Q&A: Living in a Tiny Home, Berkshire Hathaway, and Bitcoin ETFs

0:00Hey, everyone, and welcome back to The Rich Habits Podcast, a top 5 business podcast on Spotify. Before we jump into this episode, just want to give a general warning that myself, Robert, or the Rich Habits Podcast Instagram account, or TikTok account for that matter, will never DM you asking you for cryptocurrency or money in general. We just had one of our followers unfortunately get scammed by a fake account out of hundreds upon hundreds of dollars, and we feel terrible about it. We're not the ones doing this, and there's nothing we can really do to stop it. We try to verify all of the accounts here, but please just do not ever, ever send money to anyone on the internet pretending to be us.

0:41Just don't send money to people on the internet, right? Just don't do that. Yeah. Before you do any investments thinking it's me or Austin or anyone else, the general rule of thumb is always make sure to do a Zoom call or a FaceTime call with them first before you sign anything and send any money anywhere. Because at the end of the day, we can't do anything about it. And so just be careful and always check the username and verify with us. And one last note there, having that person send you an audio message is not the same thing as jumping on a Zoom call or a FaceTime with them, right? AI, especially voice AI is super powerful.

1:19And I think that there are definite times that people have almost been scammed by someone pretending to be Robert or myself because there's so many examples of our voice right now on the internet. So please just do not send anything to anyone. That is never a good idea. With that being said, you all might know public.com as the all-in-one investing platform, but now they've launched options trading. And with it, they're doing something no other brokerage has ever done before. Public is sharing 50 % of their options trading revenue directly with you, the customer. So whenever you trade options on public, you get something back.

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2:33If you want to read the full disclosure, it's in the podcast description below. And as always, this is for US members only. Now, our first question on this episode of the Rich Habits podcast question and answer edition comes from Neil. Neil says, which Bitcoin ETF should we choose? There are so many to choose from. Robert, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And for me, I just always want to own the underlying asset in most cases, and especially with Bitcoin. So I haven't really done a deep dive on which ones are the best. You can obviously look at BlackRock and ARK and some of the others.

3:08But for me, I want to own the underlying asset because I don't need the additional layers of costs or management in that asset class. So that's how I look at it. But I'd love to hear your take. Yeah, so I think the iShares iBIT, I-B-I-T ETF is a pretty good one. It's sponsored by iShares, which is BlackRock. They've now closed in on, I think, almost 10 billion in assets under management in only five or six weeks now. It's listed on the NASDAQ, which means there's ample liquidity and their custodian is Coinbase, which is, of course, the best of the best. I think what's interesting about this, though, is you have to think about the management fees that you mentioned there, Robert.

3:45I don't pay management fees to own the underlying asset itself. I would have to pay, however, management fees to own the Bitcoin ETF. And the only reason I'd want to own the Bitcoin ETF is if it was inside of some sort of retirement account that I wasn't able to get direct exposure to Bitcoin, right? I can go to my Coinbase account or public account and just buy Bitcoin straight up. I couldn't exactly do that inside of like a Roth IRA or a 401k at work, right? So I think what's also really important to mention though, Robert, is the momentum that these Bitcoin ETFs have seen just year to date, right?

4:16The new nine, I think is what they're coined. Bitcoin ETFs now have over 300 ,000 cumulative Bitcoin under custody as every new dollar invested into these ETFs need to be deployed one for one into Bitcoin itself, right? So it's like if someone goes out and, you know, let's say an ETF takes in a billion dollars in AUM assets under management in one day, that company then, the ETF issuer has to take that billion and go buy Bitcoin from Coinbase or Fidelity, whoever their custodian is, right then, right there that day to make sure they have that same one-to-one liquidity. Now that's 300 ,000 Bitcoin in only six weeks.

4:51I mean, Robert, that's six weeks. What's going to happen over the next six months, six years, right? This stuff is just getting started. Yeah. I mean, one way to look at this is you look at that from a liquidity standpoint of how much AUM is coming into the markets every single day right now. Then you look at the, we have the halving in under 60 days from now. So then that puts further constraints on the available Bitcoin that's in the market. So that's why I think we're going to see over the next, let's call it four to 18 months, a tremendous run up on Bitcoin, potentially Ethereum. And then obviously the altcoins will follow.

5:28So it's exciting, exciting times. And I think we can already see a bunch of that happening right now. Yesterday was an amazing, amazing day in cryptocurrency. And I just think that there's so much leading into this hype cycle, into this bull run. And there's so much good news that it's going to be interesting to see whose predictions end up winning as far as where one Bitcoin will be from a price perspective. Let's call it by the end of this bull run or the top of this bull run. So that's going to be fun. Yeah. And as always, no one can predict the top. They can't predict the bottom. They don't know when or why or how, but we're all part of it.

6:03That's why we only allocate 5 % to 15 % of our total assets inside of this asset class, right? That's about what I think the average person should have because, you know, you do see a lot of volatility with cryptocurrency, right? It's only been around for about a decade, whereas the S &P 500 and real estate and things like that have been around for several decades and continue to show at performance. So really good question by Neil here. Our next question comes from CR Norris. CR says, I'm 32 years old and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of my high interest debt. Right now, my fiance and I, thankfully, are on the same page that we need to pay this debt off and we are aiming to do that by October of 2024.

6:40However, you guys talk a lot about a Roth IRA. Should I be investing into my Roth IRA while I try and use the snowball method to pay off my high interest debt? Robert, what's the answer to this question? No, no, no. As Austin and I say, every day of every week of every year, you can't out invest high interest debt. Please, please, please understand the math. You want that positive arbitrage going to your favor and opening the Roth and getting all of those wonderful investments we talk about would not work in your favor because the high interest debt is just too much to overcome. So I think you're on the right track.

7:18It's a great question. And I'm so happy that you're hitting it head on because you have to get that handled first and foremost so you can get cash flow positive in your financial journey. And you won't do that with 30 % interest. It's just not going to happen. And just as a reminder here, too, right, like you're 32 years old. You've got 30 more years of investing ahead of you. And if you make a promise to yourself, a commitment to max out your Roth IRA every single year, I can say with certainty you will retire a millionaire. Like don't even sweat it. You're probably thinking, oh my gosh, it's almost March.

7:52I can't touch my Roth until October is what these guys are saying. What happens over? I mean, that's probably$5 ,000. Like, oh my gosh, it's so much money invested. It's like, listen, man, it's so much, so much, so much better of an idea to pay off the high interest debt. You mentioned the snowball method, which we really like, right? Any debt payoff method's great. We recommend, however, the avalanche method because it focuses on the high interest debt first, right? It's more mathematically sound. It saves you more money over your debt payoff period. However, paying off any debt, especially high interest, is a really good idea from our perspective there.

8:23So maybe consider switching to the avalanche method, especially since you have all this high interest debt. But at the end of the day, if you're debt free by October 2024, we are going to be thrilled for you. Yeah, and so many people, it's crazy in our DMs. You know, they're like, I'm 37 and it's too late and I'm 42 and it's too late. It's just crazy. It's not too late. You're far from too late. You can do a ton of damage financially to set yourself up in 10 to 20 years. So stop thinking you're too late. It's all about making the adjustments as early as you can so you can make up for that lost time, but it's never too late.

8:59Stop worrying about it. Great question, CR. Our next question comes from D 'Angelo. D 'Angelo says, quick podcast question for you guys. How do I go about investing in trying to buy a house? Should there be a balance or just stick to one objective first? Oh gosh, what a good question. So I like to approach this and I'm just going to ramble here for a second, Robert, then I'll let you jump in because I tried to balance it myself, call it four or five years ago. How I approached it was investing something was always my bedrock, right? And that something for me was my Roth IRA. I always want to make sure that I was doing my best to max out my Roth IRA every single year because I want to make sure that I have a wonderful nest egg in retirement come 65 years old.

9:41So for me, having that$500 or so per month going toward my Roth IRA was awesome. And then anything on top of that was like, okay, I could use this for saving for a down payment for a house type money, right? And that was, I think for me, it was a two and a half, three year process to save up for a down payment, which by the way, was only$10 ,455 for me at the time. Your boy wasn't balling by any stretch of the imagination. So I was trying to invest and save for a down payment, do all these different things. It worked for me. I loved what happened. I loved the house I was able to purchase and it was a great investment for me.

10:13But I definitely did the balanced approach where I want to make sure I'm investing while also saving for a down payment. With that being said, I could see where someone says, I'm going to pause investing, not stop completely, but pause it for maybe two years of a timeframe there. So I could then save an extra, I mean, if I had done that, that'd have been an extra$15 ,000, right? So I would have gone from 10 ,000 to 25 ,000, which would have been a larger down payment, perhaps for a larger house or just to get rid of PMI. So I could see both sides of the equation. For me personally, I'm always trying to invest my money.

10:45I always want to make sure my money's working for me in the stock markets, in cryptocurrency, in everything else that we've got in our sort of portfolios now. But that's how I've approached this in the past and how it has worked out for me. Robert, what's your perspective on trying to buy a house while also trying to invest? Yeah, I'm going to put a little bit of a different wrinkle on this. I definitely agree with Austin to do both. I wouldn't do one versus the other. And certainly without knowing your age and your overall situation, I wouldn't even be considering buying a single family primary home right now.

11:15What I would do if I were you, assuming you're 33 years old, we don't know. I would look at house hacking by buying a duplex, triplex, or a quadplex. I would look at using the Fannie Mae 5 % down mortgage because it's very favorable and you can keep a lot of that money that you're talking about in your own pocket so you can invest. So I would do both. I would look to house hack. I would not buy more than I need and really get that first investment out of the way. So that way, when it is time to get that primary home, you have both. You have your base through your investing and you've had that extra money now because you only put 5 % down rather than 10 or 20%.

11:54So that way in two to three years from now, you're just really set up well. Hopefully if you buy that duplex, triplex or quadplex, the tenants are paying your mortgage. So that gives you more money every month to put towards investing. And you're just in a really, really good position. I couldn't agree more with you, Robert. I think what's just really important here is that D 'Angelo's thinking and asking these questions, right? How do I invest and buy a house and do all these things right? Congrats, D 'Angelo, on being an absolute stud. We know you're going to be awesome with your money in 2024 and beyond.

12:23And if you end up buying the house, let us know. We'll throw you a little housewarming party. Who knows? All right. Our next question comes from Jalicia. Jalicia says, hey, everyone, I'm from Mississippi, and I'm 33 years old. My question is, if I want to retire early and live off of my dividends, which dividend stocks should I be buying to get the best return? And a quick follow up to that is what brokerage account should I be investing the money through so I can receive the dividends in the most tax efficient way? What a really, really good question here, Robert from Jalicia. I'll take a first stab at this.

12:55So if you want to retire early, The definition of that means retiring before the traditional retirement age of 65. But something a lot of people don't know is that you can actually gain access to your 401k, Roth IRA, and other retirement-specific accounts as early as 59 1⁄2. But I'm assuming you want to retire even before that, which means probably in your 40s, maybe even early 50s. So if you want to gain access to your money before 59 and a half without paying a big amount of penalties and fees, that means you have to invest this money through a traditional brokerage account. Now, what I'm doing myself is I'm investing into three different ETFs that are focused on dividends.

13:37The first one is called SCHD. This ETF essentially focuses on big dividend aristocrat companies, companies who've been paying dividends to their shareholders now for a couple of decades that also have been growing their dividend payments consecutively year over year. Not just paying me a dollar per share this year, but is expected to pay a dollar 10, a dollar 20, dollar 40 per share next year. They're growing their dividend payments. Think like Visa or MasterCard. These companies, they pay a small dividend, but the growth on those dividends year over year is insane. The other two ETFs, which you guys are actually going to be familiar with, is SPYI and QQQI.

14:18These are two ETFs that help round up my dividend investing portfolio to help me focus on exposure of the S &P 500 and the NASDAQ 100, while also paying me a very, very high distribution yield of about 13 % when you blend the two of them together. So that's how I approach this exact same equation. I do it inside of a traditional brokerage account like public. And I also just invest into those three dividend ETFs. I cash out those monthly dividends and I use it to live my life. Yeah, I think that's a great way to cover it. And yes, there are individual stocks as well that you can look at. I would do your research.

14:55I like Lowe's, Verizon Wireless, John Deere. And also one of Austin's favorites, and it was a really good call out a couple of years ago, was ticker symbol O, Realty Income. That's another good one as well. So there's a lot of ways to do this, but Jalicia, I really love this question. And Austin, I think you nailed it. Not much I can really add to that, but a great strategy. As long as you're balanced out and you're not specifically just focusing on dividend investing, I think you'll be great. And it's just a really good question and well thought out. Totally. And if you do want to be like a psycho like me and just focus on dividend investing so you can retire super early, nothing wrong with it.

15:33But to Robert's point, you're not going to see that capital appreciation, right? Dividend stocks tend not to go to the moon like we've seen NVIDIA do lately, right? Like they just don't see that crazy upside potential via price. So when you are doing this, Jalicia, just be prepared to see a lot of slow and steady up into the right versus a crazy rocket ship like you might see with other stocks. Okay, before we jump into our next question, I just want to remind everyone that Public is officially the cheapest way to trade options. That's because they're doing something no other brokerage has done before.

16:05They're sharing 50 % of their options revenue directly with you, the customer. Whenever you trade options on Public, you get something back, minimizing your transaction costs. So go to Public.com and activate options trading before March 31st to lock in your lifetime rebate. Public.com, the cheapest way to trade options. Our next question comes from Caleb. Caleb says, hey guys, I've been binging the episodes recently and I'm not sure if you've talked about this one yet. What are your thoughts on manufactured homes? I want to get into real estate. I live in New York, but it seems impossible to buy any real estate here with a household income of only$100 ,000 a year.

16:44Oh, Caleb. Okay. So my perspective is I only want to be putting money into assets that can appreciate in value, right? This is why I don't go out and buy boats or jet skis and things like that. Like I used to have a jet ski, which is cool. But I guess I'm saying is like, I don't want to tie up a bunch of my liquid cash asset net worth, right? Into something that's going to go down in value. Cars are a great example of this. that's why I'm thinking like, wait a second, I don't know if I want to put a lot of my money into a prefabricated home or a tiny home or a trailer knowing when I buy it for$80 ,000, it's going to only be worth$20 ,000 in seven years, right?

17:28It's like, great, I just lost$60 ,000 where I could have put$80 ,000 in the stock market. And over that same seven year period, it would have doubled to$160 ,000. So I just always think about the opportunity cost of putting my money into something that's going down in value? So my answer is no, but I think Robert has a different answer. I think it's a great question, Caleb. And there's no doubt that there is a shortage of affordable housing in America today. So I think it's kind of twofold. Austin's probably correct that there is a chance and there is depreciation in some of these manufactured homes.

18:01I think it depends on what kind, what location, what the setup is. But in my opinion, there is a great need for affordable housing and manufactured homes generally play into that, whether it's a tiny home or whatever you want to call it, a boxable home. So for me, I think it's a really interesting investing category right now. And for instance, I am buying back a property that I used to own in Toledo, Ohio, where I'm from because of one reason. It has three separate outlots connected to the primary home. And because they're still separated, I can legally put three ADUs, additional dwelling units on that property, giving me four sources of income, the primary home and the three ADUs.

18:44Now these ADUs would be considered manufactured homes technically. And so I look at it this way, maybe the capital appreciation for each individual property isn't as great as a single family home. I don't know. I think the jury is still out on that, but I look at it from the income perspective. I have done the research on this particular property that each ADU should rent for$750 a month. And so for that, it beats the 1 % rule. I'm going to have a very low cost to make this happen because I already own the property and the outlots. So I think it's all dependent, but this could be a good strategy for you.

19:20You just have to do the research and really figure out is the capital appreciation there? because in a market like where Austin lives, let's say Nashville and the surrounding area, you might have capital appreciations on a primary home of six, eight, 10, 12 % a year. Whereas where I'm from in Toledo, Ohio, you look at if you get capital appreciation of two or 3 % a year, you're doing okay. So I think it's all number dependent, location dependent, and really depends on what you're looking to do in this sector. But I think it's a good thought process. I'm actually going through the process myself because I'm looking at it that I can get for around$170 ,000.

20:01I can get three rental incomes from one property. So I think it's just area dependent and really do your numbers to understand where you're at. Yeah, Caleb. I mean, if you've got the desire to generate income, then maybe this could be a good idea. Like what Robert's doing, if you have the desire to live in it, then I'm kind of back of like, well, it's probably going to depreciate in value. So maybe not a good idea. I think, honestly, I mean, you live in New York. See, how I also think about this too, Robert, is like, what's keeping this guy in New York? $100 ,000 a year household income is marvelous all around the country except New York.

20:38I mean, think about Toledo, Ohio, dude. How far would$100 ,000 a year go in Toledo, Ohio or any parts of Ohio, right? Even here in Nashville, Knoxville. Even here in Florida. Yeah, dude. So like, I just think about like, Caleb, I'm rooting for you, man. Trust us. We're both on your team here, dude. But like, if there is a world where you can continue to keep a high, call it 70, 80, 90, 100 ,000 year household income somewhere else in the country, and your dream is to buy a house, you could absolutely move somewhere else, have a great income and own a house that does appreciate for sure over a longer period of time there versus trying to dabble and figure out modular homes and manufactured homes and stuff like that.

21:14So it's just such a tough question, man. It's not again, something I wouldn't do myself, but it seems like Robert would do it from like an investment perspective, but from like a consumer perspective, maybe just like be weary. Yeah, I agree. That's a great way to look at it again. It's not a one size fits all plan. And I really like the question because it gets us thinking outside of the box. And I happen to be just right now going through this exact question with a property in Ohio. So it's exciting for me to really run the numbers and take all of these elements into consideration to make sure for myself that it's a good investment long-term.

21:47Great question, Caleb. Our next question, speaking of purchasing houses, comes from Silva. Silva says, Hello. Thank you all for the eye-opening podcast and the awesome content. It's helped me so much with my financial organizational skills. Here's my question. I'm 31 years old. How do I define my home price budget? I have an annual income of$100 ,000. Robert, we've had so many people in their 30s ask questions today. This is so fun. I love it. I love it. And the questions are so in depth. That is one of the best parts of the rich habits podcast. When we think back a year, when we first started getting questions, I felt like it was so many rudimentary questions.

22:24And now it's like they're getting more and more and more advanced. And I love this because also like you pointed out, the ages of these questions, these advanced questions are getting younger and younger. If we're making a difference and getting more and more people in their twenties and thirties thinking like investors and really following through. We've done our job and I'm going to sleep well every night for the rest of my life because this is awesome because we weren't really taught this in high school or college and now people are getting younger and younger and really crushing it financially.

22:57So this is awesome. Robert, what do you think about this question? This is a great question, Silva. And the general rule of thumb that I don't really agree with is that you should be able to look at your budget as 30 % all-in ownership cost of your gross monthly income. 30 % of gross monthly income. That's the general rule of thumb. In my opinion, based on inflation, the cost of everything right now, I think you should shoot lower because so many people end up house broke. That is a term where you just have too much house for your income and there's just too many variables. So I would shoot for 25 % if you could.

23:34and a max maybe of all-in cost of 27 or 28%. That would be my opinion, but I'd love to hear Austin's take and make sure you truly understand what the all-in cost is. So many people go, oh, my all-in cost is payment, insurance, PMI, and lawn mowing. And you forget about HOA, this, this, this, all these other things. So please understand your all-in cost when making this calculation. So Robert, you use the word gross. I think gross is very important when we think about like annual income and like stuff like that. But let's shift away from gross to take home because, you know, with gross, there's like 401k contributions and health insurance, like all these other confusing things.