy one.

I was. I was the guy that would say nothing substantial. I remember the first time I applied to do something, and I was, "Okay, I got to do this." And I found out the rules, and the rules in the financial business are you have to create the script. Then you have to submit the script for approval.

Then once the attorneys go through the script and they edit the script, then they send you back the script. Then you can go and deliver the script, make sure that there's a recording of the script. Then you go ahead and submit the recording back to the home office for management, because in the financial business, everything has to be retained.

So it has to be retained. It is just nuts. Do you know what makes me angry about that? What? Is that there are really good people. There are fantastic people that I work with who just, that system is so nuts. I hate it. They won't go on Twitter. They won't go on Facebook.

There are responsible, great people with money that will say nothing, and you have, we'll call them idiots, who know absolutely nothing about money, who speak freely all the time, and you get these wingnut philosophies out there. And it's really sad, because I feel like even though we're trying to protect people, and I get it, it holds back some of the best minds in money management.

Why do you think we have radical personal finance? That's exactly it. That ticked me off for a long time, and I said, "There's no way I'm going through that with the script process." And that's the problem, though. Anything edgy. So what happens in the financial services business is because everything has to get run through a team of attorneys, and their number one priority and duty is to protect the company, and that's probably as it should be.

If I am the CEO of XYZ Large Company, my fiduciary responsibility is to protect the interests of my stockholders. I totally get it. Which is to protect my company. And that's as it should be. But their number one priority is to protect the company. And so what you wind up with is you wind up with whitewashed, boring, blasé financial crap that's basically five tips, and then six tips, and three tips, and it's just recycled through again and again and again.

And it sucks. And so then what happens is you have people that have a little bit of an edgy message, something interesting, and they amass this whole following because they're actually interesting to listen to. But realistically, although they're interesting to listen to, they're not that smart. And they kind of have a lot of holes in their thinking.

Right. But none of the people who actually know something can go out and do something about it. And thus, welcome to the world of financial media. So frustrating. Yeah. So frustrating. So then you retired, $65 million, you sold your practice. Well, here's what happened. What happened was I had a mentor, a guy that was actually five years younger than me, who was just a fantastic guy, and one day he wrote a letter to all of us.

He was in management. He was one of these great management guys. But he wrote a letter saying, "I'm leaving the company, and I'm not leaving like most people do to go someplace else. I'm leaving the company because I work 14 hours a day, and I don't have time to think about what I really want to do.

And so I'm not leaving to go to a different firm. I'm leaving because I've got to figure out what I want to do with my life." And so I really liked being a financial advisor. I didn't love being a financial advisor. And so I thought about that. And it's funny because there were three or four of us that after he left.

And by the way, it's funny because the phrase he used, he said, "I think I have other mountains to climb." Right. And he climbed Mount Everest twice after he left the company. Wow. It was really neat. And I thought, "I'm 40 years old. I have other mountains I want to climb." And so my goal at the time was to become a teacher and a high school track coach.

So I did the stuff that would pay first, being a financial advisor, and then sell my business and use that to do the thing that unfortunately doesn't pay. We could talk about teaching in America. And so I went back to school and started taking classes. And while I was in shorts and a T-shirt, I had friends that said, "Hey, you were on TV.

I'm on TV. Can you write my scripts?" And they'd pay me a little bit of money to write their script. And then I had other friends that were advisors that said, "You know, these newsletters, you know how to get them through compliance. Could you write my newsletter? Make it interesting, but make it go through compliance." So I started doing that.

Within eight months, I was making as much as a first-year teacher, which is horrible, by the way. Right. First-year teachers should be paid far more than what I was doing. And I was really enjoying myself. My kids were in high school. So I started getting involved on the media end, and Stacking Benjamins was born from that.

Don't forget, you moved into your mom's basement to be able to play for it all. That is right. Mom, thank you very much. If anybody doesn't know, the shtick on the show with Joe on Stacking Benjamins is that they do the show from their mom's basement. It's not true, but it's a funny shtick.

What are you talking about? Because we're too cheap to do it anywhere else. It's remarkable because that was my plan as far as the— Was to go into your mom's basement? That too. I live in Florida. We don't have basements. We have spare bedrooms. My plan was go and become a financial planner, get rich, and become financially independent.

And then I wanted to go and teach. And I always thought as a backup plan that I would really enjoy teaching, probably at the university level, but maybe at the high school level. And so that was one of the things I've just always been attracted to. But I thought, "That's stupid.

I'm not going to go and spend all my years working for nothing trying to make it go. I'll go make money first and then go teach." And who knows? Maybe at this point I get to teach every day, which is what I love. That's what I like. And my clients that were teachers, what they kept telling me as I was telling them that I was getting out of the business, I was going to become a teacher, they said, "You'll hate teaching." And not that I hate kids or I hate educating people.

It's that I was going to be teaching to a test. I wasn't going to be teaching people what they really needed to know. I was going to make sure you could pass this test. And I did. And I had professors that year that I was in the teaching system that were telling me that, "You know what?

I don't think you're going to like this the way you thought you would." So you sold your practice, right? I did. You sold your book. How did you come to terms with the fact that you were walking away, even though you were able to sell your book? How did you come to terms with the fact that you were walking away from millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars?

Because if you did it at what age did you sell? Yeah, 40. 40 to 70? Yeah. 30 years of fees on a $65 million book that could have grown multiple folds after that? How did you come to terms with that decision? It was Chris's message of, "I have other mountains to climb." And I knew that that was a full-time job.

It was more than a full-time job, you know. I was so worried about my clients' money all the time. We would go on vacation, and every day I had an hour to an hour and a half where my family would do stuff and I would still work. Right. Because I was so worried about their money.

And when the market went down in 2000 and then again in 2007, huge ulcers. I mean, I would worry nonstop about what was going on. And I just had other mountains. I had other stuff I wanted to do, and I could wait until I was 70 to do that, or I could stop right now and I could figure it out from there.

And unless Shirley MacLaine's right, and we were re-carnated, right, and I could do this again, I got one shot. Right. So at 40, while I have energy, let's go try out something different. Do you consider yourself financially independent? I do not. I am close, but we're not there, no.

And I definitely do stacking Benjamins for money. And I think, and even if I were financially independent, I would do stacking Benjamins for money. Just because of the fact that I like the scorecard. Right. I like the challenge of, "Let's see what this is really worth in the public." Right.

And I think that most of the things, I get very concerned when people do things not for money. There are things I do not for money, and there are plenty of worthwhile, worthy things that are not going to have money associated with them. But I get very concerned when people make an arbitrary distinction between worth doing and that's not for money.

The fact that somehow, because I'm not doing it for money, makes it worthwhile. Right. And that is a good indicator of value. It's not the only indicator. Right. And there are some types of value that will never be reimbursed by money. But it's a good indicator of the marketplace.

And that's one of the things that frustrates me, that people don't go in the marketplace and compete. Because the marketplace will reward those who are bringing value. That's what I'm interested in. If I can put on a good show, like Radical Personal Finance. Right. If I can put on a good show, more people will listen.

If I bring the value, then there will be more value to me. I'm a seaguller. Right. If I give a lot of people what they want, I will get what I want. Absolutely. And by the way, when I say I'm not financially independent, I want to tell you, I don't think I'm financially independent because I was a financial advisor, because I know how it works.

There are plenty of people. We're at Podcast Movement Conference. There are people who are entrepreneurs walking around here that tell you they're financially independent. They have a lot less money than I have. And they say they're financially independent. And I know all the pitfalls and I worry all the time.

Right. But I have my net worth and I go, maybe. Right. Yeah. Okay. Maybe. And we'll see how the coming decades work. Yes. That's one of the scary things is – so one of the things that I want to focus on with this conversation is talking about the perspective of financial advisors, because the conversation we're having here, two former professional licensed financial advisors working in the trenches being able to talk without the shadow of compliance.

Threat. Is unusual. And it's interesting because I used to have a ton of confidence in the very simple formulas. I used to have just, "Oh, this is the way it is. It's very simple. It's going to work. If I just do this, then it's great. Stock market is always going to blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's all going to work." The more you learn, the less confidence sometimes you have. Sometimes you have more, but it's much more nuanced confidence because you know all of the holes in your argument. Do you have that same experience? Well, yeah. The thing about our show is that – I love your show because you teach your audience a lot of stuff.

The joke on Stacking Benjamins is if we teach you anything ever, it's a huge mistake. Our goal is surround sound, right? And we're joking about that. We teach sometimes, but that's not – our goal is to be entertaining. But still, we did a show recently that were the five dumbest rules of thumb ever.

Really? What were they? Or what were a couple of them? One is this idea that saving 10% of your income is the right number. Right. Where the hell did that number come from? It's stupid. 10% says nothing. No, no matter – if you're 62 years old and you just paid off your credit card debt last year, you just need to save 15% for retirement and everything's going to be fine.

Right. Another one, invest your age in bonds. Oh, I hate that one. What is that all about? I hate that one. That's my least favorite. I don't understand that. Right. Anyway, we do those. But yeah, rules of thumb, you're right. They're far more nuanced. An OG on our show said it right, which is that they're a great place to start, but that's like diving into the pool.

You got to go deeper than that. I do think rules of thumb are a great place to start. And they have huge value in that perspective. My favorite one is – the favorite example is if you give somebody something like a percentage of their income that they should own in cars.

That's my favorite one. 10% of your annual income in cars is my number I stole from Sam at Financial Samurai. And I think that's great because it changes your perception. If you're starting with 10% of your savings, it might keep you from spending 100%. But if you flip it, and what I love about the early retirement numbers, if you start with 50% – and that's what I'm going to teach my kids – you may spend 50% of your dollars, but 10% goes into personal development, 10% gets given away right off the top, and then 30% gets invested, 15% into working capital that you're going to actively manage and invest in a business, and 15% into other long-term passive investments just in case you screw up your business that you still have something to start over with.

But it's like, think about the difference if we change these rules of thumb. The ones that tick me off are the budget numbers. You should spend 25% of your income on – or 30% of your income on housing. You should spend 15% on your car. And as you run the numbers, and you're like, "But wait a second.

Who invented these numbers? I have a sneaking suspicion that there's a mortgage company and a car financing company somewhere behind that." Well, just the whole thing of renting is throwing money away. Right. Brought to you by the Mortgage Association. And the National Association of Realtors. Yes, absolutely. What's that all about?

That's crazy. So, as a financial media pundit, you've achieved the vaunted position of a pundit. Oh, no. Dave Ramsey and I, side by side. Exactly. That's where I'm going. Talk about your theory and philosophy about financial punditry. We've talked about this in depth as far as the different stages that people are at in their financial journey and who can be of service to them at various times.

I think we make a big mistake that we get attached to a guru and then we stick with that guru for our entire life. We think that if I'm a Dave Ramsey fan, that I need to be a Dave Ramsey fan forever. I'm a Suze Orman fan. Well then, everything Suze says is right and some things are – and that drives me crazy.

As I look at it, and I guess the best analogy from where I sit is the Apollo Moon program, where they had these multi-stage rockets, so they had different stages. Some people are on the launch pad of life, and I think there's nothing better for those people to hear than Suze Orman.

In one of the first chapters of her first book, she talks about having respect for a dollar, about putting your dollar bills all in order in your wallet, because that tactile thing of putting your money, smoothing it out, and putting it in your wallet and they're all the same is part of respect for a dollar.

I think that if you start there, that's a great place to start. Then Dave Ramsey, live a cash lifestyle. If you start from a cash lifestyle, that's fantastic. But there comes a point when you graduate and then you let that piece of the rocket go because you already used it, you already know that, and then you need a different rocket.

I'll give you an example. Then maybe the second stage is people that just want a nice view of the Earth. I have listeners to our show who write to me and they say, "You had this guy on and he was talking about going to Mars. I don't want to go to Mars.

I don't want to be ... I love my job, I love my family. I just want to know that I'm okay." For those people listening to a David Bach or a Rick Edelman, which is funny because those two guys work together now. Really? Yeah. I didn't know that. I used to work with Rick Edelman and now he's the VP of Edelman and Associates.

Interesting. How about that? Interesting. Yeah. Rick Edelman, The Truth About Money, I love that book. He's fantastic, yeah. Yeah, it's even-handed. It says commission-based advisors are bad this way, but they're also good this way. Fee-only advisor's good. He does that with everything. For somebody that wants a well-rounded approach, hire a CFP, somebody that knows the six areas of financial planning, and you'll get a great view of the world.

You'll be well off. You're never going to go to Mars that way though because you don't go to Mars without extreme risk. So then when you exit the ... my analogy's wearing thin. The stratosphere. Yeah, but you get rid of that rocket and now you're on your way to Mars.

Now you're going to listen to people like Robert Kiyosaki or you're going to listen to somebody like one of these property ... well, Robert Kiyosaki's one of those guys, the flip property places. Then you get into the Jim Cramer stuff. Cramer's fine, but he's going to Mars. So pick your guru carefully, I think.

I don't think there's any problem with gurus. I think that I would always get ... you get this when you were an advisor. Somebody walk into your office, they need to be listening to Ramsey and they're listening to Cramer. Or you get somebody who's still stuck on Ramsey and you're like, "Dude, graduate." Exactly.

So do you think gurus should change their message? Because here's the thing. It's kind of funny. I remember Dave Ramsey talking about the fact that his wife still uses cash when he goes for the groceries. When she goes to the groceries. I don't know. I assume he still does that years ago when I was a regular listener.

He would talk about that. My wife still uses cash when she goes to the grocery store. Okay. Maybe she does. I don't think he would lie about that. But if she does, the only reason she does is simply so that he can say that on the radio without lying.

Continuity of message. Exactly. So the question is, and again, all respect to Ramsey, should he adjust his message as his life stage adjusts? Or should he keep his message core because that's the audience that he's serving? I think that's the issue. The message I just gave your audience with the multi-stage rocket, it's too complex.

It's not a soundbite. I think he has to keep the message simple and he is a big enough audience base with that message that just pounding that message home is where... And you got to remember what Dave Ramsey's in it for. It worked for me. It pounded home for me.

When I was a skeptic and I was in college and I'm just getting beat with this message every day, "Get out of that. Get out of that. Get out of that." It made a huge difference in my life. And there are, I don't know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people for whom it's made a difference.

I don't remember how big his biggest footprint is, but let's call it... There are a lot of people for whom he's made a big difference. Monster. Right. Yeah. No, it's got to be the same message that girls gave to me all the time. You have to, at some point, say this to your guru.

You have to say, "No, baby. It's not you. It's me." Girls would tell me that constantly. And you've got to say, "Hey, Dave Ramsey, it's not you. Your message is fine. It's me. I got to move on. I got to do something different." The other thing, it's interesting. I haven't listened to any of his entrepreneur shows or his Entree Leadership brand, but I assume that's why he developed that brand is so that he could express that different message because I think he probably gets bored with it.

And so he's looking to express that higher level leadership message, that higher level business message. And that's probably where he's trying to do it. If you and I were sitting talking to him, that's probably what he would say. It's got to be. Yeah, Dave, call us and tell us what you're thinking.

Yeah, please, Dave. I'm going to get him on the show. Dave, he's an amazing businessman, and I'm just trying to copy him. That's all I'm doing. He's the role model. But you know what? If I had something to do over my career at 47 years old, the one thing I would have done when I was young, if people are young listening to this, I would say this.

I always, Josh, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel. I always thought, you know what? And there is value in looking at the spokes of the wheel and understanding how the wheel is built. Right. But it's better to take the wheel for granted a little bit and build a car around it.

I would have had better mentors, and I would have taken something like, you were talking about taking Dave Ramsey and doing more. I would have done that. I would have gotten way further than I got had I done that sooner. It's so valuable. And I want to talk to you a little bit about your experience with Ameriprise because Ameriprise is a massive company in the training of advisors.

But I always noticed this when I was a new rep with Northwestern Mutual. And one of the reasons that I chose Northwestern Mutual is because when I was researching the industry, they were regarded as having an excellent training program, and I wanted to learn how to sell well. And so I was looking for training.

I didn't know if it was going to be a long-term fit or not. I knew I was going to do it for three years, and I wanted the training. So when I came in and I studied the model, and I was told we were trained under the Al Granum system, who is a famous Northwestern life insurance agent for many years, and I was trained, "Do this process." And I just said, "Okay, do this process.

We're given the fact-finding form." And when I was in my first few days of training, there was a senior advisor that came in, and he said, "You all can be idiots, but if you'll just take this little paper document out in the field, and you'll ask everybody all the questions that are printed on there, and you fill them in, you'll open cases, and you'll create financial plans, and you'll be able to help people." And he says, "You can be an idiot.

And if you'll just do that, you'll be successful." So I believed him. I just went and did what I was told. And over time, I never understood, until I got my CFP, actually, I never understood what I had been doing for years that made a big difference for me.

When I got my CFP, I memorized the language, I memorized my approach language, I just memorized all the scripts. It wasn't until I got my CFP that I understood, "Oh, that's why that's in there. We're defining the engagement." Now I put CFP terms on it, we're defining the engagement, but I've been doing that all along because I just followed my training.

I watched other people that came in, and they just didn't accept the system. Like, "Oh, I know better than this. I'm going to make a better thing." It's like, you are stupid. If you wanted a different system, you should have gone and found a different company that had a different system.

Don't be in this company and think that you should create a different system. If you're with the company that knocks on doors, you go knock on doors. Don't join the company that knocks on doors and say, "I'm going to make cold calls." If you're with the company that does cold calls, don't go knock on doors.

You pick your mentors and then follow their system until you're successful. And then when you're successful, think about tweaking it. I agree. And let me tell you what happened to me. My first year, I made $85,000. Great year for a first year financial advisor, especially given what I told you at the open of the show where I didn't know anything.

I wasn't going to use the word anything. I knew less than anything. I just did what I was told. I made 85 grand. My second year, they took the training wheels off. And now I was on my own. And I decided I need to service my clients. I didn't need to do all these marketing processes anymore, right?

Indeed. I made like 20 grand. My second year was horrible because I took all these systems and I threw them away because I knew better. Yeah, so I totally agree. I should have worked at longer. It's endemic to financial advisors. "Oh, I was doing this and it worked and I stopped." Why did you stop?

Because it was working. I made 40 calls a day and I had all these clients. So then I got busy and I stopped making calls. But in fairness to brand new financial advisors, let me tell you what was going on in my head. I have all these people that trusted me in my first year and I wanted to spend more time with them to give them the value I told them they were going to get.

Now that's step one. The other thing going on in my subconscious that I know is that marketing is hard and I didn't want to do it. Rejection. Right? Yeah. So in fairness to me, I really did want to take care of my clients. The bad news is that's the doubt.

When I was a first year advisor, I would have told you, Suzy Orman always said, and I can't believe how often I'm quoting good things from Suzy Orman because there's a lot of bad things that I don't like. But Suzy does say some good. Everybody says some good stuff.

Suzy said, "Make sure your advisor has 10 years of experience." When I was a first year advisor, that's a bunch of crap because I work way harder than them. I saw these 15 year advisors in my office. They leave at 4.30 in the afternoon. They come in at 9.

I was there at 7. I was there at 7 at night. I would take care of you far better. But then my second year, my third year, when I got in the weeds, I started to realize, I can't juggle all this stuff. And it's not that I wasn't becoming knowledgeable.

I didn't have the systems to actually do the right thing, which is why I tell people now, make sure your advisor has 10 years of experience. It's so true. That's what we end up doing. The problem is, we just hope that a certain number of people won't hear that advice and they'll work with us and they'll trust us in the first few years because otherwise, no one would ever get to the 10 years of experience.

I remember my first client. They came in. So I made the cold calls to get them into the office, right? Okay, so that was your system. I sat there and you were my trainer and you were the guy that was knowledgeable. So you talked. I didn't say a word.

I took notes on how the thing was working. And at the end of the meeting, everybody got up and I shook hands and I said to Tom, my trainer, I said, what happened? He said, they're your first client. I'm like, no way. No, they just hired you. He's like, no, no, no.

They just hired you. Right. Like, wow, how dumb are they? So you're from the perspective now is kind of an outside perspective. Been a few years since you've been in the field. So you're looking at the financial industry. What thoughts do you have about the current state of the financial services industry?

Wow. I think that anybody who is an asset gatherer is dead. I think that because funds are a commodity, product is commodity, and the public is getting smarter mostly because of podcasts are easier to get. It's easier to get information about what the right thing to do is. Anybody that walks in and says, oh, you got this money?

I'm going to put it in a Roth IRA. Hand me my money or hand me your money and I'll take care of it. I think those people are dead. I think good financial advisors, the ones that are going to be alive, are the people that say, you have all of this information available to you.

I'm going to be your agent and I'm going to be the guy that tells you, no, no, no. I know your situation as well as you do and you need to listen to this, this, this, and this and you need to ignore all this. Those people are going to rock.

So robo advisors coming on board, they're going to eat asset gatherers lunch. There's no way they won't. And we debate on our show about what the first downturn is going to do to robo advisors. Are people going to trust the robot the second the market goes down? I don't know.

When the robots, the second the market goes down and all of a sudden the robot selling this fund and buying this one and selling this one, it's like, wow, everything's going down. I got a robot in charge. What was I thinking? Right? It'll be interesting to watch. But still, I think it beats the asset gather because you and I know these people, they come into your living room, they give you a good song and dance, they sell you a fund.

And then three years later, you still, you see their name on the statement, but you don't talk to them. That dude's dead. That woman's dead. Yeah, I agree. It's going to take a while because one of the challenges I've noticed is that those of us, every listener of my show or your show, they're weirdos.

They're tuned in and it's remarkable how many people aren't tuned in to what's going on. It's remarkable to me. Thing I always observed as an advisor, sometimes I couldn't believe that somebody trusted me with as little due diligence as they did on me. And I always try to be trustworthy and make sure that I shared with them.

And so I always tried to, number one, be trustworthy. Number two, demonstrate my trustworthiness. And so I recognized that they were trusting me and it's an honor to be trusted. But still, sometimes I think, wait a second. Don't you want to ask a few more questions? Don't you want to do something but many people?

I'm like, "Please ask me this." Yeah. Here are the things you should be asking me. I wish if I had, I was six years in, so I never got to the place of being a senior advisor where I had the time to write the book, but I wanted to write the book of here are the questions that you should ask your advisor in advance.

And here's what, so ask me these. Like, no, here, lesson number one from your financial advisor. You're stupid to hire me without asking me this. So ask me this and listen to my answer and then I'll go ahead and respond with you. That's fabulous. It's just, you know, we make big decisions and I don't know.

I'm excited because the press I see is towards financial advice, which is what we desperately need and a way of asset management. And that's the shift. Now unfortunately, I just don't think consumers and customers and clients are perceiving that. I can't believe it when somebody asks me about returns these days.

And I'm saying, "When have I ever told you to ask me about returns? Don't you read anything about mutual fund returns? Don't you have any idea about how these things work?" And they don't. They're still saying, you know, people still come to me and just friends and acquaintances and they find out I'm in the financial world.

And they say, "Well, what's going to be great next year?" Are you kidding me? Can I beat my head on this mic? Exactly. I don't know. There's too much padding for it. That's also a shift. Is it away from the financial advisor as I know what's going on in the market, right?

I remember when I was an early financial advisor, I was taught to tell my clients a story about here's where the market's at now and here's where we think it's going. And there's only one or two things that could happen. Either I'm right, which is lucky, or I'm unlucky.

And then Rick Edelman tells a great story and maybe I'll tell it about this guy that was a great marketer, the stockbroker. He recommended two stocks and he had an audience of 4,000 people. To half of them, he said, well, actually it was one stock. We'll say it's Disney.

Half of them he said, "You know what? In the next month, Disney's going to go up." The other half he said, "Disney's going to go down." And then when it went whichever way it went, he cut it in half, right? The half he was right with, and he wrote them a second note a month later that said, "Hey, you didn't respond to me and I was right on with this one.

I'm going to give you another stock. General Motors is going to go up in the next month and half of it is going to go down." So now it's only for 1,000 people, it's right. 1,000 people, it's wrong. And then finally he gets to the point after four of these, he has 250 people and he's like, "You must be a moron.

I've made four right calls in a row." I mean, these four awesome calls and you're still not calling me. What's your problem? But that guy and those people exist. They're going nowhere. Because a great financial advisor is the person that tells you, "I don't know where the future's headed, but my job's to be your shepherd and to tell you this is how you keep your sheep safe." And by the way, I love the shepherd analogy because of the fact that they're not my sheep, they're your sheep.

And the advisor that says, "No, no, no, they're my sheep. Don't worry about it. I'll take care of everything." You shouldn't hire that person. Yeah, it's the most liberating thing in the world as a financial advisor when you learn to say, "I don't know." Took me a little while to say it.

I was always comfortable with saying it when I was... I was always comfortable saying it about investment prognostication because before I was an advisor, I knew enough to know, "I don't know, I don't know, stock market, up, down, I don't know." But I was uncomfortable saying it with regard to financial planning in the first few years.

And then what was funny, the more I learned, the more comfortable I was saying, "I don't know." And so today, theoretically, my business card says I should know what I'm talking about a little bit with regard to financial planning. Maybe a touch. Maybe. But today, it's the easiest thing in the world for me to say, "I don't know.

I don't have a clue about that question, but I can get the answer." Well, that's the thing. You ask a 25-year-old, and sorry, 25-year-olds, but just 25-year-olds, they know everything. And then you ask a 50-year-old, and they're like, "I don't know, crap." Like the older you get, the more you know you don't know.

Exactly. That's my experience so far. For me, this is where the financial advisor really adds the value because in the world that we live in, it's so complex. It's so many moving parts. And I frankly, I can't conceive of how somebody can get through it without somebody in their corner.

Right. I just don't see it. The key is, is it whether you know or not, it's that you know where to look. Right. Right? So if I come to you and I say, "Do you know this?" If I'm a good financial advisor, I'll say, "No, but I know where to look, and I can get that answer far more quickly than you can." And that's where you add value.

Like an agent, like a sports agent. If you look at yourself as if you're a pro athlete. Right. I love this. Look at yourself as a pro athlete. Your agent should be the person that can tell you, "Sign that contract. Don't sign that. Watch out for this guy. He's sketchy.

Watch out for that. Stay away. Hey, you waking up on time? You still working out? You doing the..." The more your person's an agent, I think the better off you're going to be. And it does frustrate me when people say, "I don't trust advisors." Because when I got to year 10 through 16 of my career, I sold it at year 16.

I was working with many people with millions and millions of dollars. My biggest client had $3 million. I probably worked with six millionaires. But they all had advisors. My richest clients had advisors. And my young clients, because I had clients that hadn't yet established themselves, they were young, aggressively charging people.

The people that were making moves quickly, they all had advisors. And it's funny because I think some people learn the wrong lesson. "Oh, I heard about sketchy advisors, so I just don't have advisors." It's not that. It's stay away from the sketchy ones and find better mentors. Find better advisors and you're going to go faster.

And that's my secret agenda with Radical Personal Finance. Shine the light on the industry and let people choose. Find out what a good advisor sounds like. Find out what a bad advisor sounds like. Find out what people are doing and find someone that you can trust. I can't see, like when you think about coaches, the life coaching industry is growing up.

And it's funny, I feel bad for them with that word because it's such a fluffy word. I'm a life coach. But realistically, think about it. Think about if every single month I had somebody that called me and said, "Joshua, how are you doing?" And actually took time. And I'm paying them to listen to me and ask me, "Are you doing these things?

How effective are you towards your goals? Are you working? Are you doing these things?" It's like the agent metaphor. Think about how different over the course of time that trajectory is. And it takes time. I think with an advisor, you're probably in the red in the beginning if you think about the fees that you pay, whether you're paying a planning fee.

There's no possible way, I think, let's say you pay a thousand bucks for a planning fee and you have a competent planner. Can that planner guarantee you that in the first week you're going to recoup your thousand bucks? I don't think you can guarantee it. There might be some tricks.

There might be some little things that you can do, open this account, things like that. I think I could, in general, save most people upper level incomes. I think I could save most people a few thousand bucks just with an hour-long conversation and a review of everything and some ideas will come out of that.

But you can't guarantee that necessarily in the first few weeks. But over the course of months and over the course of years and then avoiding the big mistakes, for me, I struggled with how to clarify my worth as an advisor until I started reading Nick Murray's books. When I started reading Nick Murray's books, and he's big, he's a former advisor, he's in his 70s, and he talks about essentially your role as an advisor in helping your clients avoid big mistakes, talking them off the wall.

And he's slightly gruff. He's very, that's a polite way to put it. He doesn't have a good bedside manner. Yeah, that's a polite way to say it. But he also says that clients don't need the bedside manner. They need to be told the truth because they won't get it.

And that set me free when I realized financially the impact in a very few couple of months that realistically, I'm not going to bring you much value necessarily on a month-to-month basis, especially if I'm not doing more of the coaching model. I think more advisors should be doing the coaching model, but most advisors aren't going to do that.

They're not going to coach you on your career. I think they should, but they're not going to do it. They're working that. But even if the only thing I accomplished was to talk you off the wall in the times that you needed to be talked off the wall, that has huge value.

I got lucky. I gave speeches for the number one advisor at Ameriprise, and he was phenomenal. I learned more about systems from him, but I also learned about why he was number one and why so many rich clients, wealthy clients, successful clients, successful financially clients dealt with him. When he would talk to new potential clients, he'd say, "I have two jobs.

Number one job is to find ways to make you money that you might not know about. More than that, it's even to leverage your primary income stream and make sure that you use that more to your advantage." You'd see these people that are great at real estate. His job was to make sure you made as much money at real estate as possible, but then to diversify your portfolio so that you don't get sunk, which was number two.

Number two was everybody has blind spots. I actually make more money for you helping you get rid of your blind spots than I do helping you make money. You'll make money on your own. The bad news is there's going to be a blind spot that hits you, and my job is to make sure that never happens.

He said, "Sometimes, frankly, it's hard for me to prove to you that I protected you from that blind spot because it's my job to make sure that you don't feel it." It was amazing. The better thing was he did it. The reason he did it was he had these sheets that he used, just to give you an idea of his process, of every single blind spot he'd ever seen in his 32-year career at that time.

He would go down through their whole case. Have they looked at this? Have they looked at that? That checklist. That's fantastic. Oh, the checklist was amazing. I took the checklist. We call it our Sherlock Holmes sheet. Do you publish that on Stacking Benjamins? No, we publish it in our class.

We have a class called Stacking 101 Benjamins. Nice. Good plug. Good plug. I like it. I didn't mean to do that. That's called a pro. We didn't mean to do that. So perfect segue. I'm turning red, aren't I? You are. Yeah, I didn't mean to do that. Perfect segue.

Show resources, class, plug it, and people can go over and gain from your perspective of what you're doing at Stacking Benjamins. You know what? Thanks again for having me. I love this. I could talk about this stuff all day. So could you, which is why we love you. Yeah, shocking, right?

Yeah. But so Stacking Benjamins, we have a show three times a week. It's the light side of personal finance. My goal when I created it, I had not heard a show that wasn't either in depth as your show or had a guru attached like Dave Ramsey's show. I wanted Car Talk.

Because I've listened to podcasts since 2005. I'm one of the early podcast listener guys. I'm a runner. And I'm like, "I just want Car Talk. I want this light thing." And I have ADD, and I want it to be magazine style. So we don't try to teach anything. We're just surround sound.

And in fact, it's funny. When I read reviews of your show, they say, "Finally, there's a show that goes into depth." That reviewer, if you're listening to this, you'll hate my show. Don't follow us on Stacking Benjamins. Yeah, because we don't go deep at all. Right. You'll have nine or 10 different things.

We go over the headlines. We'll have some big guests on. We've had Rick Bellman on. We've had David Bach on. We've had great artistic people that you don't think you're going to learn from. We had the guy that broke the Cannonball Run record on. Because talk about planning. The Cannonball Run record is driving illegally from New York to LA faster than anybody ever has.

But they didn't do that overnight. It was a plan. And it was a financial plan. I mean, they had to figure out how to outfit this Mercedes with extra gas tanks when they were going to pee. So we try to do goofy stuff like that, too. That's awesome. You guys switch to three times a week.

You were doing fewer shows before. Yes. So we had ... I wanted to be ... Part of what I liked about the show was the same thing I liked about David Letterman versus Jay Leno back in the day. Jay Leno always had big established stars on. David Letterman would have these bands on you'd never heard of before, and these people with quirky stuff you've never had before.

And we started off the show with those people. But then as we got a bigger audience, people like Rick Edelman said, "Hey, I'd love to be on your show." But I didn't want Rick Edelman to crowd out the quirky idea, so we created more shows so that I could still have ...

We have a show on Friday that's a shorter show called The Short Stack. It's an idea so good, Mom wanted us to give it a special show all its own. And that's for that quirky thing that you have never heard of before. That's what I've been struggling with, Radical Personal Finance, to figure out the right schedule because I've been working to kind of reduce the shows a little bit because I'm lacking some of the depth that I want to create.

And yet the problem with reducing it is which direction do I go? I like experts, but frankly experts are impenetrable for some people. They might be expert at their philosophy, but it's hard to relate. So sometimes ... I always loved ... Jim Rohn used to talk about this perspective.

He'd say, "You should talk to rich people and you should learn from them, but wouldn't it be great if you could find someone who was a total failure and say, 'Dude, you are just an abject failure in every part of life. Tell me everything that you do. Please, carefully everything that you do so I know not what to do.'" And I just think, "Wouldn't it be great if I could interview a failure and do that?" I don't quite know how to request that interview.

"Hey dude, you're a loser. Would you be on my show?" Exactly. I don't know how to do that, but I could at least get close to that by finding average people that are peers that maybe just experiencing some of the same things because we all have some valuable life experience to share.

And it's helpful sometimes. Not every show ... I can't do five days of deep content. There's got to be some deep content and then there's got to be some breaks. And so that's what I've been struggling with. So I'm glad you guys are doing that. I couldn't do five days of it.

Farnoosh Torabi, who you and I like, nice woman, great show. She's seven days a week, man. I can't do it. Yeah. I'm with you. Well, Joe, thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate it. Thanks a ton, dude. So you can post in the comments on today's show whether you actually learned something or not.

But in any case, go and check out Joe's show. He and OG, the faceless, unidentified financial advisor, one of these days he's going to get caught for that, but for right now I guess they've figured it out how to do it. I thought about when I was a financial advisor and wanted to do a podcast, I thought about doing it anonymously, but I didn't choose to do it.

But so far it's worked for them. But go ahead and check out Stacking Benjamins. Some of you may enjoy that. It's a very different style from Radical Personal Finance, but some of you may really enjoy Joe's show. Thank you so much for listening. A couple of quick announcements here.

As I'm doing interviews here over the next couple of days, if I miss a day because of the travel schedule, next week I'll be in Charlotte, North Carolina. So if I miss a day on a show or you don't have anything to listen to, always remember that there's a massive archive of content.

And the way that Radical Personal Finance is designed, I try very hard not to repeat concepts. So if you haven't gone back and listened through the archives, I warn you some of it's a little bit rougher as I've gotten my legs under me as a broadcaster, but there is some good content and I try not to repeat topics.

So if you want to go back and listen to some of the technical shows, those topics will not be repeated in the future unless I really feel that I've messed it up big time and I really have got to do something different. So also if you just don't enjoy interview shows, if you're one of those who prefers the technical content, go back and check the archives.

There should be plenty. I mean there's hundreds of hours of probably about 500 hours of content there ready for you and waiting. Otherwise, look forward to a few more interviews coming out next week. If you're in the Charlotte, North Carolina area, come by and see me. I will be speaking at the XYPN conference, Prevention Planning Conference.

I'll be giving a talk entitled How Financial Advisors Can Help Their Clients Get a 27% Annualized Return on Their Investments. For those of you who've listened to the show, that's the 1,000% rule. Also I will be speaking at the FinCon conference as part of a panel presentation on monetizing a podcast.

That brings me to the last and final point. The only reason that I'm speaking at FinCon is because y'all are awesome and you've actually helped me to monetize this show through the Patreon page. Thank you to the, as of today, 226 of you who support Radical Personal Finance financially.

If you gain any value or benefit from Radical Personal Finance, especially if it has a financial impact on your life, please consider becoming a patron of the show. I'd love to get that number to 250 by the end of September. That means I need 24 more of you to do it this month.

So go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Cheers, y'all. Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert, or live event unforgettable? Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best premium tickets at stadiums, arenas, and amphitheaters nationwide. Sweet Hop's online marketplace makes it easy to browse and book the best seats.

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