MI Rewind: Investing Is Your Superpower w/ Shinobu Hindert

0:00You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we've started to reshare some older episodes that are my favorites for a few reasons. One, we get a bunch of new listeners each week, so the new listeners may not have heard this episode before. Two, even if you've been listening for a while, you may have missed this episode when it originally came out. Or three, even if you've heard it before, it can be a great episode to learn from again. If you've already heard this episode or you're not interested in hearing it, feel free to just skip it. There's no harm in that and you can pick up with our new episodes next week.

0:34All right, guys, that's all I had for you for this new intro. Everything going forward is going to be from the original show. Hope you guys enjoy it.

0:46In this episode, I talk with Shinobu Hinder about her journey as a financial advisor in the corporate world to branching out on her own, why she wrote her new book, even though there were already so many personal finance books in existence, the relationship between money and women, where she thinks new investors should start with their money journey, and a bunch more. Shinobu is a certified financial planner, money expert, and creator of Empowered Planning. As a financial advisor, she created personalized financial plans for high net worth individuals all across the country, overseeing more than$350 million in client assets.

1:21Now she has taken all her knowledge and created a simple, proven method for teaching personal finance. She has delivered over 500 live workshops covering a wide range of topics, from budgeting to estate planning. Her goal is to simplify the complex world of investing and empower women everywhere to reach financial freedom. I hope you guys enjoy this conversation with Shinobu Hindert. Let's dive in. You're listening to Millennial Investing by the Investors Podcast Network, where your host, Robert Leonard, interviews successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation.

1:58Robert Leonard Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Millennial Investing Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Robert Leonard. And with me today, I have Shinobu Hindert. Welcome to the show. Shinobu Hindert Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Robert Leonard Tell us a bit about your background and how you got to where you are today. Jennifer Leonard Sure. Well, I'm a first generation American. So my father was born and raised in Kenya in Africa. My mom was born and raised in Japan. And they had come to the United States to essentially be together. And my dad had lost his parents from an early age. I had to become financially independent early on.

2:43And as I was growing up, my dad made it very clear that we didn't have relatives in the United States. So it was really important for him to share everything that was going on in their lives, the good, bad, the ugly, and especially with finances. And he kind of sat me down when I was really young and just say, you need to know how to make it on your own because he had lost his parents. So when I went to college and I was studying economics, I'm like, well, how do you work with economics when you graduate? And I was kind of looking around like, I don't know where I fit into the corporate world and got an internship at Smith Barney, which is now Morgan Stanley.

3:23And I loved it. I thought it was really cool. Every day was different. I actually worked for a commodities desk at a time. So I was taking orders from them and we'd get these certificates that smelled like coffee because it was from a coffee guy. And I just thought it was really interesting because even though my dad was careful in teaching me and my mom about money, I didn't know anything about investing. So it was kind of this whole other world to me. And I was sitting there going, wait a minute, you can kind of figure out all of these things and build wealth and do it on your own. And I just was drawn into it right away.

3:59So that's really what got me started in the industry. And it was really from there, I just felt like, to be honest with you, I think I made a lot of those decisions out of fear. of if I do lose my parents or what if I am in a tight crunch, am I going to be able to figure out how to get out of it? I think that kind of survival attitude that my dad had, he really passed it on to me. And I just wanted to be set for my life financially in the event of this disaster that my dad kind of had put in my mind was going to happen at any time. After leaving Smith Barney, you went to Fidelity. You had a very successful career as a financial advisor.

4:40What made you want to leave that successful career that you had built to branch out on your own? It wasn't really my first choice, to be completely honest. I had become a mother at the time, and my husband was working a full workday schedule, and I was traveling at least one week out of every month. And when we looked at getting care essentially for my son, it was kind of ridiculous where we we're going to need to have someone come at 6am or 6.30 and then have someone there afterwards. You're talking about a 14-hour day. And it just didn't feel good. So I was working. I tried it for, I think maybe about four months.

5:20And it just wasn't working for our family. So I didn't want to stop working. But when I looked at jobs that I could do part-time with companies with my background as a certified financial planner, there really weren't a lot of options. So I kind of did this because I needed to make this work for my life. And when I had stopped working, my phone blew up. I had friends from all over because I had grown up in the East Coast, moved to the West Coast, and people knew I stopped working. And they were just asking me personal questions about finances. I was like, hey, I'm trying to buy this house. And this guy's telling me this.

5:54Could you take a look at something for me? And I know you used to invest. What should I be investing in? Just a lot of these questions were coming up. I was having these really fun conversations. Well, fun for me. And then they would leave the conversation going, hey, where can I get more information about this? And I would search around online and try to send them some articles. But I really looked at this like, gosh, this is kind of difficult because you're asking people to do a ton of independent research, put the pieces together and make decisions about their life. So that was really the genesis of my company was I wanted to provide step-by-step guidance and doing it in a way for people to take action and not just talk about theoretically what a situation would look like.

6:35And one of those ways you're doing that was through your book that you've written. And I want to talk about your mindset and thought process on that book. And I don't mean this in a way that it shouldn't have been written or anything like that, but I just want to know how you approached it and how you were able to do something that people were already doing. And I think that's helpful for people listening because a lot of times people aren't willing to try something because they're like, oh, 10 people are already doing it. There's already companies doing that. Maybe I shouldn't do it too. So there were already a bunch of personal finance books written.

7:07So I want to know what made you want to write another one about money? When you sat down to write it, what was your guide to making it different than the rest? My guide was really taking clients that I was working with and trying to talk directly to them because that was the biggest hiccup of when I'm talking about investing, I can go really, really deep and start talking about economic cycle, talking about how to adjust your portfolio. But if I'm having a conversation with someone that's like, I don't know where to open a brokerage account or what company is good, there's these small steps that people really need guidance on so they can take action.

7:44And when I started in this industry, there were high minimums to open an account. There were fees to open an account. There were fees for trading. The industry has completely shifted over the last few years, but they haven't provided levels of education to inform everybody of how to do that, which is really why Robinhood has gotten into a lot of trouble. Because they're kind of providing the platform, providing the easy access without the oversight, without the education. And then people were inadvertently making decisions that weren't healthy for them financially. So the genesis of the book was really, if I'm tasking someone, and it's really important to me that everyone gets invested, that people are leveraging the stock market to better their financial future.

8:25Well, how are they going to do that? And I just really went from step one. What is the first thing they should be looking at all the way to by the end of the book, they're invested, their investments are automated, they know how to check up on them. And that's really how I went about the book. So there's definitely a lot of financial books out there and I have not read all of them, but perusing some of the ones that I really liked, because I thought they had great information, but not always a specific action step to take. And that's what I wanted to create in this book. Robert Leonard One of the things you do is specifically focus on money and women, which isn't necessarily your only focus, but I know it's a big focus for you.

9:01So I want to talk a bit about how you're seeing the relationship between money and women change over the last few years and how you expect that trend to continue to evolve into the future. Yeah, right now, at least in my age groups, I would say professional women in their 30s are really curious because this is a confusing time. Let's say you're 60 or you're 55 years old. Maybe your one financial goal is retiring. If you're 21, you just graduated, you have a lot of college debt. Maybe your one financial goal is to try to chip away at the student loan debt that you have. When you get to your late 20s, early 30s, life gets complicated.

9:39It could be buying houses, having children, attorney leaves, all of that. And a lot of the women that I'm working with, they're really hungry for the knowledge and they just didn't know how to get it. And they're getting more comfortable about talking about money. It's just been really, really taboo in the past. So it's changed in the sense where I think in a public setting, women are asking questions about it and opening up saying, I don't know this information. I want this information or asking for it. And then when you look at on a bigger scale, you have the baby boomer generation, where the industry at least is looking at this huge transfer of wealth that's going to happen over the next 15 years with women owning more of the wealth potentially in this country than men.

10:21So a lot of eyeballs have been on this from big financial firms, and it's kind of trickling down to our generation. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review. Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make pure feedback any less valuable. The tricky thing is finding qualified people who are interested and willing to help vet your investment ideas. That's why we built the Intrinsic Value Community. It's a place to connect, share ideas, learn, and get feedback. Nobody ever wishes they'd spent more time buried in spreadsheets, but connecting and building relationships with others who may be smarter on a topic than you, but who are also schooled in value investing, that's valuable.

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13:06To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Robert Leonard You mentioned Robinhood, and that kind of goes in line with my next question and my next few thoughts. And that said, I see too many new investors jumping right into the stock market, since that is the quote unquote sexy part of personal finance without ever having built the foundation first. I consider the first step of personal finance, the foundation, and then investing being like building the house on top of that foundation.

13:51And if you don't tackle the foundation first, there might not be one there at all, causing the house or what we call your investments to collapse. And then if there is a foundation there, but you don't know anything about it, that could also lead to a collapse. So where should new investors start with their money journey? Well, that's tricky because I put on my financial advisor hat, essentially, and I'm like, yes, build a foundation, have your emergency fund, get your spending in order. But what happens when kind of your everyday person goes to do that is then they don't get to the investing part because we're busy and they're trying to tackle that.

14:27And it's a lot of gathering information of your spending, where your accounts are, maybe where your debt is. And when most people do that, they then stop because it took them a week to gather all this information. They're looking at it on a Saturday morning and they're like, all right, I got this. I'm going to take some next steps next weekend. And then you kind of life happens. You forget, you don't have time to do it. And then three months go by and you're back at the same thing where you're gathering all of this data. So I would encourage people to, yes, look at getting invested and look at it more holistically.

14:57So if you are investing, I don't mean buy one stock because you're relying on one company. So essentially, what if someone in that company is fabricating information? You don't have control over that. If that gets blown up, I use the example of Volkswagen in my book where they cheated on an emissions test to get it passed in the United States. Well, it didn't matter if everyone else at Volkswagen was good or their earnings were good. You had someone that did something bad or illegal and their whole company stock price dropped. And then there's industry risk. So we saw that with COVID. If you were a travel leisure type company, it didn't matter how healthy your company was on the books.

15:40Everyone was terrified. We're going to get out of selling out of airlines, out of hotels. And they took a really big dip in the beginning. And then you have your market risk. So that's going to be like the financial crisis. Everyone suffered. It didn't matter if a company was good. That was pretty much a negative year for everyone except for government bonds. So when you take a look at risk, I would say when people are getting started, have an honest conversation with yourself of risk. Do you want to bet on one person at a company of doing that? Do you want to bet on one specific industry? Or are you looking at investing holistically that's going to work for you?

16:11So I'm a huge believer in making sure that your foundation is set because like you said, then your whole plan could collapse. But on top of that, maybe even simultaneously looking at investing from a more holistic point of view and really figure out what kind of risk you're comfortable taking. While we're building that foundation, one of those pieces is a budget. So how can a budget allow people to actually live a better, happier lifestyle rather than making it feel constricted? That's a great question because I talk about this all the time in my book, in my courses, with clients, of budgeting, I look at it like your lifestyle guide rather than this restrictive budget.

16:51And the reason is most of the goals that we have in life, there's a financial element that we need there to back it up, whatever it is that we want to do. If you meet someone and they're like, it's my dream to take 12 months and just travel all around the world, well, you need money to do that. If you want to own two homes so you can have a mountain house and then one where you have reception and service, again, there's financial backing that needs to go underneath that. So I look at it like, jot down what kind of life do you want to have? What do you want to have in your life? And it's completely okay to change that.

17:24But once you start to do that, you can back into that and say, okay, if I want to take an international trip, for me, that's really important. All of my family lives overseas. So I have to budget for those things. If I'm looking at it like, I can't go spend whatever it is. Oh, I can't go buy this at the grocery store. Oh, I can't go out to dinner with my friends another time because I'm spending too much money. That's like a sad boo-hoo story, right? That's not exciting for me. If I look at it like, if I can find a little bit more money at the end of every month so I can take my entire family to go on a safari in Kenya, that gets me excited.

17:59And when you look at that lifestyle, it's like, okay, I'll save for that. And I'm not going to look at it like, oh, I can't go shopping or I can't go get my hair done because I got to save and I'm just going to sit at my house and be a hermit. It's like, nope, we're going to do these things because I want to create this lifestyle of memories for my family, memories for my kids. So I'm really looking at the budgeting, finding out what your drivers are in life, what your passions are, and then building your finances behind that. Connecting those to the budget, to the lifestyle is where I think a lot of people have to disconnect because a lot of people I know, whether it be friends, family, that aren't interested in money, that's what they'll tell me.

18:35They're just not interested in money. They don't care about money. And I'm not one to push financial education or push any financial beliefs on somebody else. But when it comes up, I say, well, okay, I understand you don't care about money. You're not interested in learning all the nitty gritty about it. That's fine. But don't you have X, Y, and Z things that you want to do? Don't you want to go to, even as small as going to this concert or traveling to this place, you need money to do all of those things. And so you might not care about money and you might not want to know the nitty gritty, that's fine.

19:05But to get to do the things that you want to do, you need to have some sort of financial education, financial plan. Yeah, absolutely. Because money is never the goal, right? I don't meet a lot of people that are like talking to them, what are your goals? And they're like, I just want to have a lot of money, right? That doesn't excite anybody. I work in this field and I talk about money all the time in the stock market. I don't really care about money either. It's not like I want to sit in my house and who is that? Scrooge McDuck, where he's like diving into his piles of gold. That's not what I want to do with my life.

19:36And I don't need a lot of people that are like that. When people only care about money, maybe they're going to buy a bunch of computer screens, sit in their house all day and trade. That might be someone who's like, my goal is just to have more money. Most people that I'm working with or talking to aren't sitting in their house trying to trade just to make money. They want to have this lifestyle that they appreciate. And so whatever that is, if it's experiences. So I just try to tell people whatever life goal you have, there is a financial goal behind it. And we can kind of reverse engineer it to make sure you can do all of the things that you want to do.

20:11We just want to build around it. So what happens to, I think, in this age demographic is we try to hone in on one thing. It's like if someone's trying to save and to buy a home in Southern California, your first home might be$800 ,000, might be a million dollars. That's crazy. A lot of places, your first home is$350 ,000,$400 ,000. So when you want to buy a home in Southern California, you can't just sit and go, oh, I want to buy a home. And then that's the only thing you focus on because, well, what about do you want to go on vacation? What about all of these other things that are happening? And it gets confusing.

20:45So as much as people could really lay out their wishlist of all the things they want to happen between now and 10 years from now. Once you have those on paper, well, now let's create financial goals to back it up. And then over time, you can kind of tweak. And oftentimes people will do that to say, okay, wait a minute, I got to save this much. I got to invest to earn this amount of money so I can buy this house that I might not even like because I can only afford a$600 ,000 home somewhere in Southern California. I don't really want to do that. They shift their goals. Like maybe I'm going to move out of California in five years, but I'm going to be able to save X amount of money, take all these really awesome adventures, that's worth it to me.

21:25So it's not just an exercise of looking at money. It's an exercise of what kind of life do you want to live? And we have now the tools, the power to do it because the industry has become so friendly to get rid of all these nasty minimums and fees. I felt like before anything you did, it's like, I want to open an account. We slapped you in the face. Like, well, pay this fee. I want to buy a fund. It's like, you're punching the face. Okay, pay us this fee. It was just like all the time or nickel and diming everyone where that doesn't happen anymore. So everyone has access now. And I'm speaking of this from personal experience.

21:55When I first got started in money, I had a very fixed mindset when it came to this. I didn't have that connection between lifestyle and budget. And I also didn't realize that a budget could be dynamic and flexible. I always thought that a budget was rigid. And if you spent a dollar more in one category than you budgeted, then you were wrong for the month. And then something that was really influential for me was Ramit Sethi's book, I Will Teach You To Be Rich. And he talks a lot about this kind of dynamic budget and how you can spend lavishly on the things you love and cut mercilessly on the things you don't.

22:25And so that was really influential for me and really allowed me to connect my budget to my lifestyle and also realize that a budget is dynamic. And you and I, before this conversation started recording, we talked about how I raced dirt bikes. And for a lot of people, if they looked at my line item on my budget for dirt bikes, they would think that that was absurd, that I spend that much money on that. And it probably is in all reality. But on the reverse side, that's something that I'm super passionate about. So I'm okay to spend my money there. But then on the reverse side, something that I couldn't really care about, and that's where I would cut, is food.

22:57I want healthy food, but I don't really like to go out to eat that much. So I don't go out to eat. My grocery bill is super cheap. I almost cook and eat everything at home. So I save a lot of money that way. So it's this give and take and also a connection to my lifestyle that I think a lot of people are missing. And if you're missing it right now, It doesn't mean you can't get there because I was there at one point and I'm not there anymore. So it's something you can definitely get to. Yeah. And I kind of... The three why tests, and I have it in my book of any goal that you have, just ask yourself, why do you want it?

23:28Why is this important to me? And then you figure it out. So in this example, if someone I was working with are like, I need$40 ,000. And you're like, okay, that's what we're working on your goal for$40 ,000. Why do you need that? Well, well, why do you need to buy the van so I can take trips? I was like, well, why do you want to take trips? And they're like, well, when I was younger, my parents didn't have the money and we didn't really go on vacation. And there's all these national parks that I was never able to see. And I want to be able to take my kids on these trips to go see these national parks.