Today in radical personal finance I have a very special interview to share with you if you had a chance to sit down for an hour with the former president and CEO of Lehman Brothers and talk to him about His career and his businesses and his money and his retirement.

Would you take that opportunity? Well, I did exactly that and today I'm gonna share that interview with you Welcome to radical personal finance the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge skills insight and encouragement You need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in ten years or less My name is Joshua sheets and I am your host and yes indeed I've wanted to bring you this interview for quite a while and today I'm very happy to share it with you Sat down with my friend Andy sage and got a little bit of his story towards wealth and financial independence Andy sage and I have been friends for a number of years and I've been meaning to get him on the show and wanted to Do it and just hadn't gotten it done and hadn't gotten it done and hadn't gotten it done And finally I was able to sit down with him actually just today we sat down just before lunch and I brought the microphones over to his house here on Palm Beach and Set them up on on a table and card table there and and sat down and recorded this interview that you're just about to hear With him.

In fact, you'll even hear right at the end of the interview. You'll hear his wife calling us to lunch That's to come and eat. She was making us wrap up on time. I had a great interview. Andy sage is a remarkable man He's 90 years old and he built his career.

He started in the bottom of the trenches right after World War two Well trenches meaning the I don't know if he was in the physical trenches or not But the metaphorical trenches on Wall Street worked his way up and eventually left Lehman after serving as the president and CEO You'll hear a little bit of that story today and since then has gone on to live just a really fascinating life he's the kind of guy that I love to spend time with because he's the kind of guy who really just Exudes a love of life and a vigor and a vitality looks and looks and acts like a man far younger than his years It's fantastic to see so today I'm gonna share that with you share his story with you and just sit back and listen Listen from those who have gone before and listen to what they've done and what they did Well on their their journey before I play the interview though sponsor of the day Number one today is Paladin registry if you're looking for a financial advisor It's hard to know where to start you can start by collecting some referrals from your friends I think that's a great idea if you have a friend of yours that has a great financial advisor They constantly talk about it's great to start there You can start by looking around and seeing who's near to you or look in your local community.

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If not, you need YNAB try a free 30 day for 34 day trial at radical personal finance comm slash YNAB radical personal finance Comm slash Y and a B and he sage welcome to radical personal finance I'm glad to be here So I've been wanting to get you on the show for quite a while because you have such an interesting story And I thought it would really be a great opportunity for you to share that with my listeners Because you've you've worked the the halls of business and you've learned a lot of lessons along the way So I'd love for you just to kind of share the story.

Where did you begin and how did you get involved in the business world? well, I It all begins Back when I went to school Got an early start in school, but the trouble is through carelessness primarily my parents sent me to three years of kindergarten By the time I got into school.

I was already behind a couple of years And things didn't go so well even then and along the line we lost another year Finally I'm 18 years old and I'm in what I guess would be My I'm in my 10th grade. It's not very good The war came along And I turned 18 This would have been a World War two in World War two and off I went that was that was in 19 Early 44.

So you were born in 19? 26 26 so I in this in the army or in the air air Corps, which then was part of the army I did get schooling in electronics radio radar and became a radar mechanic and Things went very well in that school as compared to the disastrous earlier stuff get out of the out of the army in 1946 and Got a job on Wall Street and As a clerk in a small specialized brokerage firm My work was purely mechanical for the It was there about a year and a half and that for the last half I was on the floor of the Stock Exchange and then I went to work for my father who was a broker a specialist on the floor of the Stock Exchange and I did that and in 1947 the the volume in the Stock Exchange in those Cold hard years was about one to one and a half million shares a day What there is now in the first nanosecond It was boring and I wasn't needed and I learned a lot about playing pranks on other people working on the floor No such foolishness but Not no useful experience.

I quit and Was thinking of going to California to work in the Redwoods Where my family had some? timber That had been in the family for a couple of generations and it might have needed some attention. I Knew a partner at Lehman's from having lunch occasionally and he invited me to come down there He asked me if I what I was doing.

I told him nothing He asked me if I would come down and talk to him. I didn't want to go back to Wall Street It was boring. I didn't like it But I couldn't really say no after I told him that I had nothing to do. So down I went and He paid me $50 a week to go to work for Lehman Brothers Which began a 25 or more years Career during which time I did a little bit of everything and So it at the end was president CEO and And the first managing partner Which I did for two or three years and then I'd had enough of Wall Street left it moved to Wyoming got a ranch and Continued to do work for Lehman's Continued to do other financial work mostly fix-ups and I worked on Trying to repair broken-down companies for the rest of my business Generation I'd never really quit but Most of my work came directly or indirectly from banks who had loans that weren't getting repaid and gradually all the people that I knew In the banks and elsewhere retired and in the end early Phone stopped ringing the fix-up stopped coming in I didn't have an appetite for getting buying any any more of them myself and so Ended up in a sort of a retirement it tapered off I wasn't interested in being on the road five days a week almost every week of the year which I had been and so now I really am in a position of being a very passive investor and Passing my time of day doing other kinds of things So this term fix-ups is not a really a common term.

What does that mean? Well it means that companies get into trouble and Pay a price Companies fall into a number of different categories But the most common one involves companies that have borrowed money and can't repay it When they can't repay long enough the banks get angry and upset and Seek a solution, but the solution isn't easy First there are bankruptcy laws that protect companies who are people money particularly banks and Protect them very successfully.

So the bank has got a risk of never seeing their money and Usually the companies are being badly managed Not in every case, but in most cases the companies are being badly managed and the banks don't quite know what to do about it And that's where a fix-up is required and there are people Of which I was one That I did but by myself and in partnership with others where we go in and try to help them Square away their problems, which usually are not complicated and get on the right track And the the lenders either get their money or partial part of their money Sometimes they don't and that's that's what I call a fix-up It fix up is where somebody calls and says hey we own a big hunk of this company or the company owes us money or we're partners with them or whatever and They're being badly run We'd like you to go in and see what you can do to make it work and you go in and you're usually welcomed And you usually find out that There's lots of things that can be done and there are lots of people there that know how to do it They just don't happen to be the people who are running it at the time Sometimes even the people that are running it at a time are very good, but they're just not good at General management, they're good at their work.

One of the things that you learn early on is In most of these is that the person who was at the helm of these companies? must go and they must be seen to go you must fire them and If you don't you'll have no credibility Whatever and I've had that come up a number of times and I learned that lesson the hard way in one case The case of a company that I'm still involved with The guy who ran it was really pretty good.

He was a management consultant He'd gotten over his head in managing it as a business, but he had technical knowledge. It was very good. I kept him on and Not in the top position, but I kept him on useful in the company and we were just Couldn't get the lenders to be reasonable and finally one of them took me aside and said, you know Until somebody gets punished for what happened to us We're just not going to be very cooperative.

We're not going to really believe so what you really have to do is You have to fire that person and you have to he has to be seen to have been fired for you to become credible We're so unfortunate guy wasn't much good. Anyway, and He had to go and and things opened up these are the things you find when you get in you also find that the the really tough ones are the giant companies and International Harvester is an example of One place that I went and this company was in incredible amounts of trouble For reasons that were really obvious.

They continued to operate in businesses where they were unprofitable And with no real justification for doing so and There were lots of people there that knew well what ought to happen But it wasn't being run by the people that were doing the right things. So Often you get there and you find it The solutions are not very complex the problem with giant companies and International Harvester was a giant company is that they can operate inefficiently and extremely inefficiently and extremely Unprofitable for a long time before the wolf comes to the door and starts to eat them Their very size gives them Repute and cash Reserves that allow them to make mistakes for long periods of time I owned a little company at the same time.

I went there In Pennsylvania making filters, it was a very small company we had sales of a couple of million dollars a year if that and We it was a bit of a struggle at first too But if in that company if we did anything very wrong in March By early May we would have been bankrupt You did we did we did just wouldn't have had the time with a small operation to operate in efficiently which you have in the giant companies is a Ship moving through the water that weighs a million tons and it goes on through the water And it's very heavy water for a long time before it sinks.

It does sink in the end Harvester didn't most of the ones that I went survived To varying degrees of success But this is the business I got into and I got into it not only myself but with other partners who did the same kind of thing and It was a it was fun work to a point and It was for me very good work because it had an end I'm not a person who wanted to go to work and that's why I didn't want to stay at Lehman's After a while because it is that as that when I began to running the place It wasn't nearly as much fun as doing the things I was doing earlier, and I was being beaten on by God knows how many partners About one who didn't get as much of a bonus as the one the year before and why did this kind of stuff?

was boring and Unsatisfying and very much tying you down to a nine-to-five type of life and That really wasn't for me. The fix-ups are good. You go in you do what you have to do and you get out You're greeted Happily when you arrive because everybody's in trouble You're detested by the time they're profitable and it's working They can't wait to see the last of you and out you go with a nice paycheck For your for your work.

It's a good way to go At least you don't have any regrets and say go maybe I should stay around longer No, I never wanted to stay around I never wanted to stay around longer and they didn't want to be reminded of what they had been and my contribution In some cases was really fairly major in others.

It was really very minor it in the case of one company I Didn't accomplish much except for persuading the board that they should not file chapter 11 with that company Because it would be disastrous and I don't know that I personally did much more That was my main contribution was keeping them from filing Until they were able to survive.

I didn't have to do very much physical work in others I really had to get in and right on the right on the right in the line of work and Do jobs always I had to travel always I had to rent apartments or wherever it is because No companies that get in this kind of trouble obliged me by being next door where I could drive to them And that's so that that period had to end also How do they calculate compensation for somebody like this for doing a job like that?

Is it based on a contract? Is it based on performance? How do you figure that out in various various ways? One typical way was that a Number of the businesses were businesses that came out of Lehman Brothers where I was I still stayed involved with Lehman Brothers Even though I stopped going to work every day And so a lot of the stuff came from Lehman Brothers and I was doing that while being paid to do it by by Lehman's In lots of them I became most of them really I Was on the board and involved in the companies themselves With or without Lehman's and in which case I was compensated by the By the company that I was working for Those were and the last case is that in some cases One in particular that still survives I Became an owner of the company that I went in to start fixing and my compensation ceased Because I didn't couldn't afford to pay myself out of a out of a failing company but the compensation came in in getting rid of the things that didn't work and Making something of the things that did work.

And in the end the compensation in that was just a compensation of ownership All right. All right. So you had a little bit of probably some more things I haven't even thought of When you were at Lehman you began it sounds like you said you started earning $50 a week at a very low-level Position and when you left you were a CEO and president What types of work did you do over the course of your 25 years there and how did it progress Where you were able to go from entry-level to top management?

Well, I went to entry-level I Went to entry-level It's true and I had been in the street for a year and a half on the on the stock exchange We should lend some sort of Credibility though in hindsight the credibility was worthless I Started by going from department to department as a trainee and Eventually I got into what we call the industrial department, which was a corporate finance department and it's Work there was to write memoranda and prepare work for the partners of the firm to go and deal with the companies RCA and other companies that were Clients and mind you the clients of an investment banking firm Use you when they want to raise money by selling stocks by selling bonds or or something in between so your Limits is a financing company and you doing financing work and I did Work in the trenches for about seven years writing memos for people to carry to their clients and then I Moved into a different section Which was called the syndicate the syndicate is the part of Lehman Brothers that?

That forms a group of brokerage firms and in smaller investment banking firms and big ones around the country to sell stocks and bonds in wholesale amounts So you had to have contacts daily contacts with 80 or 90? firms that become part of your syndicate as you put them together to do an offering of Corporate securities and I ran that for a number of years and gradually got more into management And less into doing The actual work I had clients by then of my own and I was on some boards and I Ended up in management not because I wanted to be but because one day Lehman Brothers woke up and Found the back office found that it was unable to identify 400 million dollars of securities that they had on hand in their vaults and That they were unable to find $200,000,000 of securities that other people were claiming we had and we couldn't find And this mess ended up with an SEC intervention and censure and the firm was in real trouble our computers were a system and a product of a company who was our client It was chosen by Lehman Brothers only because it was a client not because it was a particularly good computers Which it didn't and it brought with it a workforce Which were equally ineffective?

We have the problem we got into of not being able to find securities or having too many Stem from moving from a bookkeeping pen and ink business to a computer business. The computer business was an utter disaster somebody had to do something about it and Really all the people at Lehman's were financiers and know anything about this kind of thing and I grabbed them Grab the handle of this problem just because I had to I took a short course Given by Harvard Business School, I think But not in Massachusetts in New Jersey somewhere in computers and then got rid of the RCA's got IBM computers got rid of all the people that we had in that area got new people and And had I think a hundred people temporary people from an accounting firm just come in to physically do work in the basements of buildings in New York where these securities were resisting residing and in the end We straightened it all out and our differences were Insignificant and everybody lived happily ever after but by then I was involved in management rather than in investment banking and that That is why I ended up really in a management position other than an investment bankers position Which I later found I like better anyway when you look back What because from the sound of your kindergarten experience?

You didn't have an auspicious start to your career You didn't really seem to excel in school at least at that that stage and you said with with another year sprinkled in between but yet you passed through the ranks of a large and very respected Wall Street company What were the character traits or personal habits that in hindsight you can look back and identify?

That served you well during your career at Lehman Brothers Well There's a couple of things one is I Did take it seriously I did show up every day I did work I did what I had to do I was not a person who would go to work 16 hours a day or anything like that But I was conscientious and I think I have good judgment and I think on the whole I got on very well with the management I got on always very well with Bobby Lehman and I Was able to work well with people I think that was probably the main thing.

I don't think I was The fact that I had no education and hadn't been to a business school was utterly meaningless We had a we in our industry then we and our competitors put a big big Powerful Exclamation point on how many people we got out of the good business schools and all that stuff Complete waste of time didn't make any difference whether we got the people out of like me out of nowhere or out of Colleges or out of high schools or anything else?

We taught them what they needed to know about accounting and about finance And we had to teach them whether they came out of the business schools or whether they came out of eighth grade It really didn't make any difference so What I really did was I I attribute my success till largely to what I learned at Lehman Brothers and I learned so much that you don't learn in school and From people who really can teach but don't know their teachers.

I can make two examples One is I had a boss named Morris Nadelson In the department, I worked for seven years grinding away on on memos and stuff and he Trained me in so many things one day I had a person come in with a deal and he wanted to find his fee for bringing it to us and he wanted 20% and I had told him pretty much that 20% was more than we ever paid to anybody and We were kind of at a standstill but he was going to come in for another meeting My boss said, you know, this is a no deal.

Anyway, this not gonna happen It's worthless, but I think it's worth it to give you some training. So we're gonna meet with mr Kramer who was the man who came in you and I and all I want you to do is to fight for the firm's position Take the position that we never paid more than 10% never had paid more than 10% We don't want to set a precedent and the no matter what I say, I want you to take that position and hold it So mr.

Kramer came in and mr. Nelson and I sat in the room and We got after ten minutes of pleasantries We get into the thing and finally we get to the finders fee and mr. Kramer says, you know, I've happened I know I've been difficult, but I have to have the 20% that I'm asking for because I'm doing more than anybody's ever done Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah and I do what I'm told I say, you know, we can't do that Here are the reason here are five reasons why we just really and not in a position to do it And they know me since my boss's Morris says well, wait a minute.

Wait a minute Andy I think you jump I think you're jumping the gun a little bit. You haven't really listened to mr. Kramer out Didn't you say mr. Kramer that you did this and that and the other thing? Yeah, he said, you know I think you want to think twice and guess what over the next 15 or 20 minutes?

Mr. Kramer's out of the conversation And mr. Nelson and mr. Sage are having a negotiation and he fights like a tiger for For mr. Nelson. I mean for mr. Kramer, but guess what at the end Morris? Nielsen says, you know, you're right. I guess we really can't do it and It was over the 10% was set and mr.

Kramer went out the door didn't know what hit him And and again, my boss said to me, you know, we'll probably never see him again. It's a no-deal I can tell by talking to him. I didn't do this because I really cared about mr. Kramer Kramer's 20% I did it because I'm teaching you a Element of negotiation and how to use one two on one negotiations good cop bad copper call it what you want, right and I You learn from this stuff they don't teach you in schools don't teach you they teach you about labor contracts They don't teach you how to negotiate them Bobby Lehman one day when I was really very high in the firm Again, we were talking about that same department where the same department where they do the the statistical and grinding work of turning out finance documents and Bobby got Bobby Lehman got me and and said that I should Bear in mind that he saw he knew mr.

Osborne was running the company and doing it running that division and doing very well but he said that he that what I had to be careful of was that he didn't promote only the people who would grind 20 hours a day and work three hundred and seventy days a year and kill themselves Grinding out the kind of memorandums that he wanted Because he said, you know Everybody you have in that department if he stays with us and he's 28 years old now He's going to be 38 years old 10 years from now and 48 years old 20 from eight years from now And he won't be writing those documents and those memorandums and grinding out multi-column spreadsheets he'll be talking to RCA and IBM and various people who you have or Hope to have as clients and you want to be careful that you don't bring up and promote only the grinders But that you look at each of these people you have in your department And if you see somebody who says that he may want to be working eight hours a day But he's doing it and he's conscientious but if he's not killing himself and he's not the greatest spreadsheet maker in the world and you're looking at somebody who's going to be The kind of person you want to send to your best client ten years from now You want to be sure he's still there and you haven't just promoted a lot of whole a whole lot of grinders Who won't be grinding ten years from now?

and That's the kind of lessons that you get that you don't necessarily Think about yourself and I thought about it and it was kind of happening. He knew it Bobby Lehman, I learned so much from him and he didn't know stock from livestock. He knew nothing about the finance business he he knew about running a a Firm and and people and who to promote and who not to promote and who to get rid of and who to keep and how to make salesmen work He was not a technician at all himself and he didn't need it Do you think so what year did you leave Lehman what what calendar year did you leave Lehman Brothers?

1973 fast forward as we record. This is 2017 Based upon your knowledge and contacts and exposure that you have to the business world as it continues to be today Do you believe that it's still possible for? People to have the type of career that you had back in the 50s 60s and 70s to go from the big, you know, the starting place like you did up through You know president and CEO Or as the world changed since then the business anything is possible, but it'd be harder.

Why would you say? It's our first place. I Came I came out and I should have covered this really when you asked me Well how I got into the in the senior management, I came out of wartime. I came in to the firm in 1948 But the war really hadn't ended till 46 so my bosses the people I worked for Mostly male mostly had been in the service during the war They'd only gotten there to they'd get back a year a year a year and a half before I did So I grew up in a generation Of my parents age rather rather than myself my seniority in the firm came very quickly because the people I worked for Had only been there two years or three years longer than I had for them.

Not Bobby Lehman, but but most of them so in the end By the time I was 27 or 28 been there eight years I was hiring people my age that were just coming out of business schools So I got boosted up really a whole generation because in 1946 the no males had been employed in any company you could get a job no matter who you were or what you were Doing it was not hard The it just hadn't everybody everybody had been in the service.

I don't think That with my not even not even the high school even two years away from a high school diploma I could possibly have gotten hired into a into a company like that and Succeeded so I would have had to have been a a Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs or something like that and be a Incredible genius and go go on my own and make it then really into the top It's possible, but honestly in my case It would have been tough going now.

I'm not saying that that I couldn't have Gotten that I did get the first job I got because they were looking for people to at the first brokerage firm I went to it didn't matter and when I went to Lehman's I knew the Partner who invited me and no one ever asked me they didn't even ask me where I went to school It never even came up They knew I'd worked in the street and they hired me for the 50 bucks a week and put me in I think that I Think that that part would be really tough now If you go all you can show is that you're 18 and you're still in the two years away from being a high school senior It'd be very very very hard to get a job now You know, maybe in McDonald's but but real job be very very hard very hard to do I have a granddaughter who's been to school forever and she's a a computer generated artist and She's having she's got a job but she's not having an easy time of it she wants to be in the in the probably in the gaming industry or someplace where Computer graphics are really vital and and and the training is tremendous And she'll get something but not not not as easy as I got when I started so I think that I was really very lucky I wouldn't recommend to anybody that they just drop out of school for the hell of it and Hope for the best to end up in a really good job What asked one more question and luck is tremendous Right one asked one more question about your career and then transition to some of the life lessons you've learned with regard to lifestyle and personal finance Obviously as we sit here in 2017 we are a decade removed from the financial crisis in which Lehman Brothers played kind of a leading How do how do I how do I?

leading Decade ago, and I'm just curious from your you were inside The Wall Street world and then you kind of went outside and involved in the business world and now you've watched Lehman a decade ago go bankrupt and then today, you know, we're a decade after that but of course, you're still in a student Vesta and pay attention I Wonder oftentimes how much trust to place into Companies, especially how much trust to placed in into financial companies because it seems very hard for me to discern From an external perspective what's actually going on versus, you know what the insiders know Do you what advice would you give to somebody like me?

Who's looking to be? thoughtful and careful with regard to Financial institutions. I'm looking to be reasonable to be practical to be to deal with facts But also, you know, we have could have concerns. How do how do I even approach that? philosophically in today's world Well the best you can but you want to be very very careful the decade ago market crash Was no accident it came about from a combination of three things Stupidity Greed and incompetence and when you put those three things together You really have a disaster now if you own a shoe store and you do that.

It's too bad and Despite the fact that you hire somebody like I used to be to be a fixer or whatever Yes, you store go down and it's not the end of the world. And even if it's an automobile company It's not the end of the world and If it's the government It gets close to the end of the world and if it's high finance it is the end of the world and You had those three ingredients there and Then and you would be very Ill-advised to assume that some wonderful thing has happened and none of those three characteristics are not there anymore it was just another way of saying be very very careful the Problem isn't with investment banks it there their service Their service oriented.

The truth is a Lehman Brothers going down sounds terrible, but it really didn't make any difference a City bank going down would make The difference of life and death for all of us We have that because once something like that happens everybody runs on all the banks and we all know that the banks spend and use a huge multiple of the amount of the deposits they had and if Anybody lined up to get everybody lining up in one day to get their deposits out of any bank It couldn't be done.

So you have a situation where you could have a Absolute total crash which could have well happened back in 2009 or whatever it was But the what was left of the Bush Bush administration in the Obama administration Bailed out the banks as they absolutely had to do And and a little bit more than the banks, but they had to be bailed out.

They caused the failure of the country and Unsupervised they were not adequately supervised and the result was nearly utterly catastrophic if I Have to think about financial difficulties That might come across my path Failure of the financial system as a result of the banks is certainly high on the list Lehman Brothers never was a bank a number of other people who were not banks either such as Goldman Sachs and others Declared themselves banks.

What you're saying is they were never commercial banks. They were never commercial, right? They were never commercial bank. They were invested. They didn't take they didn't take creditors. They didn't take people's deposits and write checks That's the function of a commercial bank. That's what that's what a bank is It holds depositors money, right?

but not technically you can be a bank if you qualify and you have good enough lawyers and you can be a you can Declare yourself a bank overnight and be available for federal aid and whatever it is But these aren't the companies I worry about their service companies and they usually smarter The ones I worry about are the big giant commercial banks any one of which If it failed could cause a spiral that could run all our bloods cold in terms of any other investments We have it's really really very serious it Money is a confidence game.

You have to have confidence values if I if I if I Buy a house for a hundred thousand dollars and it's now worth a million dollars. I feel I'm worth a million dollars But I'm not I only paid a hundred thousand dollars. That's the money that was paid The rest of it is confidence.

The rest of it is confidence And that's that's that's a smaller multiple that we then we have to think about so we're living in confidence of our very existence in our financial existence And if anything breaks that confidence markets crash not only not only the stock market But the real estate market which everybody thought couldn't crash it crashed so all of a sudden you don't have what you think you have and you stop spending in the spiral is fatal and This is always a risk and I think the the biggest risk of all is the is the confidence How do you protect yourself against that I don't know how you protect yourself against that you Try not to do it not to do extremes and you certainly supervise Anything that's not important has to be supervised and you never let up on your supervised Supervising of big banks you see it over and over again.

You see it here you see it now in Deutsche Bank you see it in Wells Fargo where a Commission system for getting new accounts gets carried to the point where in money is unbelievably large and you have thousands of employees and that couldn't even be kept because they were involved in the in basically fraudulent internal accounting not external not not not dangerous in itself to the financial world, but It's just shows the lack of control or the difficulty of controlling a business where you have senior executives by the hundreds of thousands spread all over the world in banks and and and in in branc branches and It would be unrealistic to think that you don't have to have confidence that that's being Guarded and that you have every Safeguard in there that you can think of so as you don't allow one of these great big banks to fail there have been There has been a movement Hasn't gone much of anywhere of putting some kind of a limit on the size of a bank and I Think that's that sort of thing really isn't what you want to do in a in a free market and enterprising country like the United States but it's something you want to be thinking about you want to be thinking about why people even want to do it and Put it in every safeguard you can to try and see that Something doesn't go to pieces that traders don't Take positions that you can't find it's just so many many things when you come to big amounts of money and where they can be stored and and Just do the best you can and But I think it's I think it's the biggest single risk to the to the economy into the stock market is the Is that is that the danger of a catastrophic mess in the banking system?

All right It's only gotten worse in the last decade They're calling us. It has gotten worse in the last. Yeah, yeah by far We would think we could talk all afternoon. They're calling us for lunch. So I only got time for one question I may have to come back and do another interview just like specifically on on finance sometime But maybe I'll just kind of close with this you are 9091 now 91 91.

No, I'm not 90. You're not almost 91. Okay, so you're 90 years old Do you think of yourself as retired at this point? well, I Retired from employment. Yes, I Can't think of anybody that's paying me any money to do anything though maybe But I'm I'm not retired and that I have to work See that on my own money is protected.

I'm not very rich, but I'm not very poor and And that keeps me busy. I just got to clarify for my audience When Andy says I'm not very rich, but I'm not very poor We're uh, you know, you live in beautiful place here in Palm Beach, Florida In the standards of in the standards of global wealth.

You've done. All right Absolutely, absolutely when we compare ourselves to but we got these hundreds millions and billions and things I'm not I'm not I don't come from an era where that happened. Really, right? when I was a Went to live over 50 buck $50 a week When I was made a partner And I think I might have been 32 or 34 some in my early 30s.

I Think I Think I got 19,000 Being a general partner on inflation adjusted one of about 30 or 25 or 30 general partners in a major thing. I was I Got I wasn't getting quite $20,000 When I I don't really remember but I think when I was running the firm I Think I I got a million dollars The same person now begin 72 you know, I didn't I didn't grow up in an era, right?

where the money the money was the kind of money it is now and If I had I'd have more than I have and I'm comfortable, but I'm not in the league of I'm not the league of people that that have or had Recently had jobs at the level of the one I had that right so when you look at and the reason I ask is I just simply have noticed this and My audience knows the question that's coming because it's a constant refrain I spent years working as a financial advisor and a major core aspect of that was this concept of retirement the idea of retirement being kind of the traditional work save money in your 401k until you're 65 so you can afford to quit your Job and go and live the life that you really love, but I came to notice two things.

I came to notice that number one The vast majority of people who want to retire will never financially be able to accumulate the money to retire Simply because they don't save enough money and the returns are too low and it's mathematically impossible absent some crazy, you know speculative speculation and something and the second thing I noticed was that the people who are the most financially in the position to retire Very rarely ever chose to do that.

They've always chosen to continue to be involved now They might change they might go from earning a salary to earning a stipend. They're sitting on a board They're you know working for a nonprofit. They're continuing to manage their own things But a lot of times the wealthiest people never really retire.

They certainly change they pull back they move out of responsibility And so I've tried to point that out to recognize that the whole Financial industry the retail investment industry is built around a flawed concept built around this lifestyle That no one's really ever gonna do and here you are at 90 years old almost 91 years old and you're active and you're fit and you're here with dancing with your wife and My listeners can can tell the passion that's coming out of your voice for business and you're mentally alert You look strong.

Yeah, like you look like a much younger man, and I would attribute that to your non retirement So I'm just interested as we close Do you have any opinion on the subject of retirement from your observation and experience in the world? Well, yeah I just agree with everything you I agree with everything you said I said it's a in my case.

I was very sloppy about it. I really I Never really thought about it. I could have got a retirement from Lehman Brothers. I didn't even get it They didn't even set it up because I went out so gradually I was I was president then I became a vice chairman Then I became a consultant and just drifted off and I never even formally left the place You're still on their Health insurance and that that disappeared when they went broke so so I Personally personally I didn't have to and I didn't do much I get a retirement here and there I've served on a lot of boards big companies They don't have retirements So I never got really a retirement But I did get enough money to be able to manage my own sort of retirement But that that's just lucky most people that that isn't going to happen and the system is flawed and It's going to fall more and more On the people that what the the upside of that is that people make many people Don't nobody goes to work for $50 a week anymore.

And and if people are reasonably successful They're be able to look after their parents to some extent the parents will have saved enough to get by But it's tough All right, she's saying we're done Andy thank you. I want to thank you for For doing the interview here. I think it's really been a service to my audience I'm just want to thank you for your friendship to me over the years and I We could talk all afternoon.

I've enjoyed hearing the lessons that That you have to share any closing thoughts as far as final words of advice or encouragement to my listeners If Anything the we talked about safety we talked about retirement If It's very hard to find provide any real answers, but I find that I've drifted toward real estate it ain't perfect and 2009 showed bad things that can happen, but on the whole I tend to think that real estate investments are Some something between Safe and And and not safe I just think For me.

I don't really dare go into the stock market at 90 because one bad turn could do me and it won't have time to get back right and I have leaned I've just kind of fallen sort of the buying condos and renting them out or Commercial real estate and and getting a combination of return for my money and Hopefully appreciation on the land that that's kind of kind of the direction I've gone in For my own retirement that's kind of what it is.

It takes a little work, but but I think it's worth doing Simplicity is to be valued when it comes to investing and real estate has the hallmarks of being relatively simple. Yeah Andy thank you for coming on We're done. We're done. Thank you Andy. I Hope you enjoyed and appreciated that interview with Andy just a couple of quick thoughts as I hit the music here as we go First of all, if you enjoyed that Recognize the fact that you don't only have to listen to podcasts That have interviews in them there's somebody in your town right near you who has similar experiences to Andy Have you gone and sought them out?

Have you gone and sat down with them and asked them for their advice or dug into their career? Think you can learn a lot by doing that Don't leave it just to me and the podcast go sit down with somebody in your local community Andy's a neat guy. He's just always giving back.

I hope you paid attention to his comments there on retirement there at the end I've known him for quite a while and I'll just affirm that You know, he doesn't sit around and do nothing. He's busy. He's active and his life Reflects that you can do the same thing if you enjoyed that con interview I know we got a little bit short there at the end But if you enjoyed that come by the show page for today's come by the blood radical personal finance comm comment on the show I can go back and do another interview if you enjoyed this Let me know what you'd like me to ask him about I'd plan to ask him more about personal finance his approach to investing etc And I'm sure he'd love to do another interview But if you enjoyed that come by radical personal finance comm and give me the questions that you'd like to ask or the things that You'd like to hear from Andy and who knows perhaps we can set up another one.

We have a little bit more time For now though, that's all if you'd like to support the show Please consider becoming a patron directly to support me allows me to continue doing this kind of work for you With the regularity and the frequency you can do that radical personal finance comm slash patron become a patron of the show Totally voluntary, but if you find value from this and you'd like to pay me for it Come by radical personal finance comm slash patron and sign up to support the show can do it as cheaply as a buck a month Ten bucks a month twenty bucks a month, whatever you want radical personal finance comm slash patron and I'll be back with you, too Sweet hop is an online marketplace curating the best in premium seating at stadiums arenas and amphitheaters nationwide with sweet hops 100% ticket guarantee no hidden fees and the personal high-level service you expect with a premium purchase you can relax knowing you'll receive the luxury Experience you deserve visit sweet hop comm today to book your premium tickets to your favorite teams Artists and all the must-see live events to sweet hop around LA It's more than just a ticket.