Episode 269: Preet Banerjee: A multi-dimensional analysis of the value of financial advice

24:52And they always stuck with me. And one of them was people who had financial insecurity in the household that they grew up in. They tended to have more financial agency and they tended to really know what they wanted more than people who maybe came from more privilege, never had to deal with any adverse consequences. And I really wanted to take a look at that. And it turns out that that is a pretty significant indicator of how well people do later on in life, is how financially insecure the household was that they grew up in. That's because they never want to replicate that feeling again. That is like a core memory for them that shapes a lot of their decision making, is avoiding financial scarcity.

25:30And then you have sort of the standard ones, income, assets, education, age. But I also wanted to look at, well, how much money did people bring into the relationship? What was your income when you started this relationship with whatever primary channel that you're working with? What is the level of investable assets that you brought in to the relationship? Who solicited who? And that was something that I wanted to explore more because, again, based on how the industry compensates financial practitioners, you are incentivized to go after people with money. You're not going to go after people necessarily who have no assets to invest.

26:07Everyone's got their sort of sore about, oh, we'll have a chat, but we're not going to take you on. The other thing is, generally speaking, really good advisors, as they get more experienced, they tend to lift their asset minimums in time and time. So the access to better quality advice goes away. So I wanted to see dive into that a little bit more. And then I also wanted to ask about people's preference to delegate decisions. So we know that there are some people who are just high income, high achievers, good decision makers in general, and they will choose a financial advisor maybe because they just don't have time and they just want to delegate and they're happy to pay.

26:44When I say they're happy to pay, they're happy to pay for like, you execute, be like my sounding board or what have you. And other people are like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm totally financially anxious. Teach me everything. I'm putting everything in your hands. And you would say that in that latter condition, the financial advisor has more of an impact, whereas in the previous condition, they're really just implementing. It's a qualitatively different type of relationship. So I wanted to look at that as well. How do most people in your sample get their financial advice? So if you look at the breakdown of how many people go into each channel, about 34 % were in the DIY channel.

27:2315 % were with independent financial advisors. social media was 12%. So 12 % of people in the sample identified social media as their primary channel of financial advice. Interesting. Full service, about nine. Branch financial advice, about nine. Print media, about six. So that accounts for about 85%, I think, of the total sample. Pretty diversified from that sense. I was kind of surprised at how many people pick social media as their primary channel. I did take a look. I don't think it's in the thesis, but I do remember taking a look at the people who pick social media as their primary channel, what was the other channels that they used?

27:58And it was primarily DIY, like OEO platforms. Very, very interesting. How do you determine whether a respondent has a financial plan? It was self-reported. So you have to take it with a grain of salt, I think, because you know that some people consider how much will I have at 65 projection as a financial plan. That's definitely something that I would do differently in a future study to drill down on. Well, that's the next question. What constitutes a financial plan in the research? Because it is more than just that projection. In my research, it was a self-reported, do you have financial plan?

28:31Was a financial plan created for you by the primary channel of advice? In terms of what it's defined as in the literature, the academic journals are maybe not as granular in their definitions, if there are many definitions, but in the practitioner journals, is really based on the CFP board's definition. And the practitioner journals, it's interesting. There's obviously a lot of work done on the value of financial planning in the journal financial planning. But one of the things that both academics and practitioners in terms of researchers have been saying for decades minimum is that there's still no real theory.

29:08There's no real academic theory of financial advice or financial planning. And what everyone kind of goes back to is theory from 50s, 60s, Ando and Modigliani, life cycle hypothesis of consumption smoothing over a lifetime. That's kind of like the backbone. Now, a lot of people have said, well, it should include this theory of insurance and all this stuff, but no one's really come together and sort of create. It's starting to now, I should say that there are now PhD programs in financial planning. And there was this movement not that long ago to say, we need to create this because in order to be taken seriously as a profession, some of the hallmarks are master's degree, doctoral degrees available, practitioner requirements and all this stuff.

29:52That's been lacking. When we hear about the profession of financial advice and financial planning, it's still in the early stages. That was incredible to read in your paper. I think you referenced another study that looked at the appearance of theory in the Journal of Financial Planning and it was like there was none. There was no discussion of theory Or very little at least. Which advice channel did you find to be the strongest predictor of having a financial plan? Money coaches, as you would expect, and independent financial advisors. There are, I think, different types of money coaches. There are maybe people who focus on cash flow and could fall under the category of money coaches, but there are many more who are CFP professionals, but they don't have a securities license.

30:33And so don't do anything on implementation, but this is a fast growing space, the money coach world. And as people become more agreeable to paying out of pocket for advice, that's a relatively new thing. Back when I was an advisor, I used to offer clients, you can pay me in, I think it was three different ways. We can do this traditional commission route. We can do fee-based or you can pay me by the hour. And I was at a big five full service brokerage. And I remember when I said to compliance, hey, can I charge by the hour? They said, we think so? Let's see if anyone else is doing that at the firm.

31:10And there's like one other team that was doing it. So this was back in the early 2000s. And they said, hey, talk to them and we'll just do what we're doing for them. And I would give people the choice and talk through the pros and cons. And more often than not, people said, I don't want to know. Have it embedded. But that's changed a lot in the last because there's just more access to information. People are talking about it more. People understand the impact of fees over a lifetime a little bit more. It's not maybe fully appreciated, but a lot of things have changed. Which advice channel has the highest amount of investable assets?

31:43So technically it was newsletter subscribers, which I think is a bit anomalous. There's only a handful of people in there. And while I did clean the data set for Three Sigma outliers, there's still, I guess, just enough in there with outsized level of assets that they actually showed up as the highest. But There were so few of them that I think you can pretty much discount that category, in which case it was full service advisors. And the reason for that is when you have a lot of money, a lot of people tend to have legacy family relationships with a big six institution. They tend to engage private banking and they have, we're talking$25,$50,$100 million.

32:25You tend not to get that as much in the independent channel. It exists, but it's rare. I think that's why they came out as the top channel by assets, followed by accountants. If you listed your accountant as your primary channel of advice, you also had very high levels of assets compared to other channels. What was the relationship between having a financial plan and investable assets? Oh yeah, this was amazing. Almost across the board, with few exceptions across the 18 channels, having a financial plan was associated with significantly more investable assets. It was like double if you used an accountant.

33:00Whoa. So if you had an accountant and you had X, but you had an accountant and you'd gotten a finished plan, it was like two X. Again, almost double at a full service bank. Again, I think there's some nuances of the full service channel because there's still a lot of people in full service who are primarily portfolio centric. But again, if you've got a big family estate, you tend to also get not only that person, but a team of estate planners and trust specialists and whatnot. And so if you have a financial plan at a full service institution, big difference. It was interesting. There was a significant difference, but it wasn't as big for the independent F8 channel.

33:37And again, I think because of the nature of full service relationships, quite unique. And so I think that explains that. But that's correlation, not necessarily causation, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, if you sell a business for a couple hundred million, was it the advisor who was responsible for that? Or do you have a couple hundred million? You're like, you know what? I need a lot of help. and I know that if something goes wrong, you're a big brand, I can sue you. I've got lots of lawyers, you've got lots of lawyers. So I don't think it was you go to an advisor because you meet the threshold of a million and you've got 100 million 10 years later.

34:08I don't think that's how it works. So what are the factors in your model that best explain the differences in the investable assets? Obviously having a financial plan was associated with having a lot more assets, but income before you started a relationship, big factor, the level of assets you brought into the relationship, when you started your relationship with that channel. Childhood communication is another aspect that I studied. And I think that's because I have always been tangentially involved in financial literacy and creating content for a long, long time. And I believe that there's value to that.

34:40And a lot of parents lament the fact that they don't even have the financial literacy to teach their kids about financial literacy. But what was interesting is just the level of communication about finances in the household that you grew up. It didn't control for what it was good information, not just the fact that you talked about money was associated with more investable assets later on in life. If you're interested in personal finance, which makes sense, obviously you're going to spend more time thinking about it and your decisions and consuming information. And these have positive impacts.

35:10Not having a pension, people who don't have a pension have to take it more seriously. That was something that I looked at in some of the early pilot studies as well. One of the things that I noticed that I think was maybe, I don't know, you deal with couples over back when I was an advisor. And both of them were teachers, both had good pensions. They had no other savings. And they kind of just relied on that and they didn't take their finances. I'm speaking very in a very general manner. They didn't maybe take it as seriously because they didn't feel they had to. That's a great sort of safety net.

35:40And that was what I found. Not having a pension made people, I guess, forced to make some of these decisions. Use of social media. So not as a primary channel, but as a secondary channel. So if you're using a financial advisor and you also use social media, you tend to be better off. If you use a traditional financial advisor and use an accountant, that's associated with having more money. Makes sense because if you have more complex tax situations, you probably have a lot of money. Being married, your age is correlated with investable assets, your income, current income, the length of use of a channel.

36:15And then a couple of the channels, full service FAs, independent FAs, and the DIY channel was associated with statistically more assets than other channels. Reading through that part of the paper on all the different elements and how they impact is super, super interesting. I had a lot of fun with the data for a very long time. Trying to tell a story out of that, It took, like of all the time I was working with the data, I would say the first 90 % of that time was just trying to figure it all out. Try to figure out what is the story that this data is telling. And the last 10 % of playing with that data is where everything really came together.

36:55And my supervisor and I, we decided to develop a progressive regression model. for each of the dependent variables, we start with this, even on its own, a pretty big regression, a lot of variables in there. But then we added in more controls and each successive iteration of that regression. So there's five models, each model having more controls than the previous. And what was really cool is to see how robust some of these effects were because they stayed consistent through a lot of the five models. And then as you add in some new ones, how there are new things that's kind of emerged. I'm probably the only person who found that interesting.

37:33I'm sure no one's going to read it, but I just want you to know that that was fun for me. I read it and I also found it interesting. So it's not just you. I appreciate you, Ben. Thank you. We talked about investable assets. Can you talk about which advice channel had the highest holistic wealth score? Yeah, Money Coaches by a pretty big margin. Wow. And that makes sense because they're not focusing on the investment implementation. So their focus is going to be more on holistic financial plans and being more well-rounded with the advice that they provide, which makes sense. So the holistic wealth score is a measure of the breadth of advice.

38:06And I'm assuming having a financial plan positively affected the holistic wealth score? Absolutely. Super robust across pretty much every channel. There were some channels where you could not get a financial plan, like a robo-advisor, et cetera. But for the channels where it was possible to have a financial plan, having a financial plan, there was a very robust and strong effect of an increase in the breadth of advice that people were getting, which makes sense because the financial plan is generally going to be very holistic. Can you talk again about the factors in your model that influence the holistic wealth score?

38:39The one I think that initially surprised me was the secondary channel use of social media, podcasts, and print media. If you read Rob Carrick's articles in the Globe and Mail, he'll talk about things other than just investing. So that's beneficial to the readers. People who listen to your podcasts, even though you have a lot of great papers talking about portfolio management, you also talk about things that are qualitatively super important to people like happiness and decision-making. And you talk about the benefits of financial planning. So people would not be attuned to the fact that financial advice is not just portfolio advice, unless they were relying on other sources of media.

39:19So in the aggregate, whereas most people going to a branch financial advisor or traditional financial advisors who have been predominantly compensated based on products, it's like two, three channels maybe that they can get an income on. That means it's two, three channels that they're gonna be providing advice on. But if you use social media, podcasts, print media, it is complimentary to the use of those channels. So don't just rely blindly on the channel of advice that you're using. Look to other sources of information to augment your financial journey, if you will. That's super interesting.

39:55So that's like, even if someone has an advisor and they've decided to delegate, having other sources of information, good information improves the overall situation. Yeah, it's a check and balance, I think. There's a lot of financial content creators out there. When I say there's a lot, there's also a lot of variation in quality. There's some just atrocious garbage out there. And then there's some really good stuff like Common Sense Investing, Ben Felix's channel. And when you use that in tandem with a channel of advice, it's good because it gives you things to talk about to maybe push back on, learn about.

40:30And maybe your advisor or channel of advice will say, oh, yeah, we can talk about that. Didn't know you wanted to. There's only so much time you can dedicate to individual client reactions as a practitioner. And it would be great if people were more informed. You can have more productive relationships. What time you have together can be much more efficient. The other thing that was in the model that explains differences in the holistic wealth score was the responsibility index, which I talked to earlier was who is delegating decisions for certain things. So this was an index that took a look at with respect to your savings rate.

41:06Who is more responsible for the level of contribution? You or your advisor? Did you decide, I'm going to save$1 ,000 a month, I just need someone to implement it? Or did someone come to you and say, you need to save$1 ,000 a month if you want to hit your goals? So the more responsible the individual was, the higher their holistic wealth score, which again is interesting because if you have more financial agency and you know more about personal finance, you're going to ask for advice on more areas of your household financial decision making. That's interesting. I think, Cameron, that's something that we talked with.

41:41I hope I'm getting this right. I think it was Islet Fischbach about the science of motivation and how for stuff like setting financial goals and savings rates and stuff like that, people will be much more engaged and motivated if they're the ones doing it as opposed to the advisor. That's exactly what you just said, Preetz. That's just a super interesting connection to make back to a past guest. I've also seen research, and you mentioned this earlier, and you were just talking about it, but I've seen at least one paper showing that more financially literate people are more likely to seek advice and more likely to benefit from advice.

42:08Yeah, absolutely. And there's a complementarity effect there. And again, that works really well for higher income households with higher assets because they can get more out of those relationships. But the flip side of that coin is for the people who arguably need more advice or need access to more advice, the mass market. If there is no financial literacy, the financial advice as a substitute for our lack of financial literacy, that relationship doesn't exist. It actually allows the industry, from what I've seen, to prey upon individuals, which is why you have financial salespeople sort of dominate the mass market as opposed to what I will say is professionals.

42:50Man, that happens in product innovation too, not just in the advice market. But I think if you look at the thematic ETFs and even cryptocurrencies, a lot of the clientele of that type of stuff is people with low financial literacy. So they're getting hammered, not just in the advice channel, but even in the product manufacturing channel. I think that's a perfect example. Which advice channel has the highest comprehensive financial confidence? DIY had the highest level of confidence because DIYs have the highest level of confidence generally, right? They think they can do it themselves. So that would hopefully come with a good level of confidence.

43:23How does having a financial plan affect the confidence? Yeah. Again, robust across almost all channels of advice. If you have a financial plan, your level of comprehensive financial confidence is strong pretty much across the port. That seems like one of the big findings from the paper is that regardless of channel and regardless of how valuable we think advice is, having a financial plan is huge on every metric that you looked at? Yeah, because portfolio management's commoditized now. And the value add is in everything outside of the portfolios. Now, I know there's some people are still stuck in the portfolio-centric view of the universe of financial advice.

44:01Not to say it's unimportant, it's just that the relative importance of adding value on that aspect, that's a much tougher game now than it was before. Now we have all-in-one portfolio ETFs. What are they, 20 basis points now, man, that's tough. That's tough to beat. Wouldn't you rather focus your time and energy on areas where you can make a much more significant difference with probably a higher level of reliability as well? I mean, that seems to be the trend moving forward, but it's a slow turning ship as you know. I don't know. We've been saying for years that investing has been solved, but I've also seen people writing articles literally refuting that exact sentence.

44:43investing has not been solved. Look at this product. It's a paradox for sure. Yeah. So what factors in your model do explain the differences in the comprehensive financial confidence other than the incoming confidence of DIYers? The length of relationship, obviously, whatever channel you're with, the longer you're with it, you tend to have more confidence. It's related to income as well. It makes sense. The more income you have, the more you're going to feel financially confident. Being retired was associated with a higher level of comprehensive of financial confidence. And that's interesting.

45:17I think that as you approach retirement, you're probably less financially confident. You're probably more anxious. That's when people tend to get a little bit more serious about their planning as well on their own. And then we probably don't make that decision to retire until they feel that they're in a position to retire. So I think that probably explains why people have higher levels of financial confidence once they are retired. If there are fewer people in the household, you have more financial confidence less mouths to feed, I suppose. If you own real estate, that was associated with more financial confidence.

45:49That's interesting. The sample's taken 2019, so I don't know if things have changed. And then this was interesting. If you use a robo-advisor, not as your primary channel of advice, but as a secondary channel that you used, there's a negative correlation with comprehensive financial confidence, which is interesting. I mean, you could probably make a meal out of just digesting that. But if your primary channel of advice was a traditional financial advisor, and you had a robo-advisor account on the side, you probably are not that confident in that primary channel of advice, let alone your overall financial confidence for your household.

46:26It was kind of interesting. And of course, there's basically zero barrier to opening up a robo-advisor account. But I could see situations where, and you guys would know because you're practitioners, but you have clients and they have portfolios and it's based on evidence and maybe it's not sexy and they've got an itch to scratch. Maybe you allow them to have a small trading account. I don't know if that ever exists with some of your clients. That's different than having a robo-advisor. What itch are you scratching by having a directed portfolio, which really could be just an all-in-one ETF portfolio.

47:01It's interesting to think about that. That is really interesting. You mentioned the effect of the duration of the relationship on confidence. How does the duration of the relationship with a channel affect other outcomes? I mean, it's generally all positive. So the longer you're in any channel, you tend to have more assets. You've had more time to accumulate assets. So across the board, the length of your relationship with any channel is positive at the P.01 level. So what are the bottom line main findings of your research on the value of financial advice? I would summarize it to say that traditional financial advisors are associated with higher levels of investable assets only for wealthier households who identify full-service advisors, independent advisors as their primary channel of advice.

47:50The other part of that, though, is that traditional financial advisors dealing with mass market households, there is statistically no difference than just using a bank teller. The even most interesting part of that is that holds true unless you get a financial plan. So if you get a financial plan and you're in the mass market, then there is a robust effect across all three outcome measures, investable assets, your holistic wealth score, the breadth of advice that you're getting, and the comprehensive level of financial confidence that you have. And I think what the really important thing here is when I looked at this, I thought, well, this isn't very earth shattering.

48:27This kind of lines up with what I see. And that is If someone has a lot of money and they come to me and they say, I want to work with an advisor, can you recommend someone? I've got 2 million, 5 million, whatever. I say, yeah, that's relatively easy to do. I've got a Rolodex full of financial professionals I've worked with in the past or no. And I say, yeah, you're in good hands with them. If someone comes up to me and says, I've got 75 ,000, can you recommend an advisor? I cannot. Can't do it unless I know that they're a financial planner and they're working with people who don't have significant levels of assets, then I know that they're probably, that's as good as they're going to get for the mass market.

49:06So initially, again, I thought, yeah, not earth shouting, but this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, which is we have a lot of people who firmly believe that all financial advisors should be shot out of a cannon. And they've got a bunch of people who know really good financial advisors exist and are out there and working with people and delivering value for the fees that they're paying. How do you make it all square? This is it. If you have a lot of money, you've got access to better quality advice. If you don't have a lot of money, you better be looking for someone who provides financial planning.

49:37Not that you shouldn't be looking for financial planning at the high end, but you better be looking for financial planning if you're in the mass market because that's the single biggest differentiator for knowing that you're going to get better advice if you're in the mass market. Just incredible. What are the policy and regulatory recommendations that come out of your research, do you think? Well, I think if we take a look at what's been happening lately, we're seeing more and more people turn to social media as a substitute for traditional financial advice. And this speaks to, again, the mass market.

50:04This tends to be more the case where if you're in the mass market, there's a lot of information out there that talks about the failings of financial advice if you don't have a lot of money. It's going to be mostly financial salespeople. Now, I do want to make clear, of course, there are advisors out there working with the mass market that are doing well. It's just finding them is very difficult. There's a lot more that are quite suboptimal and you kind of want to steer clear from. And in the aggregate, the value just isn't there in the mass market unless you get financial plans. As more and more people on social media sort of expose this, both non-licensed individuals and licensed individuals talking about this, this is not new stuff.

50:43As more and more people learn about this, they are turning away from the traditional models of financial advice for the mass market because they're just not seeing the value of paying 2 % and not even getting holistic big breadth of advice. And so they're turning to other forms of advice, namely in the form of social media. So again, some of that social media and other types of non-traditional advice is going to be good. No doubt about it. There's some great stuff out there. There's probably a lot more bad stuff. People being lured onto cryptocurrency platforms when they don't know what they're doing.

51:16NFTs, that's the first time you heard that in about two years. That was a grace for a while. So there's all this substitute for traditional financial advice. And so if from a grand regulatory perspective, we're trying to think about protecting investors, fostering efficient capital markets, then I think we have to think about whether or not regulation of financial advice, and it's really financial regulation of securities, has kept pace with changing consumer preferences. And I'd argue that you could pretty strongly say no. The problem is, how are you going to change a system which is based around securities regulation, which is very much product-driven and focused?

51:58If you're going to talk about this, you need a license. If you're going to talk about a fund in ETF for an individual, you need a license. At the same time, there's this big category of people. Let's say an ideal money coach. They're making great financial plans and sending people to, I don't know, robo-advisor to do it on their own for the implementation, whatever it is. I think that is a growing model. I think there's probably some people, financial content creators, money coaches, who I'd be much more comfortable with them saying, you could go into this ETF portfolio. And so is there a different registration category that needs to recognize that there is some limited advice with some restrictions for this category that is going to deal with the mass market?

52:39Because traditional channels, you could argue there's a failure for market advice for the mass market. Is there a different way of doing it? That's tough because now you're talking about changing from maybe potentially securities regulation to advice regulation. And that's just a hornet's nest. Crazy. I think I remember seeing that Australia is now regulating financial influencers. Like you have to have a license to talk about products. Yeah. And that's interesting. I do remember seeing a headline like that. And I also saw it was a lawsuit against TikTokers in Australia for like millions of...

53:16Oh yeah, here it is. TikTok GST fraud. It's$4.6 billion in fraudulent tax activity because of bad TikTok advice. Wow. I'll send you the article. You can take a look at that. Crazy. But they're, I think, moving a step ahead on that. It'll be interesting to see if it's the right step, but it's a step. So Pri, we have a lot of other financial advisors that listen to this podcast who are running firms, full service firms like we are. So on behalf of all of us, what recommendations do you have for us? Probably join PWL. From what I've seen from what you guys are doing and knowing you guys, I think you've got a really good template that squares all the stuff that we've been talking about.

53:55I think I heard in one of your recent podcasts that you've kind of relaxed your minimums, at least point people in the right direction. It'd be great if more firms did that. in the real world, I know that's not going to happen overnight or anytime soon. So my advice is to the extent that you can, as a culture for your firm, you want to move more towards planning centricity as opposed to portfolio centricity. I think it'll make your lives a lot easier in the long run because if it hasn't happened already now, the competition for making better portfolios, you're competing against basically the counterfactual portfolios that are used in the research is available as products to people now.

54:38And as more and more people sort of figure this out, they're going to see, well, I'm getting minimal value here, but certainly not as much as in the past. And so if the costs aren't really coming down that much, better be getting some value in other places. And the non-portfolio centric measures of value, I think is where people need to focus on. And again, the challenge is we're still based on securities and revenues based on assets. They're linked, whether you're paying fee-based or commission-based. So it's tough, but to the extent that you can, I think financial planning is going to create more fans of your practice.

55:20People are going to be more likely to spread the news about financial planning strategies and confidence in how they feel as opposed to trying to explain why you have, I don't know, structured products in your portfolio. I don't think people go on and talk, oh, you should see this product I have. I don't know. You'd be surprised. Oh, I know. I just make a little dig. We did an episode on structured products a while ago and a lot of people had lots to say about that. I'm sure. What do you mean? How can this not be good? Kind of funny. What about for listeners of the podcast who are maybe they are DIY investors?

55:58What do you think they should be thinking about to put themselves in the best position to sort of maximize the metrics that you looked at in your research? Yeah, for the listeners who are managing their own portfolios, from the thesis, what I can say is you've probably checked off a couple of boxes already. You're interested in personal finance. So that I know is important. You've probably taken some time to research the channel that you've chosen. So that was important. The amount of time you spent researching the channel or the advisor, because I'm sure some of your listeners have advisors. That's important.

56:26Financial planning still isn't super sexy. I try to adopt a planning first mentality. The portfolio stuff is secondary. And I know it's not sexy. It is not sexy at all. Financial planning. Maybe if you save a lot in tax, they're like, okay, that's pretty cool. But beyond that, financial planning is like, do you know Josh Lichner's analogy, vitamins and painkillers? You know, what are you selling? Okay, this is brilliant analogy. So imagine you're on vacation and you've got a splitting headache. You will get up at two in the morning, drive 10 miles to find a convenience store, and you'll pay 20 bucks for eight pills that you get at convenience store of painkillers.

57:03So people are price insensitive. They have a sense of urgency when they want to solve a pain, when they want to address pain. When it comes to selling vitamins, it's a bad business to sort of launch because it's kind of like, yeah, this would be a little bit better for you. There's no sense of urgency. People are like, I'll get it the next time at the grocery store. They're very price sensitive. It's a very tough thing to sell. The difference between selling vitamins versus painkillers. And people think of their portfolio problems as pain, pain that needs to be solved. They think of financial planning as, I'll get to it.

57:33I know I should. I'll get to it, but they don't. There's no sense of urgency. They're price sensitive. Not so much so on the portfolio side. I think that's interesting. So what I would suggest to listeners is you don't have to do do-it-yourself planning. That's actually very difficult. Outsource it. Get a money coach. Test the waters. try and get some kind of plan in place. And you might be surprised some of the gaps that exist in your financial situation. A lot of people focus on in 40 years, I'll have$10 million if I keep on doing this. If you get hit by a bus next week, you're not going to have any of that.

58:08All those plans, those retirement projections all go out the window if you lose your ability to earn an income. So that's just not something people think about. I came up with this. I don't know if it's a good question or not, but I'm interested in how you answer it. You've got this dissertation that's 320 pages long. We just spent whatever, almost an hour talking about it. If someone asked you in a noisy bar, whether financial advice is valuable, what would you tell them? In a noisy bar, I would say if you have money, yes. If you don't, you probably should be looking for financial planning, not portfolio management.

58:42Great answer. Even then in a noisy bar, I don't know if that would come across well. That was pretty good. I did my best. So what's next for your research? I think there's a lot in here that could turn into some papers to submit to some journals for sure. It was such a long journey and there's so many little notes that I've seen scribbled over the years. I was like, look more into this, look more into that. And they've kind of piled up and was like, yeah, there's some really cool stuff in here. I looked at a lot of these metrics for financial advisors compared to households and the differences between these two groups.

59:21There's something there. All these little nooks and crannies in the data that I want to explore. But I think the important thing is to maybe get some of the top line findings out into some journals. In the meantime, I'll be doing some consulting work for some wealth management firms who want to continue to improve their offerings and learn from this. And I've done some work already over the last couple of years based on this research, which has been great. So hopefully doing more of that. And I think if anything, what I've taken away most from all of this is that we need to do a lot better increasing the access to quality financial advice to the mass market.

59:55That is still a nut that has not been cracked properly. I think there's a lot of opportunity, especially with the advances in technology and the ability to scale basic financial advice to the masses. I think there's some real opportunities there. So probably going to narrow in on that segment. Looking forward to see what you do. Sounds pretty cool. Thanks. So I got to ask, you've been working on this doctorate since you were on this podcast in 2019. And we talked about this then, and we were excited then to see the results. Now we finally got to see them years later. What was it like? Yeah, you're very patient.

1:00:31You're very patient. As was my supervisor. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. In between, I guess, last time we spoke, I've recently moved to London. My wife's career is based here. And so I still work primarily in North America, but I just work from home for the most part, but I commute back and forth quite a bit, maybe once a month, I think. In any case, during that time, talking to people, so I don't know if this is true across the board, but talking to people when it comes to defending a doctoral dissertation, in North America, apparently you work with your supervisor and year thesis examining committee has all senior work over a couple of years and they're kind of more collegial.

1:01:11And apparently they don't even let you kind of get to the point of defending until they kind of say, yeah, you're ready to defend and it's probably going to go through it. So I wouldn't say it's a formality, but a lot of people told me, yeah, it's kind of more of a formality at that point. In the UK, so the university that conferred, even though my primary supervisor is at Rotman at U of T, it was a partnership program with Rotman in the University of Reading in the UK. In the UK, it is a defense. And what made it even worse was my secondary supervisor, he had just completed his thesis defense like two years prior.

1:01:46And he said, it wasn't too bad. They came in and they just wanted to talk about the research and have a conversation. So I guess I kind of lucked out, but I wouldn't worry about it too much. Everyone else is saying, no, no, no, it can be quite adversarial. It really depends on who your committee is. And so I had Lawrence Booth, who's the chair in structured finance at Rotman, and another examiner who was the chair of the International Capital Markets Association at the ICMA Center at the University of Reading. And they read the thesis and I guess they decided to teach me a lesson. When I went in, you kind of have, it's like three hours.

1:02:23You don't prepare a presentation. They just go in guns blazing. So that's another difference. There's more of a presentation apparently in North America, you have like a slide deck, you talk about your findings and research and all this stuff. This one's like you log in. So it wasn't in person because of continuing pandemic restrictions. You log in and they're just like, all right, let's go. So on page 34, you said this, what are you thinking? And they're challenging me on everything. And I felt at the end of the three hours, there are, I think, five possible outcomes. One is you pass with absolutely no corrections, which is very rare.

1:02:55Apparently it doesn't happen. You can pass with minor corrections and they give you like three months to make some minor changes and resubmit it. You can pass with major corrections, which could be six months to a year. And it's like, you need a new chapter. You need to deploy a new survey because this is garbage. Option four is this is so bad that at best we'll give you a master's degree. And then option five is just go away and never speak to anyone in academia ever again. And so at the end of these three hours, I went in there thinking, all right, I'm aiming for pass with minor, pass with minor.

1:03:26And if I go pass with major, here, I'll live with it. At the end of those three hours, I was pretty sure that I was going to end up with a master's. They grilled me so hard. Wow. And it was so adversarial. I was almost shaking at the end of it. And so at the end of the three hours, they say, all right, you can log out and then you'll get a text message to log back in after we've conferred. You'll get your decision in the room. So I'm waiting there for 10 minutes and my primary is allowed to watch, but he's not allowed to participate in the three hours. But during he was texting me, he's like, hey, hey, six months, you know, not a big deal.

1:04:01Make some corrections, whatever. But he said, you know, you handled yourself well. So I get the text message to log back in. And I remember this. It was ingrained in my memory. Lawrence says to me, first thing he says, congratulations, Dr. Banerjee. You passed with no corrections. It took me, I'm going to say a solid three months before I felt elated about it. I was in this complete stupor for the next couple of days. I didn't feel happy about it. I was like in this state of, I don't know what to make of all that. It was a very stressful experience. In retrospect, I appreciate how thoroughly they dove into it and made me defend everything that was in there.

1:04:41Cause it feels like, okay, it's held up to some pretty serious scrutiny. So I feel better about that. Anyways, that's how I'm rationalizing it. Unreal. What an experience. Yeah. I don't know if I'd recommend it. Good to know. Well, Preet, we really appreciate you coming on to talk about your dissertation. It's really fascinating stuff and I do think that you've filled an important gap in the existing research. Well done and congratulations. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate you having me back for a second time. Yeah. Congratulations, Preet. Great to have you on. Thank you.

1:05:17All right. We're going to kick off our segment with Mark McGrath. We did ask in our last episode for feedback from the community on what we should name this segment. We had tentatively called it Mark's Minutes, which we all acknowledged was a little bit of a terrible name. But we got a suggestion that was like all of us when we saw the suggestion, we're like, wow, that is so obvious. How did we not think of it? Between the three of us, you would think we would have come up with it. Right. I was using chat GPT to try to figure out names and every iteration of Mark and financial planning investing and everything.

1:05:51And I still didn't stumble upon this. It's a stroke of genius. Yeah. So humans are victorious again. We did a poll in the community and there was, let's see. Oh, wow. I hadn't checked the poll in a few days. It's up to 70 votes now in the rational community. So 70 people voted on this. And by a landslide, the winning name is Mark to Market. That's going to be the name of our Mark McGrath section going forward is Mark to Market. So Mark, to kick off the first Mark to Market, let's go. Great. I'd just like to point out that after this, I came up with the name McGrational, which I thought was also awesome, but I can't think of a smart way to put it in there.

1:06:32I'll just use that from time to time maybe. What did our buddy Rob suggest? McGrath's Wrath? Yeah, the Wrath of McGrath or something like that. There were some pretty ridiculous suggestions. Along with some really good ones, there were some pretty ridiculous ones. Good. Okay. So today I want to talk about RSPs, registered retirement savings plans. So I think there's a lot of misconception around how these work from a tax perspective. I'm constantly running into people that, in my opinion, are thinking about these the wrong way. And a lot of people are focused on two things. One is the tax at death on the second spouse.

1:07:05Bit of background, an RSP can roll over on a tax-deferred basis to a surviving spouse, but on the passing of the second spouse, it's taxed as income on the terminal tax return. And so a lot of people get hung up with this idea that your RSP is going to be taxed the top marginal tax rate, which could be true. Yeah, but there's a lot of other things to consider. And the other thing that people mention is that RSPs, the returns inside an RSP, they all get converted into regular income, basically. So if you have a diverse portfolio that's spitting out Canadian eligible dividends or capital gains, when you withdraw from the RRSP because it's all taxed as income, it's converting these more potentially tax-efficient sources of income like dividends and capital gains into regular income and help.

1:07:48That's detrimental. Well, what I want to do today is kind of reframe this. And in my view, RRSP returns are actually tax-free, the exact same way they are from a TFSA. But people aren't thinking about it correctly because they're forgetting that RRSP's are actually pre-tax money. And I know you've talked about this before. I've talked about this online before. I've had some advisors question me on it. But I think when you think about this, the way I'm about to describe it, hopefully becomes obvious that that's the case. So I'm going to walk through a scenario. So imagine you've got, I'm going to frame it in two different ways that I think are going to be helpful for maybe tricking people's brains into thinking about this.

1:08:21But so in the first scenario, imagine you have, say,$20 ,000 in cash in your bank account, and you want to make a$10 ,000 investment. You want to invest$10 ,000 of that $20 ,000 that's in your bank account. And you've got two choices. You've got the RSP or the TFSA in this fictional scenario. Those are your only two choices. And to keep the math simple, let's just assume that today and in the future, your tax rate is going to be, say, 50%. That's just going to make the math easy to understand. So you've got the RSV or the TFSA. So if you contribute to the TFSA, you can just contribute the$10 ,000 to the TFSA, to the tax-free savings account.

1:08:51There's no income deduction. There's no tax refund associated with that. You put the $10 ,000 in the TFSA and you've got$10 ,000 left in your bank account. Now, to make the equivalent to comparison to an RRSP, you would actually want to contribute$20 ,000 in this scenario. Because if you contribute$20 ,000 and you're at a 50 % tax bracket, when you do your taxes, you're going to get a$10 ,000 refund. So in that scenario, you're still left with$10 ,000 in cash, which was your objective. You wanted 10 ,000 left in your bank account. So you have to gross up the RRSP contribution to account for the fact that this is pre-tax money.

1:09:23I don't think anybody disagrees that this is pre-tax money. That's the whole point of the RRSP is we don't want to pay tax on that income when we receive it, we want to pay tax some other time. And so we have to accept that this is pre-tax income. The other way to think about this is imagine you earn income and there's no tax withheld its source. So for employees, we get taxes withheld on our paychecks and that goes to CRA. But if you had other sources of income, like rental income, royalties, forms of investment income, dividends from a corporation, for example, there's no tax withheld its source, putting aside the potential for tax installments and that type of thing.

1:09:57So in that scenario, let's say same thing. You earn$20 ,000 of income. There's no tax withheld at source and you have a choice on RISP or TFSA. Well, if you're in the 50 % tax bracket and you choose to contribute to the TFSA, you're only going to be able to contribute$10 ,000 because your tax bill is going to be 10 grand and you have to set that money aside. Whereas if you decide to go with the RISP, you can allocate the entire$20 ,000 to the RISP because you're going to get an income deduction and therefore there's going to be no taxes owing. So in both of those scenarios that I framed, I think it's hopefully somewhat obvious that the RSP is pre-tax money, the TFSA is after-tax money.

1:10:31So when you're comparing TFSAs to RSPs, you have to gross up the RSP contribution. And if you do, they're virtually identical, assuming the tax rates stay the same. So let's just assume you earn, let's say 7.2 % returns on your portfolio, and over 10 years, your investments double. But with the RSP, you have$40 ,000 pre-tax. With the TFSA, you have$20 ,000 post-tax because the TFSA is post-tax. If you withdraw from the RSP, and again, you're still in the 50 % tax bracket, you're going to have$20 ,000 after tax. And if you withdraw from the TFSA, of course, it's tax-free. You're going to have$20 ,000 after tax.

1:11:05Now, if we agree that the returns that you earn inside a TFSA are tax-free, and we also agree that the outcome is the same in both of those scenarios, we must accept that the RRSP returns are also tax-free. That's how I like to think about it. I think it's a bit of a mental, it's not a trick in that it's not true, but sometimes we look at the balances in our bank account, we make an RRSP contribution, but we don't consider the tax refunds along the way. And I think when people are focusing on the potential for a very high tax return at death, they're ignoring all of the tax refunds that they received along the way.

1:11:36And they're just focusing on this one outcome. The other thing to keep in mind, I'll say is that because when you convert your RRSP to a RIF, a registered retirement income fund, which is the usual option. It's not the only option, but it's the most common option. After age 65, if you have a spouse or common law partner, you can split that income for tax purposes. So when you withdraw from the RRSP, let's say you withdraw$50 ,000 and it's now a RIF, you can allocate up to 50 % of that to a spouse. So between that and some additional tax credits, the probability that your income in retirement is going to be equal or higher to your income when you contribute to the RRSP, in my experience, is very, very low.

1:12:14I think that's it. There's a lot we could talk about with RSPs. You could do a 10-part episode series on it, I'm sure, but for the sake of brevity, that's all I got. I love that. I love that segment. There's two things, I think. There's the tax-free aspect. If your tax rate stays the same, the RRSP equals the TFSA, other than some little nuances like you can get lower withholding tax rates than the RRSP on US, but whatever. That's beside the point. Assume that they're the same if tax rates to equal. The RRSP, in addition to tax-free growth inside of the account, has a separate, completely separate benefit of pushing the income taxes on the original income that you earned to put into the account to the future.

1:12:53That's going to give you either a bonus if your tax rate's lower or a penalty if your tax rate's higher. Those are two separate attributes. One is tax-free growth inside the account, and one is a bonus or a penalty based on the difference in your incomes. I agree with you that it's unlikely, barring major changes in tax rates, which if you look at historical tax rates, there actually have been some pretty significant changes over time, but usually it's a safe bet that your tax rate is going to be the same or a bit lower in retirement. There's splitting RIF income. There's also spousal, RRSPs, splitting pension income.

1:13:34A lot of times people think like, well, I'm earning this high salary now. I'm going to have this big pension. If they have a pension, I have this big pension when I retire, but that can be split too. Your taxable income in retirement tends to be quite a bit lower. Great topic to bring up and super important point. I don't think it's debatable. I agree. If anyone's disagreeing with that, I think that is objectively wrong. It's not a debate. Yeah, because otherwise you're paying tax twice, which is not the case. If you don't agree with that, then you're accepting that you pay tax today and when you withdraw the RSP, which is obviously not true.

1:14:05But I do want to bring up one good point you made, which is that potential for a bonus or penalty. And what I think people don't realize is it's true of the TFSA as well, in that if you elect to pay taxes today by contributing to the TFSA, but had you wait until retirement, you're in a lower tax bracket, you have effectively paid that penalty now when you could have received a bonus by using the RRSP instead of the TFSA. So that same difference between your current tax rate and your future tax rate, you need to apply that to the TFSA as well. You made a really good point, I think, a few months back on Twitter when I was writing about this, that the RRSP provides tax uncertainty and the TFSA provides tax certainty.

1:14:41And I think that's a very, very valid point. We don't know what future tax rates are going to be. Yes, in many provinces, they are indexed to inflation, but we don't know if there's going to be a hike in tax rates. So we don't know what the optimal decision is without hindsight. So if you value that certainty, then potentially a TFSA might make more sense psychologically, let's say, even if it turns out that it's not mathematically optimal. We had our guest, Scott Sederberg, a while ago. He used US data for this, not Canadian, but it was still, I think, relevant. He did some simulations using historical US tax rates and found the optimal contribution to the tax-free, the TFSA equivalent, and the tax-deferred, the RRSP or the pre-tax and post-tax savings accounts, pre-tax being RRSP, post-tax being TFSA, even for people at a high tax bracket, there is an optimal amount that should be contributed to the TFSA along with the RRSP because it provides that hedge against tax rate uncertainty.

1:15:35I just pulled up, I have these charts that I made. I found this paper a while ago that had historical tax rates for an Ontario taxpayer going back to 1920. There's this big, so up until about 1970, there was a pretty big difference between the top tax rate and the 99.99th percentile tax rate. I guess very few people were actually paying this really high top tax rate. But even if you take that 99.99th percentile tax rate, the marginal rate for going back to 1920, it was like 25 % and it went up to 80 % in the 1940s. Then it came back down and went up again and then it drifted down lower to where it is now at like 54%.

1:16:18But that future tax rate uncertainty, even if you knew your future income, which you don't, future tax rates are still uncertain. I think that's a whole interesting... You said earlier, Mark, we could keep talking about RSPs for a long time, which is true. Yeah. We'll do another episode on them because I think there's one other point, we won't get into it. But the RSP over a long enough period of time can actually outperform a non-registered account, even if you withdraw at a higher rate than when you contribute it. So I know Jamie Gollenbeck has written about this. And I think one of your episodes actually covered this as well.

1:16:49Like even when you factor in things like old age security clawback. So I know we're talking about RSP versus TFSA, but the RSP can even outperform in situations where you withdraw at a higher tax rate than when you contributed, which I thought was really, really fascinating. When we did that episode, we found your tax rate could be in the example we looked at, which I think, I don't know if it was 20 or 30 years or something like that, but it was your tax rate of withdrawal could be up to 13 % higher than it was at contribution, and you're still better off than had you invested in a taxable account.

1:17:18But you're right. It's necessary to have that because when people say, no, I don't want to use the RRSP because my future tax rate might be higher, you have to ask what is the alternative. You have to. Otherwise, there's no point in even having the conversation. Given that TFSA room is relatively low for most people compared to an RRSP, I don't always know that. I mean, for a lot of Canadians, I'm sure they have to make that decision. But when you get into higher incomes, that decision becomes a lot easier and you can contribute to both or you can max out both anyway. Right? Cool. Well, that was a great topic.

1:17:48Thanks for bringing that, Mark. Yeah. Thanks. And that was this week's Mark to Market. Such good content from Mark. So great to have him on. Could have watched you guys nerd out for hours, I'm guessing. Oh, it's fun. We could have nerd out for hours. All right, let's carry on. So I want to do a quick episode review for those newer listeners who might want some guidance and which episodes to go and check out. So, this one I thought of because I spoke to a couple of people in the past week who did not listen to the episode with Colonel Chris Hadfield, episode 226. And then when we mentioned it afterwards, they did go back and listen to it and they were so grateful that we did.

1:18:25So, I thought that's come up twice lately. I thought, why not? And it was such a great episode. And if you have not listened to episode 226, please do so. I think it's one of our great conversations. It's also arguably the most shareable conversation with kids, with friends, with family members. The lessons that we learned from Chris are super valuable. They're life lessons and do apply to everyone. With that, let's kick off a quick review of that episode. Colonel Chris Hadfield joined us on episode 226. Chris is an astronaut, author, musician, photographer, public speaker, and professor, just to name a few incredible career he has had and this conversation can possibly benefit more people than any other conversation that we've had so i consider this a must listen episode and also a must share so we started by talking about the importance of setting goals however you must be ready for a change on the path towards those goals so setting out to achieve the goals what matters is what you do next because the path to goals is a series of little decisions what matters most is the deliberateness of how you make each of your small decisions every day and that will determine your path of who you are going to be tomorrow.

1:19:42So he says you need lofty goals in order to have inspiration to do what is needed next. Enjoy the process and celebrate the process. He also talked about how the greatest antidote to fear is competence and we are fearful when we do not know what to do. So always improve your competence. Being an astronaut is not only about when you're in space, but rather it was all at work for years and years to be able to be considered to go into space. And that was Colonel Chris Hatfield, episode 226. That really was a great episode. It was the one when it came out, not a lot of people did listen to it because we can see the stats on the episode.

1:20:21We saw like, okay, a lot of people didn't listen on, no comments were left on the episode. So then we followed up in our next episode and said like, hey, you guys didn't listen to the last episode. You should have. It was really good. You might want to check it out. And then a bunch of people listen to it and they're like, wow, I'm glad you told us to do that because this might have been the best episode you've ever done. How about a quick book review? Very quick. I know we have a big episode this week. So I thought I'd choose one that was mentioned often in my various social media feeds. So the book is called Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly.

1:20:56So I follow him on Twitter. He was on Tim Ferriss. He was also on with Patrick on Invest Like the Best. I really enjoyed those conversations. So I grabbed the book, Excellent Advice for Living. Kevin Kelly is the founding executive director of Wired Magazine and has written many other successful books and many articles and very prominent publications. This book, quite simply, I thought was fantastic. I read it while on the dock of the cottage a few weeks ago. The book was published a couple of months ago and it's basically a collection of his thoughts and insights that he has been collecting forever.

1:21:31And he finally took the time to assemble them all in one spot. So, there's 450 of them in a 224-page book. Super short read. You can start it anywhere. It's one of those books you can pick up and put down and pick up again, kind of start anywhere you like. I think it goes really well with the Chris Hadfield episode we just highlighted. Learning and capturing knowledge from someone's career that can really benefit a lot of people. It's also the perfect book I think to read on Kindle because it becomes really easy to save his pieces of advice easily and then I fed it automatically into my Readwise app so it shows up in my daily feed of reminders which is super valuable.

1:22:09I thought maybe Ben, you and I could share what I thought were my 12 favorites out of the list that I ended up saving from Kindle. Here's the first one. You can't reason someone out of a notion that they didn't reason themselves into. Do you want to take the next one? Sure. On that first one, I remember people telling me that exact or maybe not verbatim, but similar when I did one of my first videos on dividend investing and it caused this big uproar of people getting angry at me on the internet. Someone said to me, well, you can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.

1:22:43Pretty good. It's not bad. Next one. A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others. Kind of interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Whenever you can't decide which path to take, pick the one that produces change. I like that. You should demand extraordinary evidence in order to believe extraordinary claims. That's a good one. These are all things that I've heard before. Yeah. I'm not saying they're his. These are things he's collected from all over the place and assembled in this one spot. Yeah. Okay. He's not claiming ownership. I understand. Yeah.

1:23:14Investing small amounts of money over a long time works miracles, but no one wants to get rich slow. When someone tells you something is wrong, they're usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong. You learn a lot more if you ask people, how are you sleeping instead of how are you doing? Side note to that, I started asking people this question. I've actually modified it a bit. I said, what's keeping you from sleeping lately? Something like that. I've had a number of incredible answers lately. People talking about illnesses, family illnesses, other stresses in their lives.

1:23:50Really interesting as opposed to saying, how are you doing? And you always get back, things are good. That's a very interesting idea. I sleep fine. I fall asleep fine. If I wake up in the middle of the night, I just have trouble falling back asleep unless I've done my heavy leg lifting. But even though I know I need to do that, I don't always do it. Leg lifting causes you to sleep. If I do like heavy squats, I will usually sleep. And even if I wake up on eight, I'll be able to fall back asleep. But even like yesterday, I went for a long bike ride and a long kayak, like a lot of exercise, drenched in sweat when I got back and woke up in the middle of the night and tossed and turned after that.

1:24:30Really? Yep. It's like there's some kind of hormonal release, I think, when you do heavy leg stuff. Anyway, all the greatest prizes in life, wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from the magic of compounding interest by amplifying small stay gains. All you need for abundance is to keep adding 1 % more than you subtract on a regular basis. I like that. Another one, don't ever work for someone you don't want to become. Figure out what time of day you're most productive and protect that time period. I like that. I remember Gene Fama talked about that. Oh yeah. Protects his mornings. I think about that a lot actually.

1:25:05After one o 'clock, anything goes. Next one, your enjoyment of travel is inversely proportional to the size of your luggage. Sounds about right. Sounds about right. I agree. Measure your wealth not by the things you can buy, but by the things that no money can buy. There's a quick dozen. I'd say probably 150, I would think. I love the book. Really good book. So I highly recommend it. Excellent advice for living. Wisdom I wish I'd known earlier. by Kevin Kelly. Cool. All right, let's go to the after show. You mentioned exercise. Lisa and I are briefly living closer to town since we're doing some renovations at home.

1:25:42So, we're living this walking bicycle-based lifestyle as opposed to car-based in suburbia. Just loving it. It's so nice. So, it's right near the Ottawa River. So, you're able to bike along the river and over the new bike bridge they built over to the Quebec side. It's just phenomenal bikeways. Beautiful. Beaches I've never seen before. We get home and you park the bikes and you go for a walk to the grocery store. It's just fantastic. Then I rejoined. There's a great gym right next door to where we're staying. It's a great gym that does circuit training. I'm sleeping great now. I was always, but it's really good now.

1:26:16A little sore, but haven't been to a circuit-type gym since the pandemic. I thought I'd be a complete mess. Quite relieved I wasn't, so I was doing okay. That's good. Feeling sore from working out is like one of the best things ever. Oh, I love it. You and I have got lots of travel coming up. Going to Future Proof next week. And then in Toronto later this month at the big CFA event. Don't forget if you're in Toronto and want to come to our meet and greet on the Thursday night, the 21st email info at rational reminder.ca. Do you want to read the recent review? That travels just, when you said next week, that's like, oh man, it is next week.

1:26:55You're not really built for travel enjoyment. Literally though, because I don't fit on airplanes. I know, that's what I mean. Yeah, okay. RockyTopmen77 on Apple Podcasts said that it's a data-driven financial podcast and the review is Benjamin and Cameron clearly wants to understand the topics thoroughly and get in the weeds to help listeners to understand what the data says about financial markets, filled with great information. It's very nice. Keep going. On Spotify, I actually personally switched to Spotify for podcasts because I keep having problems with Apple podcasts, not being able to continue playing an episode if I pause it.

1:27:39Really? If I'm listening to something and then I stop listening to it and then I come back to it later, it won't reload the episode. Drives me nuts. So I just said, okay, I'll try Spotify. Never had that problem. Because I use Spotify for music, just the free version. But anyway, I noticed that in Spotify, you can ask, because for the podcast that I listen to, they ask you a question as the listener. So in the app, when you're on the episode, it says like, what did you think about the episode? Or did you enjoy the episode or whatever? And you can write a comment. And it turns out we had that on for rational reminder, but we weren't paying super close attention to the fact that they were there.

1:28:12So now we're going to be more engaged with those and try and write questions relevant to the episode as we go along so that thoughts. But I was just looking through past comments that people have left, and I thought I would share one. And this is just in response to what did you think about the episode, which is the default question on Spotify. And somebody said, Peanuts was their name, said, Ben's analysis on Haissa answers a question I didn't even realize was currently fundamentally influencing my investment decisions. I think this is a crucial episode. it's kind of cool. So if you're on Spotify for listening to this episode, we'll have a relevant question and hopefully we get some interesting responses from people.

1:28:55You mentioned Spotify. We were with friends on the weekend, went out for dinner and one of Lisa's friends, great guy, Matthew was a listener before I actually met him. And then through Lisa's friend found out that I was part of this. And I said, well, how did you find out about it? He said, I was suggested in his Spotify feed. Wow. So he just started listening a few years ago. So it was nice to hear. Yeah, really cool. Also heard on LinkedIn from Anthony from Vienna, reached out to thank us for helping people around the world with their financial decision-making. You'll be glad to know Ben, that beers are on him when we go to Vienna.

1:29:34I also wanted to thank our friend and professional peer Carlo for posting pictures on LinkedIn with his laptop displaying our logo so prominently. Thanks to Carlo for that. Any Canadian advisor who might be attending the IAFP conference next month in Edmonton, our friend Marcus DM'd me earlier today to say that they're hosting a hot wings competition on a Thursday night of the conference. Yes, the hot wings debate that never ends is going to be at the IAFP. Now, you won't be there until the Friday, I believe, but Mark McGrath will be there as he's always been the butt of this hot sauce debate and takes a lot of flack for being a fan of Tabasco sauce so any advisors that have any idea what we're talking about and are going to be there you're more than welcome to check out somewhere it's going to be announced where this hot wing contest will be I don't know if you have any other insights into this event but I was asked to pass this along yeah no I don't have any other insights and like you said i won't be there until friday i would have joined in i was craving szechuan last night like really hot szechuan so i made some who doesn't it's so good yeah it's so good so good but i made some and i made it like really hot because i wanted some really hot szechuan i was like i served myself and i served my wife i gave us a bowl each and she was doing something else and i ate mine and i walked over her to tell her it was really good but my eyes were like dripping and my nose is dripping.

1:31:04She's like, are you sure I should eat this? You'll be okay. The kids touch it? No, no. But oh man, my eyes were just watering like crazy. I really went for it. Worth it though. It's so good. I love hearing from people on LinkedIn. So please do reach out. Both of us are on, I guess we call it X now instead of Twitter. Yeah. And RationalMinder is on Instagram. Make sure you follow on Instagram or RationalMinder on Twitter to see when our next live event will be. There is one every other week for the rest of the year. Anything else, Ben, to add this week? Nope. I think it was a good episode. I hope people enjoyed it and they can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or they can tell us what they thought about the episode on Spotify or in the Rational Minder community.

1:31:50Lots of different places to tell us what you thought. I do want to say before we go that it is really helpful. I think that's the right word to use when we do hear from people on episodes, because sometimes we'll do an episode and nobody says anything, which is fine. We don't need comments for the sake of getting comments, but there's a asynchronous relationship that we have with the audience where we put a bunch of time in, we create an episode, we record the episode. And then a week later or whatever it is, people listen to it. And if nobody says anything, we have no idea if, was it interesting, but not interesting enough to say anything.

1:32:25Was it terrible? Was it whatever anyway? So So whenever people leave, even if it's a great episode or terrible episode, it's super useful to hear feedback. Feedback I've had lately is people enjoy the mix. We've been mixing it up with some really good nerdy red meat and some more applicable type stuff and throwing in marks. I think the cocktail is interesting, but we do enjoy feedback. If you have suggestions or feedback, let us know. All right, as always, thanks for listening.

1:32:58Thank you.