Episode 365 – Rob Carrick's Eight Lessons Learned in 27 Years of Covering Personal Finance

24:00I wonder if maybe the idea of this as a buying opportunity needs to be played up. The concept of the bargain of buying things marked down is well understood. You said there's the media to blame. before. I'll put a lot of blame for not being open to bargain hunting on the investment industry. And all these people say, oh, don't catch a falling knife. It's not time to get back into the market. Don Templeton, when he was talking about buying what others are fearful, he didn't say, talk about the falling knife. You talk out of both sides of your mouth. You say, oh, you got to buy when it's down, but don't catch a falling knife.

24:33And people are picking up on that. And they're thinking it's not time. These pros aren't buying. And I think if you say, let's buy on the installment plan when things are down, this is a fabulous time to be buying. I think that might turn it into an active thing. Instead of a passive thing, just sit there and take the pain as we are out there hunting for those double-digit returns you're going to get because you bought at market lows. In my personal career as an investor, if I were to pick my number one regret, it would be not pouring more money in at market bottoms. When I've done it, and I'm no genius about picking bonds, but I did invest blocks of money for my wife and I at low points, and it did fabulously well.

25:12You could give it like two years. Now, there's moments when you feel like an idiot. I can't believe I put money in and it just plunged. But if you can take the long term, it is a way to give clients and investors really good results. These are the results that make them feel like they've tapped into some expertise. And the expertise is just following basic investing wisdom. We tentatively talk about buying low and there's bargains out there, but I think maybe turning stay the course into charge ahead is something. I know the investment industry has a million examples. If you bought at market lows, I mean, stop doing them at the market bottom and do halfway to the market bottom and say over two years, look how much people made.

25:51You want to turbocharge your returns, do that. One of our early episodes of this podcast, we had William Bernstein, author and financial advisor, he said that young people should pray for bear markets. I could not agree more. Bear markets in everything, real estate, in any asset that they want to acquire, the pain is all on the boomers. That never happens. It's usually the reverse. On that topic, how does the economic landscape for young adults look today compared to when you started your career? When I started my career, it was mid-80s, coming out of the 1980 recession. And I was a journalist and a lot of newspapers had had a tough time because they had ads revenue to dry it up.

26:33I was oblivious to it. I just thought, oh, I'm a new journalist. I'll go out and find a job. And it took me a little while to find one. But I did. And met my wife. And we went out for a while. We got married and we decided to buy a house. And we thought, oh, let's buy a house. Okay, we'll use the RSP, the homebuyers program. My wife did. We think we saved for like 18 months, put together our 10 % down payment or what it was. And we never really thought, oh, this is so hard. I remember thinking, wow, it's a big financial responsibility. But the friction out there was minimal. It was very, very affordable.

27:04All our friends were buying houses. There was no talk about, will we ever own a house? It was just, when are we going to buy? Having families, I know a lot of young people today talk about the economics of having kids. We never did. It was doable. A balanced life of financial acquisition and saving and investing was quite possible. And today, it is not. the big things in life like having kids and owning a house are just way out of whack with income growth and in my day there was much more of a traditional gap a house cost about three times your annual income now it's probably 10 in toronto if not more you add to that inflation of the past few years so just treading water is more expensive you're a young person you graduate you get a job you're renting how do you save for a down payment when you're paying like 2500 rent in toronto I do think it's harder.

27:52Boomers fight me every inch of the way talking about this sort of topic. It all comes back to the high interest rates of the 1980s. I thought, your house was$10 ,000. The mortgage rate was high, but your payments, I don't want to diminish the financial burden of that. I'm sure it was quite significant to imagine 21 % mortgage rates. It almost can't be done. But everything got better from there. Whereas for it to get better for today's young people, well, we need the real estate market to crash, flat out crash. We need like a 1989, 90 Toronto style crash to sort of completely remake the housing market as being more affordable.

28:30That's when my wife and I bought our first house in Toronto. It was in 1994, if I'm remembering correctly. And everything was still on sale from that crash. In fact, all the houses we were looking at were on sale for much less than they'd sold for previously. We looked at quite a few power sales. It was devastation in the market. My regret is I didn't buy multiple houses back then. So given that backdrop today, Rob, how should advisors or should advisors adjust their approach when they're working with younger clients who don't see a lot of hope about ever owning a home? I think what you have to do is map out that it can be done, but it just might take a bit longer.

29:07Everything is still possible, but on a different time. And I wouldn't say longer. I would say a different timeline. You are going to be living longer and working longer. and you can save for longer. You can use your FHSA, and then you can top it out, and then you can move to a TFSA, and you can do this gradually, and it's fine to buy at age 35. If you're working to 70, buying at age 35 could be the same as buying age 30 if you were working to 65. You have time. As for retirement, it's always been true. Most people don't really power up on retirement saving until later. I think what we need to do is map it out.

29:44There's a home-saving phase of your life And then there's building up financial resources for emergencies and starting retirement. And then there's the full-on retirement saving. If you work to 70, we can make this work for you. And we don't have to have 20 % rates of return, but you need to commit to saving a little bit now, just a little tiny bit now, and we'll move along. Now, how does that work in terms of revenue generating for an advisor? I'm not really sure. I don't think the industry really has a model for that. There are some fee-for-service planners who will deal with people buying homes.

30:17They'll do a consultation, charge$500 or$1 ,000. But in terms of being an investment advisor and helping them build a portfolio, it's not a lucrative market niche. And I'm waiting for someone to just completely ace this, deliver sort of a turnkey package. You're starting to save for a home. You say you want to buy them five years. Okay, we're putting your money in savings products. Oh, you have this money allocated for your midterm for retirement or for longer terms. We're going to put that in equities and basically give them a multi-screen savings and investing approach where it's all based on timelines.

30:51Young people are wide open to getting help and advice from smart people. But the old sit down, young investor, and I will give you my years of experience, that does not wash with them at all. In fact, if you could give them an app-based approach with a human face to talk to once in a while, I think that would work out quite well. The industry runs around chasing high net all the time. Upstart's like, well, simple. I can see them turning the ship a little bit with offerings to appeal to a racier market share. Someone's got to figure out in this country a way to serve the middle segment in a cost-effective way.

31:26I don't think it needs to be a lot of touch. I think it can be mainly tech-based, but no one seems to want to tackle that. I mean, so the recourse is I go to my bank and I get what they have to sell. A bank or TikTok where the advice may be questionable. Well, it's all over the map. I've looked a lot of TikTok videos and I thought, this person's really good communicator. They're talking about TFSAs and I can think if I didn't understand what it was, I think I do now. It's really good basic stuff and so it's all good. And then there's a lot of just nonsense and get rich quick and getting people twerked about silly things that are probably going to really hurt them in the long term.

32:00And there's a lot of self-promotion, much like the investment industry. If you were 25 today, Rob, what do you think your our personal finance priorities would be? I'd probably be on mapping a way to homeownership. I mean, when I was 25, I did not think ever about homeownership. When I was 25, I was just basically enjoying life. I was not saving. I had the good sense not to go into debt, but I was not a saver or an investor. I mean, luckily I worked in journalism back then. It was like a fine benefit pension plan, which I got into. So that was a big help. But I think now any 25-year-old has to be thinking, the next 10 years, what do I want to do?

32:38So if I want to own a house, I think you need to start thinking about that. Obviously, you get your debt paid off, so you start to build your savings, and you think, am I saving for a less than five-year period or a five to 10-year-plus period? Then I adjust what I'm doing accordingly, and I go from there. It wasn't a mountain to climb to get a house. I had a pension, but I also had RRSP money, and I didn't have to use all the RRSP money to buy the house. I didn't take out everything I could. But today, you sort of have to think one goal, then on to the next. So I think I would probably be focusing on getting a home and then building financial stability and then thinking, okay, now I have to start thinking about retirement, maybe in my 40s.

33:16Rob, what do you think about a subset of the young people today who are looking at the headwinds that they're facing, the almost impossible dream of homeownership, retirement at 60 or 65 seems out of reach. And so they take the approach. There's no point in me putting my head down and working really hard to achieve these goals because I'm never going to get there. I might as well enjoy my life now. I'm going to travel more. I'm going to eat well. I'm going to do all these things that I enjoy. And that's the best I can do. I've been thinking a lot about that. It's a theme and a meme. People are talking about it.

33:53I think it is very short-sighted. I think everybody should enjoy themselves. I actually once wrote a long, long time ago, say when you're 25 or so, that's the time to enjoy life. You don't have to have a big retirement savings fund at that time. But by the same token, I think you need to realize that life as you see it from age 25 is not how it's going to be. You don't really know a lot about life at age 25. And I think that people are short selling themselves and their earning power and their careers and their whole trajectory of life when they think it's all over for me at age 25. It's a bit dramatic.

34:24Things can improve. You can meet someone and double up your power to save for a home or put a down payment down. I'm sympathetic, and I think everyone should have a little enjoyment in their life. And if at 25, you're not going to save and you're just going to go on trips and go on restaurants and socialize, I say get it out of your system for a year or two. But don't penalize your future self by giving up at age 25, because if you can get some good habits going, then you can make things happen when your career suddenly takes off at age 28 or 29 or 30 or whatever. if you completely blow up your finances at 25, that can be damaged.

34:58That could take 10 years to fix. So if you're at 25 and it's live for the day, has to be a zero debt proposition. You can't afford to live for the day if you're putting it all on your credit card. And if you don't take on debt, then at least you have a good, reasonable platform on which to launch yourself at a year or two when you get that out of your system and you see that, wait a sec, the economy's improving. There are people that are being hired at my work. I can get a raise. I can get a promotion. I can get a job somewhere else. I don't want people to make pronouncements about their entire life based on the age 25 year.

35:28The other thing I've seen along a similar line of thinking, I'd be curious if you've seen this too, Rob, is people thinking that the only way they'll ever get ahead is by hitting a home run. And so they'll pick individual stocks or they'll pick a crypto and hope that they hit it because they don't see any other way to financial success. I've done a few financial literacy sessions on campuses or universities and colleges, and I have heard that sentiment. Should I get started with investing? That's the question. Because I know if I pick a hot stock, I can double my money and all that. So I think it's a symptom of the economic plight of these people.

36:01I don't think it's anything more than that. It's just them saying, I'm so stressed about money. I don't see a way through it unless I manage to script together 10 ,000. If I could turn it into 50, what a big home run that would be. The problem with sensible investing is that's boring investing. Home run investing and guesting at GameStop and NVIDIA and all that stuff. It's so exciting. And you can track it online and watch it going up day by day. And the other stuff is just applause along. Oh, there's your 7%. Yay. It's not exciting, but it's so effective. I think we need to communicate to people that wealth building is best done on a steady, slow basis.

36:36I think the whole home run thing is going to be flushed out of the system the next time the market really goes down hard and stays down for a while. that usually washes everything out for a little while. And that will recalibrate people. And as I said before, people will make their mistakes in their investing careers. I think all generations have. And if you are a home run investor and playing tech stocks or AI stocks or whatever, and you get blown out, well, that happened to your parents too. Now, Rob, we've been talking about some market crashes. You've seen a lot of them in your day. We've seen a lot of different crises that young investors have faced.

37:11But you mentioned in your article that really nothing has been as damaging as this recent wave of high inflation that we all experienced in the post-pandemic period. Why has that been the single most damaging incident? The effect of it has seeped out of the financial realm into people's general emotional health. There's a general sourness, a judginess, an unhappiness out there. Inflation has contributed to that. It's given people sort of this focal point of what they're angry about. It's warped people's thinking. They're angry. They're resentful. They feel like they've been cheated. That's what inflation does.

37:47It cheats people. It says, your money's not worth as much as you thought it was. I was talking this morning. I had coffee with a guy. He's a fairly affluent person. And he was saying, I figure that my money is worth 15 % less than it was last year. And he is not hurting for money. But he's feeling like even someone in that strata is feeling it. And if you are trying to feed a family of four with some teenagers, you've got little kids and you're renegotiating your mortgage this year, you just feel like inflation has destroyed my finances. There's no sort of moment of calm now. Everything is grabbing more money away from you.

38:18It contributes to this overall sense that Canada's broken or America's broken and this idea that everything's wrong. As a problem and a phenomenon in the economy, it's punched way above its weight. When the market goes down, there's a number of people who feel bad about it, but a lot of people don't really feel like they have direct stake in the stock market. Maybe their pension or they've got a few small investments, but it's sort of a boomery kind of thing. But the stock market going down is a crisis. But inflation affects everybody, all ages. Seniors are in tough because they don't have the opportunity to go out and ask for a raise or get a better job or anything like that.

38:54They're stuck with what they have. Young people who don't have a lot of money are finding that there's nothing left. There's no way to better yourself because there's no money for saving. So inflation has just wrecked a lot of things. And I don't blame the central bankers. I think they were trying to save the economy from a depression and they went too far. But who knew? There was no playbook for pandemics out there. And one thing I was thinking is, I would like to know what data they were looking at when they thought, we have to keep interest rates down and keep them down. They must have been seeing some pretty scary numbers that they weren't sharing because I'm sure it wasn't a gut feeling that they should just keep interest rates down, like the overnight rate of 50 basis points for an extended period.

39:35They misjudged it, but it was a tough call to me. If it was a choice of a depression or inflation, I guess inflation is the better choice. So you mentioned seniors and boomers. What do you think the financial industry is getting wrong about addressing Canada's aging population? Well, I think they're getting wrong. The fact that they're just ignoring them. They're expecting seniors to transact like everybody else. So we're going to give you all these great apps and we're going to have bank branches where there's almost nobody. You're going to wait in line for hours, but we have a great app. I was in a bank branch recently and there was somebody walking up and down the line saying, did you know you could do a lot of stuff online or at the ATM over there?

40:11Yeah, we all know. We don't want to be in this line, but it's sort of we're forced in and some of them are seniors. I think when you tell them we've got a great app, but you need two-factor authentication and we're going to send a text to your phone and you have to take that text and go on and type it into your computer, people are just dropping away by the dozen who think they can do this. And if you've got physical or cognitive challenges, it is not happening. So you pick up the phone and then you hear, oh, it's going to be hours or your call gets dropped. Well, I've got family experience with this and I think the financial industry has just sort of got its fingers in its ear and it's going la, la, la, la, la.

40:44We don't hear anything. I just wonder how long this can last. I don't think there's enough children out there who can help their senior parents do all their banking. There's going to be a point where there's going to have to be better service. And then there's the small other problem of if you are the power of attorney for your parent for financial, or you're settling in a state and you're dealing with banks and investment companies and how slack-jawed a lot of them are about how to handle this. Oh, we don't know. We're going to have to see this. It's going to have to be legal documented. It has to be notarized.

41:10There's two stories. They change their story. People die all the time. How do you guys not have a system for this? But they don't. It's quite obvious they don't. and everybody's sort of out there navigating it, trying to transact for their parent who's had a stroke or who died. And it's very simple stuff, but they're all petrified of being sued, I guess. And so they've erected these barriers. And then there's also the people who don't know the procedure. They're not brief, they're not trained, and they're giving half true information and stuff. And there should be like a department of estates.

41:40You just call them, I'm gonna send you a copy of the will. I'm the executor of the will. Free me up to take care of this. I've heard some wild bank stories with stuff like that. What do you think financial firms need to be doing to better serve older Canadians? Is it more staff? Is it more branches? I think they need a dedicated seniors helpline and maybe a person in branch whose job it is to just say, this is the seniors queue here. If you're over 65 and you have the seniors account here, come over here. We'll help you. We can show you how to do it online, but we'll do it together. And oh, you can't do it for whatever reason.

42:16You'll have a kid to help you. You come into the branch anytime you come into this queue or make an appointment. And you're just going to have to invest in that staff. I mean, a lot of these people are sitting on a lot of money. I think they are struggling. They don't want to be in that shape. They want to be able to look after their money. They're trying their best. And you've got to meet them somewhere, but they're not. They just think everybody's the same. And it's like the financial industry with young people. They think young people are just high net in training. And they think seniors are just basically the same as boomers, and they're not.

42:47And I know it costs money and all that stuff, but the shape of the country's demographics mean that I think eventually they're going to have to knuckle under this. So I did that call. I asked who will be first to set up some sort of dedicated seniors help situation. And I think it'll be a wait for that. One of the things we've all seen in Canada is this really remarkable loyalty that Canadians have to the big banks. and it doesn't seem to matter how badly people get treated. They just assume that the big banks should be the pillar of their financial lives. Obviously, banking is necessary, but also for investing and other services.

43:25What message do you have for consumers who have that endless loyalty to the big banks? You need to try an alternative. I'm not saying switch your checking account or have your paycheck deposited into some bank, no branches, but how about you set up a savings account and you take 500 bucks and you put it in there and you collect your higher interest rate and you learn to use their app on their website and you get comfortable transferring money back and forth and you see how your interest is adding up and you get comfortable with it and you think okay well maybe i can use this account as a checking account and then maybe you think what else do they offer who else is out there offering alternative services i think everybody should make a point to try at least one alternative financial institution this year, banking or investing, give it a try.

44:11But I think there's too much fear of the unknown. It's not as unknown as you think it is. All the deposit taking players out there are members of CDIC. You can't be a player in deposits without being a CDIC member. You have no risk of losing your money. I mean, CDIC will, how's your back? I've been briefed up and down on this. I remember in 08-09, I got a full briefing on what happens if a bank collapses and they've got everything tracked. And the fact is that they'll probably find a buyer for your failing bank before anything falls apart. But the banks are geniuses at marketing. They have created these six brands and people, although they feel like they're probably not getting the best deals, they're okay.

44:50There's someone there who's going to look after them. I'm amazed. When I came to Ottawa in the mid-90s and I was reporting for Canadian Press, banks were being hauled up for parliamentary entry committees all the time. Why are fees for small business so high? Why are mortgage fees so high? Like there's show trials, you know, you get the bank CEO and these senators and MPs would ask all these tough questions. Nothing really changed about it, but there was some accountability. But somewhere in the past 15 odd years, that just went away and the banks have no oversight on Parliament. No one's really watching.

45:21No one's asking questions in Parliament about why the banks are doing this, they feel they have carte blanche. And you can see that in some of the ways they behave. They are acting like we don't really have competition. And it's one of my disappointments how alternative banking and alternative investing are so tenuous right now. The number of serious, serious bank competitors, I mean, WellSimple's maybe the only one, EQ Bank, maybe on banking. But beyond that, there's a bunch of small tier players who cannot seem to break through. I'm guilty of using a big bank even. I have a big bank account too, but I also have accounts at least half a dozen alternative players.

45:58I mean, partly that's my job. I'm testing everything out. But I recently did a reno and I was keeping the savings for it in a bank with a pretty good interest rate. And I found I could just pay my credit card bills for the reno bills through the online bank. It was great. I was thinking, why would I have kept this money in a big bank when I would have been earning no interest? And I was looking at the interest lines on my account statement. Yeah, that helped. So Rob, we've asked you on this podcast before how you define success in your life. Now that you're moving to a new chapter, how will you define success in your retirement?

46:29I'll define success as finding the right mix of staying busy, contributing positively to the debate, and finding rewarding things to do with my expanded free time. Finding a balance and doing a mix of things. I'll be looking for the sweet spot there. One of the reasons why I decided to retire I thought, I don't have the kind of balance I want, and I'm looking for retirement to give that to me. So hopefully we can talk again sometime, and I'll tell you the longer term view from retirement. Definitely. So as we send you off on your retirement, Rob, what's your parting advice for listeners of the Rational Minder podcast?

47:02My advice to people is there's this feeling at personal finance that you have to get everything right. You either have to be just a master of it or stay home. I like to encourage people to try one thing you can do to better your finances and accomplish that and then move on. If you can do one thing well, and it can be a small thing, pay off a debt, open up an investing account and buy some good products, go find a financial planner and get a plan. It's very empowering. You'll be hungry for more positive momentum once you establish it. Everybody makes mistakes. All four of us here have made our share of mistakes.

47:37I know it. All the mistakes are fixable over time, and I don't want that to hold people back. So try something, get some momentum and forgive yourself for your mistakes. Great advice. You're a three-timer on the podcast. We're grateful. Also grateful for 27 amazing years of financial journalism. Thanks, Rob. Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure talking to you.

48:03All right, so that was a great conversation with Rob and what a nice send-off. It'll be great to have him back on too. It'd be cool to hear from a guy like that who's so dialed in, but so thoughtful at how he's experiencing retirement after some period of time. That'll be a cool thing to talk to him when he comes back on at some point in the future. One of the interesting parts about this story, I think, is those of us who work in the financial industry or like Rob, as a financial journalist for so long, he spent so much time writing about retirement, speaking to people who have made the transition, speaking to experts who help people make the transition, hopefully he will find himself much better prepared for it than most people.

48:42Because I think a lot of people who go into retirement, they're tired and they think this is going to be great. It's going to be so relaxing. And then six months in, they're climbing the walls. Rob knows all of that already. He's heard these stories from many other people. He's heard the advice. And so I think people who have grown up in that environment and lived their careers with those expectations being more realistic, we're probably likely to have a much more enjoyable retirement. Think of the impact he's had, like what Bogle's had, the impact on so many people and being such a profound fan of ETFs and indexing.

49:19Think of the expense ratios he's saved people over the years. That's a lot of good advice that I would like to be able to put some kind of value on. He is one of the columns that I would say too that reading over many years, I just have almost always found myself agreeing with his sound advice. He is anything but an industry shill, which is easy for financial journalists to lapse into because that's where you get all your leads and your interview sources. And he has never done that. And that takes a lot of independence and a lot of guts to be able to hang in there and do that over a 27-year career.

49:56I mean, he's as much an investor advocate as he is a journalist, and those are very important. He's been balanced too, though. It's easy and fun to bash advisors and talk about why nobody should have one, but he's been very balanced about what clients should expect or demand from an advisor if they're paying them a fee, but he has never said that nobody should have an advisor. He's always been very balanced about the limitations of people's abilities as DIY investors. He's just advocated for if you're going to pay for advice, this is what you should be demanding from your advisor. I don't know if he coined it, but a term that he uses a lot is the do nothing advisor, the ones we all know who focus all their energy on sales and acquiring new accounts.

50:38And they get you set up and then you hear from them once a year to nag you to make your RRSP contribution. That's the kind of advice, quote unquote, that he has always spoken up against. but as you said, he's always been a very big advocate of financial advice done properly that focuses on planning. All right. We've got a couple of reviews here. Should we do those? Fire away. All right. I'll do the first one from P. Brook 546 in the United States. They say, amazing financial podcast. So rare to find unsponsored and evidence-based advice of this quality. This podcast has had a significant positive impact on my life, both financially and personally.

51:15Thank you for everything you do. I'll take the next one, Dan. So this one is from Kieran from the UK. And he says, I've been a listener for nearly six years and had the pleasure of meeting Cameron in person at the London meetup in 2022. The time and effort that goes into the podcast is clear in every episode from the polished production to Ben and Cameron's meticulous approach to uncovering the truths about investing. My God, Ben, how do you do it whilst raising a family? I love whilst, by the way. At this point, it's hard to believe the pod is free. It's really like a master's in finance, just without the formal certificate at the end.

51:53Keep up the great work. Very nice. Speaking of meetups, we're planning a couple of meetups out in the West Coast, probably middle of September, Ben, you and I are going to hit the road, be in Vancouver for sure, and hopefully Vancouver Island. If you're interested, drop us an email and we'll keep track of that, but it'd be fun to have a couple of meetings. If we're going out there, we're going to the island for sure. That's my hometown. True. Yeah. I got good friends at Victoria's. So that is the plan. Okay, Ben, we know you want to talk about the premium t-shirts. We kind of have to, they've been such a hot item.

52:25So at the time that we're recording this episode, the premium t-shirts have sold out for a second time. So we have ordered more. They'll hopefully be back in stock by the time the episode is released. I did say that last time we recorded and they were not out when the episode was released, but it was later that day that they were restocked. If you hear this and you go and check and they're not in stock, maybe check back later in the day or the next day or something. But we have ordered more. They will be restocked. They are these limited run shirts. I don't know how limited yet to be determined, I guess.

52:59But it just shows the factors in the Fama French five factor model on the front in big white letters. We call them premium t-shirts because they have the premiums on them. And it's a play on a t-shirt being like a premium shirt. You got a laugh out of Dan. This is really a deep nerdy dive here. Big time. The thing that we found though, is that if we hype the shirts up, similar to the factor premiums, if these risk premiums are out there that the factor models kind of predict they should be, if they get too hyped up and everyone chases them, they'll disappear. And so that's true for both the factor premiums and as we're finding out, also the premium t-shirts.

53:35Nice. Classic Ben. We're expanding the inventory of merch as well to include small caps. Sorry, that you put on your head. Man, we're nerdy. I mentioned my friend there in Victoria. And if you want to feel old, my buddy and I were talking a few weeks ago, I said, you know what? Because growing up, we used to ski literally every day of the winter. There's a small ski hill near the house. So six of us would go out every day, virtually all winter to ski at night. So we said, you know what for our 60th birthday next year, we should get together and go skiing, kind of relive the memories. So we're actually planning a 60th birthday ski trip.

54:16Four of the six, three of the six, four of the six, I've not seen in over 40 years, if you can believe it. So we're just connecting now to plan that ski vacation next March. But boy, 60 comes fast. I know you guys got a long way to go, but it comes fast. Have you slowed down at all on the slopes over the last 40 years? Yeah, I don't do the double diamonds anymore. Used to do all the diamonds. That was the cool thing to do. And I was like, yeah, the hips and knees don't really like the diamonds. Just the green circles now. Just the green. I only go blue, but we go fast, just not that difficult and try to avoid the ice.

54:50But other than that, it's an amazing sport. Time flies though. My 20-year high school reunion will be coming up. And I remember at my 10-year reunion, thinking about how old the people that were coming for their 20th year reunion looked. now here I am. There you go. The slide has started. So now you hang around old people to look younger. That's right. That is the strategy. That's why I'm here, Dan. I hear you. Very specific recruiting. I'm here to make Ben look good. What are you guys up to? We're both shaking our heads here because all we do is work. I do work a lot. I've been out in the kayak a few times, which has been nice.

55:30Weather's been a bit crazy though. Last time I went kayaking, we got caught in a crazy rainstorm. walking back up to the house. Oh, I thought you meant while you were on the water. No. We could have been though. Didn't seem like it was going to get stormy like that. Came out of the water, started walking back up to the house and a bit of thunder and then just pouring rain. It was crazy. I'll tell you what, Lisa's kayaking at the conference we were at in South Carolina on the coast. No. Some coastal kayaking, like three or four feet of water and came across an alligator, a hammerhead shark, and two dolphins were jumping beside her.

56:03that's wild in four feet of water how cool is that yeah it was really cool any kayaking down in toronto no and i don't typically kayak i like to try to get out on a canoe trip once a year so hopefully planning on that for the labor day weekend or the weekend after whatever we can manage i love to do it in the summer because it's just the best way to get away from the city out on the water is nice it is that's pretty much it though cameron not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on over here. So that's enough banter for today. We've, I think, filled the quota approximately. All right. Great to see you guys.

56:35Thanks, guys. Take care till next time. Thanks for listening.

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