(upbeat music) - Welcome back to Ask the Compound. Remember our email here is askthecompoundshow@gmail.com. It's a new year, same old questions. We even got a bunch of questions over the holidays. People still care about their finances over the holidays. Maybe there was some deep introspection. Duncan is calling in today from Disney.

World, land, I always get 'em confused. What's one in Florida, World? - Disney World. - Okay. - Yeah, I ran a 5K at 5 a.m. this morning. - Why so early? Was it like through Disney? - Because they want everyone done before the parks open. - Okay, let's get into Disney in a minute.

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That's rocketmoney.com/atc. I use this. I get emails a couple times a week. Here's your summary of all your bills. Here's this unwanted expense. It's really nice. They get your inbox. It's great. All right, Duncan, what's the heat check at Disney? - Well, yeah, I messaged you the other day.

I was like, I gotta ask you some questions about Disney stock. I don't understand. I'm a long-term shareholder, I think, like you are. I don't understand how so many people are here and spending so much money and the stock still looks the way it does. I guess it's streaming.

Is that maybe the answer? What's your explanation? - It would be interesting to see if we could do the counterfactual of Disney, if they never did Disney+. 'Cause at the time, it seemed like a home run. They had so many people sign up and I think they just didn't realize how much they were really putting themselves on the hook for spending money.

And it is all streaming. I think all the streamers and all the entertainment companies got whacked besides Netflix. And I guess it doesn't matter how much people spend. The movies have also been underperforming as well. They haven't been doing as well. We watched the new "Indiana Jones" with my son last week.

I don't know. Did that need to be made? Probably not. I don't know, they spent a couple hundred million dollars on it, so. - I didn't even know it had come out. - Yeah, it's on Disney+ now. Unfortunately, yes, I bought Disney for my kids. So hey, let's buy some shares and teach you up the stock market.

I taught them right. I think they're only down 40% or so. So yeah, people keep spending at the park. If it would have just been the park-- - Should have called them a Target Dave Fund. - Yeah, and merchandise, maybe Disney would be doing better. But alas. - Hey, up first today we have, hey guys, I figured I'd present a scenario for normal folk like myself for the not-to-brags.

I like the idea of a modified version of the fire movement-- - He's an anti-not-to-brag guy. - Known as Coast Fire, where you hit a principal savings goal and then never have to save a dollar again for retirement. For example, currently I have no debt and $50,000 earmarked for retirement.

I'm 30 years old and it's highly unlikely that I would never contribute to this portfolio again. If I added $200 a month between my wife and I for the next 35 years, word willing, at a 7% return, I get a balance of $935,000. Why is it that so many people think you need one to $3 million in retirement?

When to me, assuming a 7% return is already more on the conservative side and obviously Social Security will most likely be around. What am I missing? - One of the few young people who actually think Social Security is gonna be there. I tend to agree with Andrew here. This Coast Fire strategy makes sense in theory, in the fact that if you front load your retirement contributions, then compound interest will do the heavy lifting for you on the back end, right?

That would mean less money you have to put in to save for the future. I do like some of the ideas behind the fire movement. It's financially independent, retire early, it's a high savings rate. People are very good at long-term planning for this. There's discipline involved. Other parts I don't care for, delayed gratification is fine, but I'd rather have you enjoy some of this stuff now.

I think that's what this Coast strategy is. It's listen, I'm gonna front load everything and then if I don't have to save it as much, I can spend some now and then in retirement, I'll have this nest egg. To each their own. There are no perfect retirement strategies, obviously.

So Andrew's in pretty good shape. $50,000 saved, no debt, 30 years old. It's possible this strategy will work out, but I think there's some questions you should ask yourself before totally banking on something like this. What if returns are lower? So sure, if you grow that $50,000 at 7%, by my calculations after 35 years, we're talking 530K, add in the $200 a month and yeah, you're already close to 900 or something I got.

If returns are actually 8%, that 50K would turn into 740,000 over 35 years. That's pretty good, right? Now add the $200 a month in at 8%, we're talking, you know, 900K to a 1.1 million. It's actually not bad. But what if returns are 6%? John will do a chart on here of this growth of 50K over 35 years.

I looked at 6%, 5%, 7% and 8% and that 5% returns grows $50,000 to 275,000. At 6%, we're talking 384,000. So now that's much lower. That totally changes the idea here, if you were really banking on that money being there. Maybe social security can fill the gaps and that's enough for you, but lower returns could severely crimp that lifestyle.

So I think you also have to think about what if your lifestyle changes? So there's a road that runs by my office and it was really bad and it goes to a bunch of businesses, but it was two lanes going each way and then a median where you could do turns, right?

And for years, there was huge potholes and they needed to fix it. And then one summer, they ripped it all up and redid it. They put in those, you know, those turnaround things, that's a circle, what do they call them? Where everyone has a yield and no one knows what to do.

- A roundabout? - Yeah, people just blow through the yields. And so they put some of those in so it looks nicer. And then instead of having the turn lane in the middle, what they did is they put a median in. So they added a curb and then they put some grass and some trees in there.

And then instead of having it be a turn lane, they added these small turn lanes so you could turn in the middle, right? There'd be one, there'd be holes in the median where you could turn in. But they made the roads very narrow and they didn't think through the design of all the businesses.

So there's like a Best Buy and a Nordstrom Rack and all these businesses in a sports store, right? All these trucks that have to deliver inventory to these buildings and these businesses, they didn't have enough room to turn. So within the first week of this new design being done, it looks great, all the trucks are driving on the lawn and they totally ripped all the medians up because the trucks couldn't fit.

So the designers didn't leave a big enough margin for safety. And the funny thing is, is that there's actually a story about it. They had to come back months later and tear up part of the median to make the turns wider, make the entrances wider. And they still didn't do it perfectly because there's still trucks that drive on the lawn.

And they interviewed the designers and said, "What happened here?" And they're like, "Oh, it's a good design. "We just had to make some tweaks." But they didn't leave themselves a margin of safety. And that's the problem here with this idea, I think, is that you can create a retirement plan that looks really good in a spreadsheet, but I think you have to give yourself some wiggle room in case things change.

Life in your 30s is gonna look way different than life in your 40s and 50s and 60s. You might take on some debt, you might have some kids, you might go back to school, you might decide the fire movement isn't for you. Like, plans could change. So I think that you add in a margin of safety to account for that.

So I think that you just have to give yourself some breathing room if your preferences change, 'cause they probably will. The other thing is, what about inflation? Sure, one to $3 million seems too much, and I can-- - Yeah, I was gonna say, what about impending hyperinflation? - Well, it doesn't have to be hyperinflation.

The inflation rate in the US over the past 100 years or so is roughly 3%, it's a little more than that, but let's call it 3%. Over 35 years, 3% inflation turns $1 into 37 cents, right? 2% inflation cuts your money in half over 35 years. Bump it up to 4%, and $1 becomes 26 cents.

If it's shadow stats inflation, we're talking 15%, I think you have negative money after 35 years. You owe someone else money. So I think the numbers your Coast Fire Plan spits out may seem completely doable based on today's current level of spending and the big pot of money you see, but what if that money doesn't take you as far in the future?

Obviously, there's no guarantees in any of this stuff, but I think you can give yourself a margin of safety, and here's what I would do. So they're looking at the $200 of savings. I would move from a dollar amount to a percentage of your income. So let's say this couple, this guy and his wife, make 60K a year.

If they're saving $200 a month, that's $2,400 a year. We're talking like a 4% savings rate. It's pretty low as far as I'm concerned, but hey, they already front-loaded it a little bit. I think you make it a percentage, and then you bump it up a little bit each year.

And so let's say they start with that 4%, and they bump it up 3% a year, and I'm not talking going from 4% to 7%. I'm talking 3% in total going like 4% to 4.1%, then 4.2. If you just did that a little bit, so after 35 years of saving $2,400 a year, you're saving 84 grand in total.

If you did my thing where you just bump it up a little bit each year, and you save a percentage of your income, and that income grows by inflation every year, now we're saving almost $300,000. So I would like if you made more of a percentage of income to give yourself that margin of safety.

So as your income grows, so does your savings and your spending. You can still allow that initial investment to coast for you into retirement, but I think making some minor tweaks like this gives you a little bit of a bigger margin of safety. That's what I'm looking for for retirement savings.

And then-- - Yeah, that makes sense. - And then don't go to Disney, otherwise you can't save anything. - Yeah, I mean, yeah, there's a lot of people here. Okay, so up next, we have our first audio question in a long time. - I've listened to you and Batnick talk about inflation all year, especially about whether prices should generally revert to normal, and whether this is more like post-World War II or the '70s.

Here's the question. Is it helpful or even accurate to refer to temporary shifts in supply and demand as inflation? Econ 201 taught me inflation is due to supply and demand of the dollar itself. The Fed tinkers with rates and reserves, and the money supply changes. Congress spends some money, or doesn't, and aggregate demand changes.

The economic cycle goes round, and true inflation waxes and wanes. On the other hand, sometimes prices change for their own reasons. Gas goes up because of geopolitics, and then things settle down. Shipping prices go up because of supply chain issues, and then it gets better. Milk and eggs go up for agricultural and consumption reasons, and then they come back down.

These are all round trip, transitory, end the roller coaster right where you started episodes. All these factors were strong in the last few years, but they are two different families of phenomena, yet the popular and economic press treats it all as inflation, because CPI scoops up everything. So, does distinguishing between the supply and demand of goods and services, which the Fed can't really touch, versus the supply and demand of money itself, does that help us understand which forces have been more dominant, and what might be likely to happen next?

- Good radio. - Very eloquent question. Yes. My general baseline take here, and I wanna get into some of the technical aspects of this, is that there's just a lot of stuff that we don't know and understand about inflation. Even the Fed doesn't really have a good handle on what causes inflation.

'Cause if you remember, they wanted things to run a little hot this period, and then they went really hot. And they wanted to cool things off, and they did cool off, but I'm not sure they did for the reasons that the Fed said they would. So, let's start with some charts.

John, give me a chart on, this is the US Consumer Price Index going back to the early 1900s. You can see since the 1940s pretty much, this just goes up and up and up and up and up. The only time it really fell in the early 1920s, and then the late 1920s and early 1930s from the Great Depression, we don't really have much deflation anymore.

So, to the point of this question, yes, some things wax and wane and come and go, but mostly the price goes up. And while inflation itself is not a good thing, it's the lesser of two evils, you wouldn't really want deflation because that means lower wages, economic pain. I think you can, I guess, look at the money supply as a way to think about this.

So, John, do the next chart. This is the M2 money supply, and I looked at it year over year. And this chart goes back to the 1950s, and the crazy thing is is that it's never gone below zero until now. So, I guess part of that is because it's also never gone as high as it did before too.

M2 money supply went up almost 30%. Even in the '70s, when that was one of the reasons for the inflation back in the '70s, it certainly wasn't the only one, but they were pumping up money supply. It got to 12 or 15%, but it never got as high as we did during the pandemic.

And obviously that's because we were spending so much money to keep the economy afloat. Now it's negative. So, I guess you could say, well, if you saw the money supply spike so much, and people like Jeremy Siegel did say that's gonna cause inflation, and he was right, now that it's falling, you could say, okay, that must mean inflation is gonna fall as well.

I think that would kind of make sense. I guess my way of thinking at this is, is yes, there's going to be certain things that come and go, especially for volatile things like the energy sector or food. TVs seem to get cheaper all the time. I still don't understand why TVs get cheaper every single year.

I like it, but I don't understand why. I think it's interesting for people like me to dissect this stuff. I think every time we get about an inflation, there's going to be a different reason that comes along. So you could figure out, I know exactly why it happened in the '40s.

I know exactly why it happened in the '70s. People still argue about those periods. And then I know exactly why it happened in the pandemic. Part of it was demand because the government spent so much money. Part of it was also supply because there was supply constraints because companies held back because they thought we were going into this nasty recession.

I think your personal rate of inflation matters way more than the government statistic. That's where I come in on things. If you could say the housing market inflation was terrible because rents went up, but if you locked in a 3% mortgage, you basically experienced deflation over this period, right?

I think it matters more how much your wages are growing and how much lifestyle creep you're introducing your budget every year. So all these things probably matter more than that. I don't think anyone has an economic model that can tell you how inflation is going to work. So this, usually people say econ 101.

Our question person here asks econ 201. So they skipped a level. I feel like everything that I read and learned about in my econ books has been tossed out the window the past three years, especially. It started in the 2010s, right? The Fed lowered rates and the Fed printed a bunch of money and people thought we're going to get hyperinflation and it didn't happen except at Disney.

And then, yes, the Fed lowered rates and printed some money or whatever you call it in the pandemic, but the government also spent a bunch of money on that. So I don't think there is a single model because every time this happens, there's a curve ball and something out of left field people couldn't possibly predict.

So no, I don't think there's a model that can help us explain it. You could look at the money supply. But I don't know, if you go back to my money supply chart, money supply was rising in the early 2010s as well. People thought we were going to have big time inflation then and we never had it.

Inflation was relatively calm for the entire decade. So no, I don't think anyone has this figured out. And I don't think they ever really will either because there's so many outside factors at play. - Up next, we have your recent article on NASDAQ returns basically describes the NASDAQ as having amplified reward and of course, risk as well.

I've wondered this lately, but should very wealthy investors be allocating some of their assets towards investments, which are even riskier than total stock market indices? Is there even such a thing that gives semi-reliably better returns over the longterm? And is such a thing even available to retail investors? Margin can obviously amplify risk and reward and it's probably a terrible idea for most, but maybe it produces an expected gain over the longterm for those who can handle the risk.

- Something people were not asking us in 2022. How do I take more risk? John, throw up a chart here. I wrote a post on this, the NASDAQ 100 versus the S&P. The NASDAQ 100 goes back to 1986. You can just eyeball this thing. I could give you all the volatility statistics or whatever, but you eyeball this and you see the highs are higher and the lows are lower.

The gains are bigger, the losses are bigger. Since 1986, the NASDAQ 100 has outperformed. It's up 14% per year versus an 11% per year gain for the S&P. Now that sounds great, right? Oh, it's easy. But that includes an 80% plus drawdown after the dot-com bubble bursted. And I think you were underwater for almost a decade and a half it was like 13 years if we include dividends.

And so, it's great you outperformed, but you would have had to hold on through just an unbelievably painful lost decade. Now, the way I like to look at it is risk and return are attached at the hip, but taking higher risk in the form of higher volatility does not guarantee you higher returns.

Emerging market stocks have been far more volatile than the S&P over the past decade and a half or so. Returns have lagged meaningfully. So is there a way to reliably outperform the U.S. stock market? I mean, some people would say there's a small cap premium or there's a value premium or quality stocks or momentum.

And you could look at different strategies and different periods and find when all of those strategies have outperformed. There's a lot of factors to choose from the strategies. And this whole thing like, is something available to retail investors? There's no secrets that are available just to rich and wealthy people that are institutional investors that aren't retail.

Like everything is available to everyone these days. And most of the stuff the institutional investors invest in isn't worth the time as a retail investor anyway. But there's nothing reliable when it comes to financial markets. The S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 right now feel like sure things. I can promise you these indexes, Duncan, you say indices.

I think only British people can say that. - I'm pretty sure on Bloomberg they say indices. That's where I've heard that. - Yeah, but I feel like you have to be British. We add extra use into your words. I say indexes. These indexes will underperform for an extended period of time at some point.

I don't know when, I don't know why, I don't know the magnitude, but it's going to happen. This is just how markets work. So I think the best strategy, if you're going to invest in a more volatile asset, whether it's small caps or the NASDAQ 100 or leveraged funds or whatever it is, whatever you choose, I think the best way is just to rebalance regularly.

So you lean into the pain when there's the downside 'cause the downside is going to be worse in a more volatile asset. And then you take some gains when it's volatile to the upside. And counterintuitively, a more volatile asset class or strategy can actually reduce overall volatility if you utilize it in this counter-cyclical way.

So I think that's the way you have to think about it is I'm going to have a 10% position in this highly volatile asset class or 15 or whatever it is, but I'm going to regularly rebalance it every time it shoots way up or it falls down. So I think that's the way to lean into the pain.

That's how you use volatility to your advantage is you rebalance and you don't, that way you're not going all in when it's up a lot and then getting out when it's down a lot. - That makes sense. All right, so up next we have, that question was from Patrick, by the way.

So up next we have a question from Mark. Mark writes, "I'm 35 years old "and work in the hospitality industry. "I've just started with a new company "that offers a 401k program. "I signed up to start with a 10% contribution "as many recommend. "However, with a preexisting Roth IRA "and a betterment brokerage, "I found myself saving too much money.

"Would you be able to give some guidance "as to which would be the best two "to keep depositing money in "and what I should do with the money "in the account I'm pausing investing in?" - Sounds like Mark gave himself a margin of safety here. Not to brag, Mark.

I would be curious in how he's determining he's saving too much, but let's, this is definitely a financial planning question versus an investment question, so let's bring in a financial planning expert, Mr. Nick Sapienza, coming to us straight from Louisiana. Nick, how do you think about the hierarchy here?

So we've got a 401k plan, we've got a Roth IRA, we've got a brokerage account. How do you rank these? I mean, for me, this is like trying to figure out who my favorite child is. - Yeah. - It's really hard. - Yeah, I mean, in Mark's case, like he kind of left out some key details of what his goals are.

So like the simple answer for me is if I'm looking at Mark and just saying, you know, he's 35, he potentially has maybe 30 years 'til where he retires and maybe he lives for another 30 years, so he's got a 60-year runway, simply prioritizing tax deferral and tax diversification.

So that's the 401k and the Roth, if he's trying to narrow it down to two, those are the two. But I wanted to take it a little bit further. - You always want to get the 401k match first. He's got to match. That's the easy decision. I agree the Roth is good.

Bill Sweet would tell a special young person to do that. Nick Magiulli, on the other hand, would say, listen, a brokerage account is actually more flexible, especially if you're younger and want to spend some of it. So that's your point about the goals is, it should maybe we keep all three of these and even if you have to decrease some of the contributions to one or the other, does it make sense to give yourself some more options by having all three accounts?

- The way I break it down is, and I don't know if his 401k has a Roth 401k feature, if it has an after-tax feature. I don't know how much money he makes, what his tax situation is like, but let's just say there are three different scenarios that we could target.

The first is Mark retires at 65, a normal retirement maybe. The second is an early retirement at 55 and the third is some sort of mixture of early retirement, fat fire, you know, coast fire, whatever, or like a sabbatical and a delayed retirement, something like that. Then that, they're almost all the same in terms of how I would prioritize them, except for the sabbatical, of course.

For normal retirement, you know, you're really, you want to look at the 401k first, again, match other features and then move on to the Roth, maxing out that Roth option. The split as far as if it should be 50/50 or some other combination, again, depends on his income, depends on his tax situation.

So there's a, maybe, you know, a need for some tax planning there. - I like the idea of looking at this from retirement scenarios, 'cause you're right. The time horizon probably comes into play here, depending on how much flexibility you need. And obviously the Roth gives a little more flexibility too, 'cause you can take those contributions out without penalty, but I like the way of looking at it.

- That's the key thing that I wanted to point out is you can take those contributions out at any time without penalty or without tax. So maybe that frees up an additional 6,500 bucks or whatever his basis is at that point. The second scenario is early retirement. So if he retires at 55, the rule of 55 applies.

So the year in which he turns 55, he can start withdrawing from his 401k. Key thing here, Mark, is like, leave your 401k alone. Don't roll it over or roll it into a new 401k if you choose to move. The prioritization, it kind of comes back to the financial planning thing of what we don't know is like how much money you're gonna need to spend between ages 55 until you start social security.

Can you survive on the basis of that Roth or do you need to tap into that brokerage account? And also you can use that, he asked another question. What do I do with the brokerage account? In the meantime, obviously either leave it invested or you can use money from the brokerage account to fund your Roth IRA contributions.

So you can sort of like siphon that money into the Roth from that point. I've already, this has been double-checked by Bill Arturonian, so it's not, you're not doing anything wrong from that standpoint. But you can also free up some cash flow and that creates maybe another scenario there.

The last one is-- - And the other thing is, sorry, the other thing is I'm a big proponent of young people enjoying their money and spending it. But to your point of if there is any inkling of I wanna retire early, maybe you don't decrease your savings at all and keep putting the money in your, putting into these.

- Well, it goes back to the first or the second question that you answered, which was about the margin of safety. It's just creating that scenario for what if? What if things change? And yeah, I mean, some people just aren't into spending money like others are. They have a very low bar in terms of what they get enjoyment out of.

So where else should that money go? And just save it into the brokerage account so that you do have more flexibility if that's the scenario that Mark's in. And then if you're in a sabbatical situation where you wanna take a break, have your Walter Mitty moment, then I'm still looking at 401(k) up to the match.

And then from there, I'm looking at brokerage or Roth, depending on how much I'll need to spend during that period that I'm-- - Walter Mitty, not a bad movie. - Yeah. - That was underrated. - Yeah, like that one a lot. - Never saw it. - Every time I hear the name Mark though, I think about that pregame speech with the basketball team.

He's like, "We're rocking with Mark 'cause Mark's rocking with us." Have you seen that? (laughing) - No. - It's hilarious. - All right, one more question, Duncan. - All right, last but not least, we have a question from Rob. I have two stocks I've held since the late '90s, Cisco and Intel.

They were originally bought by my father as part of my college savings, and I'm assuming he never sold them since I was in college during a dot-com crash. They make up 23% and 16% of my investing account, respectively. This account is separate from my wife's and my retirement accounts, which we max out.

The remainder of the account is in a range of ETFs. Cisco and Intel have not performed great, and I'm concerned about not being diversified. Is it better to dollar-cost average out of these two stocks or sell all at once so I can diversify immediately? Love the show and your movie recommendations heavily influence our nightly movie selection.

- There we go. I just gave Rob Walter Mitty, underrated movie. - Those are two rough stocks to have held for that long. - I'm surprised. So yeah, John, if you throw up the chart-- - Props to Rob Sr., or whatever Rob's dad's name is, Diamond Hands, Rob Sr., for holding on for that long.

That's impressive. - It really depends when they bought them. So John, if you throw up the chart here, on a price basis alone, Cisco and Intel are still, they're both at the same place. They're roughly 37, 38% below the highs from 1999. Now, it really depends if Rob's dad bought them in '97, '98, or '99, how they're doing, 'cause you probably did pretty good if you set the run-up.

But these stocks have underperformed massively on the next chart, John, the S&P 500 since 1999. The S&P's up 400%, Intel's up 100, and this is with dividends. Cisco's up 37%. Now, these stocks have done a little bit better lately, but you went through a huge period, and I'm guessing Rob probably never even looked.

That's right, that was such a big part of his brokerage account, got 'em handed down. I wonder, Nick, before we get into the financial planning aspects of this, how much does psychology play a role between if you bought these stocks versus someone else bought 'em? Because I feel like if these coming from someone else, it's a lot easier to rip the band-aid off and just get these out of my face, I'm done with them, they're losers, versus I bought them, I have to wait 'til they come back for us.

Is there a psychological element there? There is, and it's more of not selling than to sell, because it was a gift, or also because, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people around here who have inherited the stock of an oil company, and it's just, I mean, it's crushed 'em, or it's just held them back, and they can't get themselves to sell it.

In some cases, I've heard, not personally, but anecdotally, I've heard of people saying that on their deathbed, they said, they were told, "Do not sell this stock." Like, "Don't sell any of my Exxon stock, "or my Nivera stock, seriously, yes." Wow. So it's the opposite. That's gonna be Duncan with Oatley on his deathbed.

He's gonna say, "Babe, don't sell my Oatley stock." 100%. Just don't pass it on to any children, yeah. Don't do that to 'em. So that might be Rob's scenario. You can't say no to that. You have to be diamond hands at that point. If you're getting a death wish from someone-- I think there's an element of guilt involved in selling a stock.

You kinda get married to the stock in that way. - I'm sorry, but the finance brain in me would go, "Sorry, Mom and Dad, I'm selling this tomorrow." I'm not adhering to your wishes. - And I would be the opposite. I would say, "Oh, I feel bad." I would maybe sell a little bit of it at a time.

But props to him. I mean, especially the point of diversification, which we kinda talked about earlier. It would be impossible for me. Like, I could look at a chart, and like you said, it depends on when you bought it, right? You could have crushed the S&P over time period, but I could not stand for lagging everything else for an extended period of time.

Like, several years in a row where my Cisco and my Intel are flat or negative, and the market's ripping. That would just-- - So how do you balance the potential tax ramifications? I don't know if there's a stepped-up basis here, if you got 'em handed down. So maybe there aren't really losses that he's sitting on versus the psychology behind, "I just wanna get out of these." So how do you balance the taxes versus the behavioral side of things?

- I mean, what I thought about for this situation was that there's maybe some reluctance to sell or some regret. I mean, clearly, this is a burden for him and he wants, or that's what I'm picking up. It's a burden for him, he wants out of it. The way I look at it is you're swapping one asset for another, maybe an index fund, let's say.

So something more durable, more reliable. He's not going to cash. So that should lessen the regret. And if you think about Rob's future, the best portfolio is the one that has the fewest burdens. I would love to, in a perfect world, you could just sell it all at once and move on and put that behind you.

But taxes may be, and guilt may be something that comes into the picture. So I think that there's just, Rob has to do what's best for himself. It's his financial plan. He has to, if he's not gonna do it all at once, if there are tax implications, then he can do quarterly selling, which is probably the most common route.

You have a quarterly cadence where you sell a portion of the stock, 20, 25%. There's some tax planning that's involved there. But the other questions are, do you have any tax-less carry-forwards? Could you tax-less harvest right now? Do you plan to make any meaningful, charitable contributions this year? If he can combine tax planning with investment planning and financial planning, that's a home run for him.

- Yeah, and I guess if you did that slower over dollar cost average, that gives you time to think about these things as well. Obviously, not that you can't do it, do all those things by selling at once, but I think you'd give yourself some more time to think through those different routes.

- I'm not leaving you a single share of Oatly, Ben. - Okay. - A single share. - No, I don't get it. (laughing) All right. Thanks, as always, to Nick for coming in to help, to Duncan for calling in from Disney. We appreciate all of your questions. As always, remember, askthecompoundshow@gmail.com.

It's gonna be a good year. We've got new guests lined up already. Can't wait. - Oh yeah, happy new year. - Happy new year. Yep, this is the last time I'll say it. And we will see you next time. - See you, everyone. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)