 Good. Just give me a minute to get your slides up and we can go for it. Sounds good. Well, I want to thank Doreen for having me here, as well as JP in the back room, making sure everything runs smoothly. I have been having technical problems today with my computer. So I'm hoping we don't have one during this presentation, but I won't swear to anything today. Okay. Do you see your slides up on the screen? I do see the slides. Fantastic. Thank you. Okay. Okay. So today is investing tips for busy people. And this is during financial literacy month. My name is Craig Braemer. I am from, I represent better investing, which is a nonprofit organization that's been around, I think almost 75 years now at this point in time, helping investors learn how to become better investors. I started my first investment club back in 1987. It's still going today. I've been working with that group and they crossed over a million dollars a couple of years ago. So I think the concepts work. It's not a get rich quick concept, but I think the concept is definitely work over time. I've been an investor for over 40 years. And as she mentioned, I'm also a professional work in the financial industries. I've been doing that for the last 40 some odd years. I started teaching for better investing back in the mid 90s. Locally. And then I started not teaching at the national level for the last 10 years. And I do have several financial designations and I'm involved with a small, with a financial management firm out of Alamo, East Bay Blossom wealth management. On the very bottom of this page is very key item. It says www.betterinvesting.org. If you want to learn more about better investing, that's where you want to go. And I put it in green and green for money. The next slide has to be our disclaimer. And you heard earlier disclaimer. This is all for educational purposes only. We might talk about different investments, different strategies, even different services out there. But again, this is all for educational purposes only. So next slide is who we are. And this is better investing. It is a nonprofit organization. It's been around, I believe it's going on 75 years now. And we were around in the very beginning involved very, very heavily in investment clubs today. It's a more, diverse space. There's a lot of individual investors that have been part of it because they like how we think about the world. And we are stock centric, meaning that we think about stocks, not just ETS mutual funds or other types of investing. We think stocks are important thing to own over time. In San Francisco, we have 11 other volunteers like myself that are involved. And we all are volunteers. We have a lot of different types of investment. We have a lot of different types of investment. We have 11 other volunteers like myself that are involved. And we all are volunteers. No one gets paid here locally. National level. There are paid people, but locally it's all volunteers. We run a number of different educational events throughout the year. We also have, and we go out and visit investment clubs in the area. And, you know, investment clubs was our background originally. And that's where a lot of us still spend a lot of our time. I started like, as I mentioned, my first investment club back in 1987. It's still going today. We also have a San Francisco model club that sometimes will meet, meets in the San Francisco main library. But we meet virtually more often than that now. And that is available to the public. And we'll have more on that later. Next slide. This is our agenda. It's really complicated. We basically got two things to cover investing basics and tips to consider, but I want to first address the elephant in the room, which is too busy. And on the next slide, we're just going to talk, let's touch on too busy slide. Regardless of how busy you are, you really shouldn't put off investing. There's something called the power of compounding, which is highly important. And that's really keyed towards time and time in the market. The more time you have the market, the better chance you have of compounding your money over longer time periods. Time works for those who start early. It doesn't mean if you're already 50 and you haven't started, doesn't mean you shouldn't start. It just means that younger people have an advantage over you. And that's really the important concept. And people that learned that earlier in their investment life will make their life hopefully financially better over time. So time is very important. The power compounding. That's one of our basic investment concepts we're going to talk through. So I will tell people, stop spending so much time looking at other things through social media and let's learn some basic investment concepts. And that's what we're going to spend our time on the next couple slides. Next slide, please. This is called compound interest and compound interest. As you can see here, we have Albert Einstein. He called it the eighth wonder of the world. He said who you understand as it earns it. He doesn't pays it. So think about this. You're earning interest on top of interest you've already earned. That's the compounding effect and the longer the time horizon that you have, the more it compounds over time. And guess what? Not only does it work if you have investments invested that way, but it also works the other way too. If you have credit, it works negatively towards you because they're charging interest on interest you've already, you might not have already paid on depending on how your credit card works, et cetera, et cetera. Hence why it takes so long to pay off your credit card if you're just making a minimum payment. But compound interest is a good and important notion to think about it is a very powerful force. Time is your friend. I can't emphasize that enough. Time is your friend in regards to this. So what I will tell you, and we're going through a couple quick examples of how you can see how this works. The earlier you can start to invest, the better off, more often you'll be in the long run. On the next slide, we're just going to walk through a real simple example. So on this example, we have a couple different lines. The very bottom, it says principal. And what we're looking at is compound interest over 20 years at a 10% return. So you have your principal. It doesn't change because you have your original principal. Then you can see the blue area right above it. The blue triangle shows your non-compounding. How much interest you would have earned at this interest rate over that 20 years? And it would have grown from $1,000 to $3,000. Great. Fantastic. You made good money. However, if you're able to compound it, you can see where that green circle is up on the right, it could have grown to $7,000 or more than twice what you would have earned on the non-compounding side. So this is the important notion to think about. Compounding of interest or return is very, very important. And as you can see, the line gets steeper as you get longer. So it just shows you that the longer you can do this, the better off you're going to be. So this is a very simple concept. You want to read more, go inside on Google or your internet search engine and put in compound interest and try to understand why this is so important because it really is. I want to look at it a slightly different man. So that's the kind of the first bigger picture concept. But let's dig into this just a little bit more on the next slide. It's a little more complicated, but it is also basically telling you the exact same thing. And so there's three lines on this page on the upper line, which I think should look blue to you. This is a person that puts in $5,000 a year every year between ages 25 and 65. He invests a total of $200,000. And he earned the exact same return as everyone else on this same page. It grew to a little over a million dollars over this long time period, 40 years. But what's more interesting, the two lines below it, because this is the power of compound that people don't necessarily understand and why it's so important to start early. So in the middle line, this is, I believe, Susan who invests 5,000 just like the first person did at the same rate of return, but only does it from age 25 to 35 and then stops. Only invested $50,000. Yet as you see in the far right, it grew to $602,000 over this 40 year time horizon. Whereas the bottom person, Bill waited till he was 35 because he's really busy. He has a career going on and he just doesn't have time for this investment stuff. Man, that's not, you know, I'll get to that. I'm going to make a ton of money. I don't need to do that yet. Okay. He waited till 35. Now it's interesting. Susan stopped at 35. Never put another diamond. Only invested $50,000. Bill, on the other hand, the bottom line started at 35 and put $5,000 in every year. He invests $150,000. Yet if you can see out on the very far right, it's only a $540,000. It did not even pass Susan's number. It didn't even pass Susan's number. It didn't even pass Susan's number. This is the power of company. The fact that you started 10 years earlier, gives you a significant advantage. And again, I don't want people to get depressed. If you're 50 and you haven't started yet. That y'all, you can't do anything. The answer is no, everything you do will help you down the road. And it's very important to do it because retirement will go on for a long time horizon. Hopefully. And why you can, if you can help others in your family, who can start early, it will really benefit them in the long run. This is a very important slide for investors to think about and people to think about. Because, you know, that earlier start, even if it's just a little bit, definitely gets you further down the road than what many people will think will happen. And again, finally, it's time in the investment markets to matter. This is why a lot of very wealthy people think about giving money to younger people in their family to try to get them to invest early because they understand that compounding is very, very important. Let's jump to the next slide real quick. And this slide is basically looking at history, going back for the last 90 years or so. And it's looking at what's called asset classes and asset classes can be defined as stocks, bonds, treasury bills, inflation, though that's not really an asset class, but you can measure it. And in stocks, you can look at large stocks and small stocks. And I put on the left here stocks to live your best return on investments over the long term. And I wholeheartedly believe this, and I believe this throughout my whole 40 plus years of investing that I've been doing. And so far it has not proven me wrong. And I don't think it will prove me wrong in my lifetime. But I want to focus you on the two circles on the right. And you can see the green circle and the red circle and the green circle refers to the two stocks, asset classes that we are charting on here. One is large cap and one is small cap. The small cap is on the very top. That's in the yellow or gold. And that has grown to almost from a dollar, from a dollar way back in 1926 is grown to almost 36,000, 37,000 dollars. Large cap stocks grew to $7,000. Now in the red circle, this is your bonds and your T bills and your inflation. We're talking hundreds of dollars or less in this particular case. This is why it's so important to think about having some of your money in risk assets, like stocks and or, you know, other types of risk assets could be real estate as far as that goes as far as I'm concerned. So this is the important things about the slide. Bonds are useful. You need them in your asset allocation to reduce risk. But over time, if you're really trying to grow your wealth, owning stocks or owning other kinds of risk assets. Like I said earlier, real estate is another risk asset. I believe you'll get better returns over a long time periods. On the next slide. One of the big issues we rest with, and this was not an issue when we presented this last similar presentation last year was inflation. Today inflation is very big. It's right on the rise. We're hearing about it every day. Go back one slide. Inflation is the problem that we're wrestling with. Because inflation is now something in the range of seven or 8%. It will probably come back down, but it erodes the value of your dollars over time. And it costs you more to pay more for your goods. This really is the big battle you wrestle with as an investor over long time periods is inflation. Because inflation never stops. It might slow down, but it rarely goes the other way for very long. So this is something you always want to be worried about. And stocks actually do a pretty good job of competing with inflation over time. Bonds do not. They have a fixed rate of return. They tend to get hurt more by inflation. But again, bonds own a piece of your portfolio for a reason. You need to have some bonds in your portfolio, particularly as you get older on the next slide. Our next concept to talk about is have a plan. If you have debt, you want to pay down your debt. You want to build an emergency plan and you want to make it automatic. You know, there's a little chart on the bottom there says vision plan action success. Well, for many people having a plan enables them to have a very successful over time. And that's very, very important. I think people that do have plans tend to have better returns over time from what we've been able to see and been able to read. So have a plan. And these are the three things I want to touch on now. They might not sound nearly as exciting as talking about the stock market or investing, but they're actually very, very important for people to get a, if you want to have a successful investment program over time, you need to have a very strong foundation. So you need to be able to do these things first before you can get to that level. So let's go to the next slide of paying down debt. Debt avoidance is obviously the best, but let's think about that. Most people really can't do that. And so let's figure out the next best thing to do is how do, if you have too much debt, how do you get rid of that debt? And what we've found over time is breaking it down into manageable steps in smaller pieces works out best for people to pay down their debt. And it does require discipline. And the problem with this whole product concept is it's not very exciting. So investors lose focus, lose interest over time. And thus they don't really get excited about, Oh, I got to pay down this debt this month. It's not nearly as any as putting your money into stock and watching it go up. So that's one of the problems. But, you know, here are some basics to think about getting to get out of debt, pay at least the minimum amount on all debts. Again, if you pay them at least the minimum amount, it's not going to pay it off very quickly, but you will get rid of it over time. Prioritize your debts by cost and small amounts, pay off the small ones first. If you can, that way you have more capital to go pay off your larger ones down the road, but figure out which ones are your most expensive ones and figure out how you're going to get rid of those as quickly as possible. If you can afford to pay additional amounts on the debt with a highest interest rate, work those down first and then go to your lower cost debts second and third. You can consider debt consolidation. And there's all these TV ads about hiring these hiring these people to help you pay down your debt. I've never used one. But I get a little nervous when I'm hiring someone that says they're not going to get paid something for this because I got to believe they're making money off it somehow unless it's truly a nonprofit or a government organization that's helping you do it. So be careful. You find a reputable counselor, not one that's going to charge you a thousand dollars to help you get rid of your debt over time because that's not going to help you in the wrong way. But it is all doable. I have seen it happen many a time in my life. And I came out of college with a decent amount of a little bit of debt that, you know, I did have to figure out how I paid that off over a couple years and it worked. So you can do it. If I can do it, anybody can do it. I think on the next slide, I want to just show you how costly it really is to have debt and particularly high interest debt. So in the right hand upper corner, you have a little red, yeah, red, yellow circle that says $8,000 at 18.9% interest rate. And you got three options, purple, red and green. If you use the purple one says I'm going to pay the minimum amount every month and it's going to take a couple of years to pay that sucker off. That $8,000 cost you $31,000. That's a lot of money to pay, particularly paying at 18.9% interest rate. Option two, you paid the minimum plus $40. Well, you did actually pay it off a lot earlier. A couple of years plus earlier. But what's the most important thing in the middle on the bottom there that I didn't circle? It says $20,954. That's how much you paid over that time horizon. That's still a lot for that $8,000. But it's $11,000 less than what you would have paid just making the monthly payment. And that's just paying an extra $40 a month. And so that's the important notion to think about. Just paying a little bit extra can really reduce your debt very, very, very quickly. And it'll save you a lot of interest payments over time. Now, third on the right hand side, the green area, we decided to double our payment of $320 a month. First off, we pay it off in 13 years. So almost a third of the time faster. And guess what? Your payment amount is only $13,000. The total amount paid versus the $8,000 you originally charged. And that's again, almost one third of what you originally would have if you didn't, if you only paid the minimum amount over time. So this is the power of trying to pay off your high interest rate debt and paying it off a little bit at a time every month. If you are, you know, I do know people that use their credit cards all the time, but that's how they pay for everything. And then once a month, they read a check and pay off all their credit card every month. If you can do that, that's fantastic. I think that's a tough thing to do successfully over long time periods. But, you know, I've known people have been doing this for years and they are good at what they do. And so I would just tell you, this is a very important slide to think about. How do you pay off when you all of a sudden have to get yourself in debt? If you can't get yourself out, it's a very painful long experience. So on the next slide, I want to now step away from the debt payments out of the world to how do you start improving yourself outside of just paying down your debt? The concept is pay yourself first. Easy concept. First off, and this is as when we visit with clients in the very beginning, we ask them, do they have an emergency fund? We want them to have an emergency. We want the emergency fund. They should have a minimum of six to 12 months of expenses set aside in case you lose your job in place. You have a medical emergency, a car repair, house repair, family emergency. You need to have money ready that you can grab using, you know, most cases will tell them to use a simple savings account or CD. The goal here is not to mostly make money. The goal here is to have that money available to you that gives you flexibility to actually do something, pay it off, pay it quickly and take care of the problem and then figure out how you pay that back over time. I myself thought I was having a simple window replacement on last week on a vehicle that I have and lo and behold, after they took off the windshield, they said, well, we got a bunch of rest. You're going to have to take this into a body shop. Who knows how much that's going to cost me, but it doesn't. Obviously I don't want to go spend the money, but I also have the money set aside to that. I can handle this situation that it's not going to go on my credit card at 22% interest rate and have to pay off over time. I have a money set aside an emergency fund just for this particular case. So having an emergency fund is important and what I call it is flexibility. It is the ability to have answers to someone says, oh, I need $2,000 for you right away. Okay. Where am I going to find $2,000? Well, hopefully you have emergency funds. So you can say here it is. And then you replenish your emergency fund over time. That is first. That is kind of the bottom of that pyramid you need to build. The next level up is I have in the very bottom of the slide here is next step, build an account to start paying yourself first. This is an investment. You want to treat yourself like a lifelong bill or investment. Take your pick. It's something I learned coming out of college and I've been doing it ever since. And I've always used a portion of what I earned to go into an investment account from day one when I started working. Even when I had some debt, it was a decision of how much I put here versus how much I put there. And over time. It all worked out. Stocks went up, paid off the debt. And that, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But paying yourself first. And then you'll see on the next slide or two, which we're going to touch on now or next soon is, you know, you want to try to make this as seamless as possible for you. But I put this slide on here because I hear commonly for many people. I don't have any money to invest. I can't do it. I just don't have the money. I have to go pay this bill. And I have to pay this thing. Or I have to go get a new car or I need to go get something else. Well, it's a decision to get a new car versus getting something else. But there's also something called spending leaks. What is a spending leak? It's a small, seemingly small amount of money spent on non-essentials that add up over time. I'll raise my hand. I've had those in the past. When I worked for a large financial organization in the city for 25 years, my example would have been soda. I had a soda or two every day. And I never brought my lunch to work anytime. That cost me. I actually went and did the calculation. That cost me probably about $3,500 a year. When you add up all those lunches, you add up all those sodas. And when you start putting it over a 25 year career in the city, that was about $87,000. I could have had another chunk of more money working for me. And all I tried to tell people is it's an option. It's your choice. You can drink the soda. I wanted the soda. I thought I was making enough money. I could do this. And that did actually work out fine. But if you're not making enough money, you can't get enough money into your savings. Then maybe you do need to try to think, what else can I cut out of my life to help me? I'll put more money away and deciding if you need it or want it, those are two different things at the end of the day. And wanting it is one thing. Needing it is something else. So think about yours. You might have a spending leak in your lifestyle. If you're willing to share, I would, I'd ask you to put it in the chat and maybe at the break, we can, if anyone wants to share one, we can share one or look at a couple that people put in the chat box, but everyone has spending leaks. I have not run into a person in my life that does not have a spending leak yet. Most people, it's a choice. Do they want to keep doing it or not? And you have a choice. Do you want to keep doing it or not? I chose to, but you might not want to. On the next slide, as I said earlier, it is if you can make things automatic, it will make your life much easier. When you automate things, you can set it and forget it. I would never like to use words, forget it, but setting it and leaving it alone, those investors tend to do better what we've seen over time. Investors who want to set it and then, oops, markets down, I want to pull out back. I don't want to do this or markets up. Now's a great time to invest. We have found that those returns generally are not as good as the investors who just put it in there and leave it alone and let it grow over time horizon. We do know markets grow at a certain clip historically at a fairly consistent rate over 10, 20, 40, 60, 80, 90 years. Those rates of return for the stock market will be someplace between 10 and 20, 10 and 13%, sorry, 10 to 13%. Not every 10 years, but over average over long time horizons. Yes, that's generally been the historical numbers, but yet investors, the average investor out there is generating return half of that. Why? Because, be honest, they're futzing with it. They are getting involved at some point, either getting out of the market or getting into the market at the wrong time, and that generally does not work out to their advantage. So in your 401K plans, you can set it and just let it go. Automate it makes life a lot easier and take advantage of the ability to take payroll deductions and put it into your checking account and put it into an investment account or put it into the 401Ks that are out there. So making an automatic is important from my perspective. And that's our last investment concept. So let me turn it over to see if there's any questions before we get into the 10 tips. Craig, there is one question a couple of people commented on what their leaks were. One was a subscription to a Twitch or other subscription services and the other was eating out. And the question was for all loans, is it best to pay them off as soon as possible? Well, if you have a low-cost loan, so let's say, if you have a loan that's low cost, so in many people refinance their homes in the last couple of years, so your interest rate on your mortgage is probably someplace between two and 3%, maybe two and 4%. The answer is no, I really can't justify paying that off any sooner than I have to because it's a very low interest rate. I think I can generate a better return on the market by investing those dollars into the market. No guarantee on that, but I think I probably can get a better return. So I would not advocate racing out and paying off a 2.5% mortgage on my home. If you want to, it's not going to hurt you. I just don't see there's a big advantage there. However, it's the credit card debt or personal loan that's in the 5%, 5% would be wonderful. 9%, 10%, 12%, 21%. Yeah, you want to pay those things off relatively quickly when you have money in your pocket. So I would advocate paying off debt as quickly and as often as you can possibly do it. And I know it's not easy, trust me. You have many, many things pulling at you all the time, saying, oh, you go spend money here, go spend money there. And the TV and the ads are up there telling you you should go buy this, you should go buy that. And it's difficult. There's no question about it. This is not an easy process. And I want people to understand it's not easy. It is not an easy process. So I think Craig, I know that one just came in. How do you know if a savings account or money market fund is compounded? Most savings accounts or money market funds, they aren't probably compounded. Money market funds would actually, because it earns interest and then that interest then earns interest the following month. But most I would argue if you're getting a CD and a bank or just a pure savings account, it's probably not not compounding at any kind of real rate of return. Really what you're running to focus on is trying to have assets that can compound at a faster rate over time. If you remember the chart I had a few slides ago looking at the, I think the green circle and the red circle of the asset classes over time, the green circle outperformed the red circle by a wide margin. Those stocks did so much better than the rest of owning bonds and money market funds. That's been true for 90 years. I see no reason why that's going to change. So by having your money invested in faster growing assets, it will enable your assets to grow faster from that point of time. You can also ask whoever you're buying, getting the security, is this a compound interest account or not? And they should be able to tell you pretty quickly. One way or the other. A couple more, Craig, and I wanted to get back to you. Someone asked, can they have both in 401K and a Roth account? Yes, there's rules about having a Roth based on how much income that you earn, but you can have both. You might not be able to fund both in the same year, but that's a different issue. But yes, you can have both. And the last one, where can we find like-minded investors, perhaps better investing? Perhaps better investing. You're stealing my sales pitch here at the end. Yes, perhaps in better investing world. We will get on that when we get to number 10. So let's jump into the investing tips. Again, none of these should come as, oh my gosh, I've never heard of this before in my life. I'm hoping everyone has heard something about this in their life. But I do want to kind of hit through some things that I hear pretty regularly as a financial advisor and as a research person for the last 40 plus years of my life. These are things you want to look at out there. So let's go to the first slide, which is starting with a year 401K plan on the next slide. And on this slide, what I'm really trying to advocate for you is, I can't tell you how many times I talk to young people that are children of my clients in most cases who end up, they usually end up being a client at some point, that I said, do you have a 401K plan to work? Well, I'm not really sure. I think I do. Oh, they're just starting one. I'm not 100%. I think I'm putting so much. You should actually know. This is one of your first things you should learn when you get on the job. I get a paycheck and do you have a retirement plan that I can participate in? And not all companies do. Let's be clear. Not everyone has a 401K plan, but if they have one, that is great because you can put some money away through that. Second, your first question you want to ask them when you do join join them is do they match any of your investment? Many corporations do. Many larger corporations will match. And I have found that if you're not participating in that, you're doing something that I would say is kind of silly. You're giving up free money. As far as I know, I like free money. So put me in that list there. In red here, I say only 25% take full advantage of the match. This is a statistic. I forget exactly where it came from. I think it was from a fidelity or a survey they did over the last number of years, but only 25% of people taking full advantage of the match. You're giving up money for no reason other than maybe you can't afford to do that. But again, that's a decision. How do you spend up? Plug up spending leaks, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're working at a company, see if they have a 401K plan, please participate with it. It will help you out by putting money away over time and then find out if they have a financial match. Many companies do a 50% up to the first six, 6% of the money that you invest. That is actually fairly standard. Not every company does it, but many, many companies do. And on the next slide, let's just walk through the math of this free money. So this is a little different example. It's matching 50% of your contribution up to 10% of earnings. So let's say you earned gross pay of $1,000 for that pay period. Your contribution would be 10% of that or $100. The company's going to match $50 of that 50% of it. So they're going to give you $50 every payday. That's free money. I see no reason why you want to turn that away. And now people say, ah, $50 is that that's not that much. Okay. Well, at 26 pay periods a year, twice a month, that's $1,300 a year. That starts becoming real money in my world. I like $1,300. And if you don't, you can just send it my way. I'll give you my address. You can start writing me a check and send it to me. I'd be very happy to take it. So company matches are very, very important to help investors get further along down the world of hopefully financial success and retirement success. That's company match on our next bullet. Number two, consider hiring a registered financial advisor. And maybe registers might not be the right word. You might want to consider hiring a financial advisor. It's, it makes it a little bit easier to pass off some of the workload. It's not all the work. You can't just say, Hey, it's all your responsibility. Go make me a billion dollars and I don't have to worry about it. That doesn't work that way. You still have to do your half. You need to work. You need to make money and you need to bring money in their job was to help guide you down the path and hopefully prevent you from making too many silly mistakes that many people do over their lifetime of investing. And trust me, I've done a few silly mistakes in my career. And I tried to make sure others don't follow the same silly mistakes I do. You can hire a certified financial planner. I'm a CFA, which is a chartered financial analyst, but find people that have legal fiduciary duty. To put your best interest first. That is the important piece. They have to have your best interest first. So it's highly important. If they're not registered in many cases, they probably don't have this liability. Legal responsibility to find out. You can also go check on FINRA. Unless I have this thing on the bottom of a triple T and E. What the heck does that mean? And, and trust me, I'm not trying to get you to come as a new client any place. What I'm trying to get you to do is consider if you don't have the time, if you don't have the talent, if you don't have the temperament, and finally, if you don't have the energy to manage your money yourself, please either keep it very simple. Keep broad based ETFs in your portfolio or hire someone every so often to help make sure you're going down the right path, be able to ask somebody some questions. It is highly important. People that are in my field that are good at what they do, they know and they can see things pretty good. They might not want to be doing that. You might want to be doing this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but find people that do have fiduciary duty. CFPs actually have that responsibility to be half fiduciary responsibility to you. CFA's tend to do the same exact thing. If you're a registered investment advisory firm, again, your client's best interests are first on our list. That's the requirement that we have to live up to. But you can do it yourself. I know many people, many friends of mine that do it themselves and they've been very successful as well. It takes more time, takes more effort. But if you have the time, if you have the temperament, you have the talent to go do this and you have the energy to go do it, do it yourself. A good friend of mine that's in one of my investment clubs just retired, he asked me after about six months, about two months before he was going to retire. He says, can you look at this for me? And I said, sure, I'll look at it for you. And look, his spreadsheets were more complex than my spreadsheets. He was a manager at a food grocery store. He had amazing spreadsheets. I said, yeah, you don't need my help. You're doing just fine. Yes, you can retire. That is something that, again, if you have the time, temperament, talent, you can do it all yourself. On the next slide, here is the negative of hiring somebody like myself or another financial advisor. They're going to charge you something to go do that. And so in this slide is fairly simplistic, but trying to look at, if you're just doing it yourself, the very top star, the, I think it's pink or purple line with a pink star and a purple around it, I think, it's about a million dollars. It grows to over a long time periods. You're paid a 0.1% annual fee. This would probably the product fee. If you just bought like a, let's pick, let's say a Vanguard or any generic ETF index fund that's out there, that's on the broad market S&P 500. It doesn't have a large fee. But just owning that, you're going to get a market exposure and you don't have to really do a whole lot. You just let it do its thing. In that case, your money, $100,000 growing at 8% a year over 30 years grew to almost a million dollars. If you put a 1% fee on there, which is a relatively average fee you'd see from many different advisors out there, that fee, that account would drop by almost $200 and somewhat $1,000 over this time horizon. That's the second line down with the blue and green star. And that's because you're paying something out to somebody to help you out, help you get along down the road. Now this all assumes that you didn't make a better return because, you know, they might, they might not. But if you keep on going down the list, if you're paying more in fees over time, you can see there's less and less money for you to keep. So it's still gross. You still have more money than what you started, but you keep less of it over time. So this is, again, this is the risk that you run. If you hire someone, make sure that you're getting a reasonable, paying a reasonable fee for what you're going to get at the end of the day. And the next one is looking at the next slide and looking at it in just a slightly different manner. And so this is assuming cost of fees after 25 years of investing. So we invested $100,000. It grew to 300, it grew $330,000 in earnings or worth of $430,000. If you're going to pay a 2% fee as the red circle on the bottom shows, you would have paid out of roughly $170,000 to the person that helped you get this far along. You still would have made a good return, but you obviously shared something. And let's be clear, the people that do help you, they do deserve something because they are helping you get ahead in life. They are helping you make hopefully the financial journey easier over time. If they're not, then you're the wrong person, I would argue. Again, that's just my opinion. But this is just a simple example of a 2% fee and what it costs people. You do need to think about the cost. And this is just the management's fee. We're not going to get next on the product cost fee, but these are just thinking about it from, if you hired someone to help you, how much is it going to cost you over time? Try to go lower wherever you can. And we're going to give you a couple other examples to maybe help down this path. So on to our next investment tip number three. This is the product fee. So I just told you that there are two sets of fees. There's the manager fee. He gets, they get paid to do whatever they do to help you guide you down whatever path you're trying to guide, get guided down. Then product fees, depends on what you pay for things. In this case, I have what's called the world passive versus active. So there's a world of investing out there. And depending the type of securities you use, might have a fee on involved, might not have a fee. The fee might be a lot. It might be very little. Typically on many mutual funds or ETFs, there is a fee, some small amount of fee that might look like there's nothing. It's a 1% fee. It's a 2% fee. It's a point 0.5% fee. But there's usually a fee today. Most stocks trade without fees anymore. There are commissions. They used to be a commission involved today. Most times you can buy it if you're on a Schwab or a fidelity platform or something like that. It could be free. Not always, but many cases. This whole passive versus active, what does that mean? Passive just simply stands for people that are wanting to invest with index funds. Those funds try to match whatever index they're tracking, like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones industrials average. They don't try to beat it. They're just trying to match it. So with computers, it actually makes it kind of not easy, but easier to do very inexpensively. So it doesn't cost much money. Active managers tend to be more expensive. They believe they can outperform the market over time. They're going to pick you the right stocks and they're going to kick the market and get you a much better return. It's possible. I happen to do both in my business. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. That's the problem being active management. If you don't keep up with the index, you trail the index, which then says maybe you're better off just owning the index. And that's something to think about. But the most important thing between active and passive is the very bottom bullet point. The fees are a lot lower on passive or index funds. Generally three cents on the dollar to 20 cents on the dollar or 0.03% to 0.2% versus an actively managed fund, which might be as cheap as a half percent, but could be as high as 2% every year. Every year. Remember those earlier charts that 1% 2% how much were you giving up in this case? So you don't actually see it because if it's a mutual fund or an ETF, it just gets netted out of the net, net asset value on a day to day basis. So you don't actually see it leaving the portfolio, but I guarantee you it is reducing the overall return for that particular security. So this is the passive versus active and passive. As we touch the next slide. Touches on. What's been happening for the last 20 some odd years, is that it's going to shift away from actively managed funds. And most of my career was on the active management side. When I decided to semi-retire and go do what I do now. I part of my business is now definitely on the passive side because it has worked consistently for the last 20 years. And I see no reason why it's going to shift at some point back the other direction in any way. For any long lengthy period of time. I've found as many investors said, I can make a slightly better return by just shifting my money from active to passive. And I don't have to hope that they beat the market over time. They just have to match the market over time. And that's why you've seen billions and billions. I could even say trillions of dollars shifting over the last 20 years from active managers to passive managers. And those passive managers might own index ETFs. Index mutual funds or index exchange traded funds or ETFs. And the main reason why is in the middle of this page. Over the last 15 years, and this was done as of 2019. According to this, this, the scoreboard that was done on the past 15 years prior to that, 88% of the active funds underperformed their benchmarks. Underperformed 88% over a 15 year time horizon. Now, on any annual basis, those numbers can be a lot higher than that or lower than that. Active management is very tough to do. And it seems like it's an easy thing. Just got to beat the market. Well, it's not as easy as it sounds. And there are some people that do do it on a semi consistent basis, but they're not that many. And there's not that common out there to go. Fine. In addition, the active managers tend to have higher fees. They also typically generate higher capital gains for you, which means you have a higher tax bill at the end of the year. And that's something that many investors are always trying to try to reduce over time. So this has been an ongoing shift has been going on for a long time. Under the next slide. So going into some more details, when you just think about index funds, these are typically low fees types of investments. There are two basic types, mutual funds and exchange traded funds. There are some differences as you see throughout both of them. I will tell you that it's been. The exchange traded funds can be a little more tax efficient because of how they are constructed and how they trade throughout the day, but both are, are definitely more tax efficient than the active manager least historically. I tend to tilt more and in our business that I use today, I work with today. We use primarily ETFs only in our particular world if we're not using individual stocks. Again, index funds can be both in stocks. They can be in bonds and they can be in other assets, let's say like gold or silver. They are, there are things like that. They can be functioning as an either an index or an either an index mutual fund or an exchange traded fund. So those are the differences between the two and we can obviously go into more detail later on. On to the next slide here. Number four, we're going to kind of split the baby here and try to do a little bit of both. Think about robo-envisors. There are a number of different robo-envisors out there. Many different firms offer some version of this. And it's a digital platform that allows you automated formula-driven investment services, little or no human supervision. They automate investment. They help you automate your investment and rebalancing process. And they typically use indexing or passive strategies. The fees are relatively low. And, and they're very low opening balances. So these are perfect for the young person starting off is trying to build up a little bit of a nest egg. And are willing to stick X number of dollars in on a regular basis into these things. And the fees are pretty low. On the next slide, we kind of walk through a couple of the things that we're trying to do here. And what we're trying to do here, we're trying to do a little bit of the same thing. And minus to think about. We do think it's pretty good for entry-level investors. We provide models to a couple of different firms out there. When we think about robo-envising. It's low cost compared to. Hiring a traditional financial advisor. It's accessible and efficient. You know, most of them are used on apps on your phones. You easily to do easily to track. Now, there's some problems with these. Number one, probably the biggest issue everyone has with them is it lacks personal touch. If something happens in your life and you need to ask a question, they probably don't have a lot of people there that can really help you and answer those questions. That's probably the biggest thing out there. Number two, going back to the first bullet point there, automated service are ill-equipped to deal with unexpected crises. So if all of a sudden something happens in your life, or there's an extraordinary situation that you need to all sudden change something, the auto-investing, the robo-envisors might not be best equipped to handle that situation. And then lastly, they typically have a limited investment options to keep costs low. They don't have a wide spectrum of things to pick from. But I will argue to you that in many cases for people that are starting off and trying to get five, 10, 15, 20, $30,000 kind of saved up over time with some sort of professional guidance to give you, because they do actually do a pretty, a lot of them do a pretty good educational process as well. I would argue, yes, using a robo-advisor will help you build some assets. And then as you become, have a little bit more net worth, more questions about how you go from here to there, then I would argue then it makes maybe some more sense to start talking to some live person or a person that will give you some more guidance. But robo-envisors is a good way to kind of jump the hurdle from one spot to another spot. On the next slide, this is probably one of the more important concepts to think about, asset allocation. And what I would tell you, if you just have a few minutes to spare to think about your investments every month, think about your asset allocation. Possibly. And I would argue, what the real issues, how old you are, or let me put it differently, how close are you to retirement? But asset allocation is a pretty simple concept. It aims to balance risk and reward by breaking up your portfolio's assets based on your individual's goals, risk tolerance, and investment horizon. Of those three, probably the middle one, risk tolerance is highly important from the perspective of if you're investing your money in risky assets and you don't want to make it, that's not going to work, trust me. You'll kill yourself over time and it won't really benefit you. The biggest one for what we see historically is investment horizon, meaning that how far away from when you actually need to start pulling on these assets is very important how you want to invest. There's three basic asset classes to think about. Equities, fixed income, and cash. They all act differently. They all have a purpose in a portfolio. And depending on where you are in your life, you could have all three. You might just have one of those or two of those, probably have equities and cash or fixed income and cash. But at some point in your life, you'll probably have all three, and that's usually as you get closer and closer to retirement. And we can touch on that later if you have questions on it. But please make sure your investments don't all end up in the same proverbial basket of all stocks, all fixed income, all cash. On the next slide, you do need to do what's called asset balancing, meaning that bonds have a certain return spectrum over time, meaning they have different patterns of returns than stocks. They tend to be a little different than each other. And thus you want to think about what's called rebalancing, meaning at some point you might want to sell something that's done very well and put it into something that's not done so well, buy low, sell high. That's a concept that hopefully many of you have heard. The theory of having 100% of your portfolio in stocks will make you the most money, at least historically it has if you have a long enough time horizon, but you have a lot higher risk and volatility. Again, you need to measure your asset allocation to make sure that it's not tied to your risk levels. If you can't handle all the volatility, then you shouldn't take that level of risk, even though it might make you more return over time, you probably won't get there because at some point during the worst part of it, you'll say, I can't take it anymore. I can't afford to lose more of this money. It's never going to come back. Trust me, I've heard those words several different times in my career by people. And guess what? You've all come back, but at that moment, you'll feel like you'll never come back. You'll never get back there again. But, and that's why you have to tailor your risk of your portfolio to your personal risk. You can't take too much because you will cause you to do something at the wrong time. Rebalancing can happen anytime. It doesn't have to wait until the bull market finishes. It doesn't have to wait to the, you know, preferably lots of stocks selling stocks when the markets up is a good thing versus selling it when it's a down is not so much of a good thing. And that typically wouldn't make any sense if you're trying to rebalance by selling high when the markets are down. So that's again, buy high, buy low, sell high is a simple idea, but it's the basic for rebalancing. And you should do rebalancing on a regular basis. What's regular? I would tell you once a year. There's been lots of studies done over the last 20 years. It really shows that people that want to. Rebalance more often, you know, quarterly, monthly. Or even more often. They don't generate a better return over time. So that concept has been deepened pretty consistently. On the next slide, we're now going to get the bullet point number six. And this one target date funds. So in many cases, you'll find these in your 401k plans. And for those who want to make life easy. And basically pick one or two choices. Pick a target date fund that's, that's close to when you think you might be retiring or leaving this organization. Hopefully retiring because you might be leaving early. You never know. And what is a target date fund? It's just simply, it does all the work for you. Again, making your life easier, automating things, except you don't have to do anything. You buy the fund once and through its lifetime. As it gets closer and closer to the date of that fund, it will be getting itself more and more conservative. And it does it automatically. And so this works out very nicely. It puts things on an autopilot. Hence why, hence why. Target date funds have become very, very, very, very, very popular in a lot of the 401k plans. Cause it makes life easier for the participants to say, I'm just going to pick that fund. That's going to, I'm going to retire in 30 years. And that return of that fund is a 20, 55 fund. And that sounds perfect for me. And I'll just let it go. Be aware. The risk is one risk is more than one risk. Probably is that these are also volatile. They own a bunch of stocks in this portfolio. It will go down when the market goes down. And likewise, it'll go up when the market goes up. But that also surprises some people. They think, well, I own a target date fund. So it doesn't go down as much. Well, maybe, maybe not. People were surprised in 2008, nine, how much their target date funds dropped. They weren't expecting it to drop as much as they did. On the next slide, we kind of look at some of the pros and cons. It's a great way for automatic investments and all in one vehicle. Meaning you don't have to do anything else. You can own one or two of these target date funds in your 401k plan and call the day. It is a diversified portfolio. They typically own some international stocks. They have some domestic stocks. They own large companies. They own small companies. They own some bonds. They're going to own some cash in the portfolio. They do all the work for you. You just have to pick the date that you want to pick from. And don't do this. I've seen it before. Someone picks, you know, seven different target date funds. Going starting in, you know, 2025 going out for the next, you know, seven time periods or, you know, five at a five year clip each one. You're not really helping yourself out. If you want to buy one or two or three, that's fine. More than that. I think you'd be over, over, over diversifying yourself and not getting any real benefit from it. Be aware by using a target date fund, they're going to want to charge a little fee for that. So you're paying a little bit more than index funds. They are automatically rebalancing, which, you know, sometimes rebalancing is done at the right time relative to Marcus. Sometimes it's not done at the right time. But it does do automatically rebalancing. And if you don't need that anymore, then you might not want to be doing that. And I'll touch on a situation of what I'm talking about there in a second. It might not be a great hedge against inflation because the bond portion might be getting too big in that portfolio. And lastly, not all target apes perform the same way. Trust me, we saw many different returns in 2008 from, from different, different one of these target date funds out there. So on this one particular case, I will make the point for anyone that's relatively young that has 30 to 40 years to retire. A target date fund, I actually think doesn't make any sense to use personally. This is my personal opinion. I would just buy the S&P 500 index fund, have all my money in the market instead of having 95% of my money in the market. Your choice, you pick what you want to do. But it makes, with that long time horizon, I want all my money on the equity side growing for me and not having any of it sitting in a bond fund. If I have 30 to 40 years away from retirement. And I will get almost guarantee you that every target date fund has a little bit of money in the bond portion. That's just the way they are built. On the next slide, number seven apps for investing. So this, I'm going to get into a world of something I know nothing about. But I know people that have used them and they have been quite happy with them. I've never used an app for investing. But I do hear that they are a good way to allow you to put money away. And allows you investing with just a few dollars, a few pennies, put it away and let it grow over time. This is a good way, whether it's in, you know, using the app Acorn or Chime or there's probably three dozen of these things out there at this point in time. You know, go figure out which one has the best rating systems, have the best fees, have the lowest fees and best services out there. And allows you to put some money away very easily. Again, paying yourself first, making it automated are ways to get yourself ahead over time. On the next slide, we talk again a little bit more about the pros and cons. It doesn't cost much money to use their, it's very low dollar amounts in very cases. You can build this quickly. It's simple to use. I wouldn't invest too, too much money with this. Unless you really understand exactly how it works. And I believe their fees do get, can get somewhat more expensive as you can, the accounts get larger over time. They have limited investment options out there. And some people have complained about quality of some of the products over time. Again, unfortunately, I've never used one per se. So I don't have great experience, but my son and others have used them and they, they find it to be useful in many different cases. I'm an old school guy. I still use cash. I know it's a kind of a funny notion to still use cash. And so I get a dollar bill back or change back and the change goes in a jar and then I go down and eventually turned it into dollar bills at some point in time. You know, that's, again, I'm old school. I have gray hair. So anyways, moving on the next slide, slide number or idea number eight, bonds. Bonds are different than stocks. In this case, you actually loan money to the companies or the government. And your creditors and you're entitled to interest and then getting paid back for the money you loan them. If a credit goes in bankruptcy, you get priority first over everybody else in the organization. Typically, not always, but typically, and you're made whole first. Bonds have a fixed duration. They expire at a certain time, typically, which makes them less volatile than stocks, which means they are typically less riskier than stocks. And so the return on and lastly, on the very last bullpoint there, return is typically fixed rate. It's not always, but 90% of the securities out there tend to be fixed rate. And you get paid on a periodic basis, usually twice a year, sometimes more, sometimes less depending on the different investment that it is. And it's a contract between you and whoever you're loaning the money to, they have to pay you back. They're going to pay you a certain amount on a regular basis. These typically have lower risk than stocks because the stocks don't give you any of those guarantees. They give you nothing. They just say that hopefully over time we grow and we'll hopefully the stock price goes up and maybe we'll pay a dividend. Maybe we won't. Who knows. And but we've found over time, stocks typically grow over a long, long time periods to help protect yourself a little bit. We would advocate using on the next slide bond ladders. And particularly today with inflation, where it is with bond ladders become more important. And these are owning securities that will mature in that year. And so you can build a simple bond ladder coming due in 22, 23, 24, 25, or you can invest your whole money in coming due in 2025. Your choice. I like bond ladders because it gives me money every year that allows me to wherever the interest rate is at that time, lock that rate in. I don't have as much interest rate risk from that perspective. I get more diversification. And I can also potentially have better credit risk over time or lower credit risk, I should say. And I probably have higher liquidity. So we typically use these types of build bond ladders for our clients and think about that personally as I think about investing because then I have money coming due on a regular basis. However, last couple of years up until this year, it hasn't really mattered because industry has been so down and so it was hard to get any return out there at all. In the bond world. On the next slide we have again some of the pros and cons. I think it gives you flexibility. I think it gives you the ability to have money coming due to you on a regular basis. Those are some of your bro. Some of your pros. Again, bonds quality bonds are not as volatile stocks. Again, that's in nature all positive for all bonds. On the negative side, bond returns are not nearly as good as stocks. So if you look at the chart, I showed you earlier, going back 90 years, widely underperforming stocks over time. You can also have credit risk with bonds. So if it's not a government organization, you could have some credit risks and something you need to be aware of bonds can go down in value as interest rates go up, bonds go down in value. They are in verse to each other. So as interest rates have gone up a lot this year, bonds are actually negative performing negatively for the first time in many, many years. And I think that has been a surprise to many, many investors to see a negative return. And in fact, in the first quarter of this year, bonds actually underperform stocks overall for the first quarter, which is I think catches a lot of people by surprise. Next on lesson number nine. This is history again. And again, I've talked a lot about history so far. This is going back 150 years. And what you really want to see how this chart is, what is it doing? It's going up, up into the right slowly over time. Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. And when you see these little shaded spots on the chart, where I have a red arrow on the right hand, upper right hand corner, it shows that the market didn't hit a new high for a period of time. And this particular time it took over 10, almost 15 years for it to hit a new high from what it hit back in 99, 2000 time horizon. So that was known as the lost decade. Many people were complaining that, geez, we haven't made any money for a long time. And they're right. They didn't make money for 15 years. But as you see what happened since then, it went up to new highs. And this is what you've seen consistently over the decades. And what I would tell you is this is a chart you want ingrained in your brain. And when markets are down, you do want to take advantage of it. It might not come back right away. But over time, it has always shown that to happen. So my last investment tip is invest with like-minded investors. Find people that have things similar to how you think about investing and maybe consider investing with them, whether it's to an investment club or just talking to other people that have similar type of investment styles as you. Trust me, if you're trying to invest in your styles quite a bit different than somebody else, it will drive you crazy over time. I would advise you not to do that. I would find people that you feel comfortable investing with it and have similar styles that are your own. It will help you sleep better at night. Also, if you invest with other like-minded investors, you can, you know, a bunch of you looking at similar types of stocks might find different ones that become more available to you out there. Find different ones that you might not have found on your own. I think helping chatting with other people might keep your emotions at bay because trust me, the market does try to drive you crazy and try to get you to do things that you shouldn't do at the wrong time. And that seems to be the goal of the stock market over time. Individual stocks may have the potential for the greatest returns. We always hear about XYZ stock, you know, X thousand percent over the last two years, five years, ten years, you might get lucky and find that. Let's be clear. It's not a high chance of ever finding something like that. But getting a return like I showed you earlier, 10 to 12 percent on an annualized basis over long time horizons of 10 to 20 years is very possible. And we've seen that very consistently over my lifetime as a investor over the last 40 years. Invest in yourself. Keep on learning about how to become a better investor. And then lastly, investment clubs. Consider looking at an investment club. It might be something you like. It might not. It might drive you crazy. And we've had people join our clubs and say, I just can't do this. I don't like this. And they've left. That's your choice. So in the next one, next slide. What's the advantage of individual stocks? I think you make a better return over time. You control what you own. You can buy things that you want to own, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the most important thing is at the time. Do you have the time? Do you have the talent? Do you have the temperament? And do you have the effort to do it? If you don't, I would tell you, buy a broad-based investment. If you don't, I would tell you, buy a broad-based investment. I would tell you, buy a broad-based, broad-basket index fund out there, an S&P 500 index, the Vanguard total stock market index, the Vanguard total bond market index, or some other versions of these, dozens of dozens of S&P 500 funds out there. Make sure their fees are low, own those to get, to get the power of the growth of the stock market. But you control what you buy and how much you pay for it. You control when you're going to buy this out. You can control your taxes and fees. You can control your taxes and fees. I would tell you, buy a broad-based investment. And that represents better investing as a nonprofit. I put this little box to the right-hand side. It goes open house. If you go to the website, betterinvesting.org, click on that box. You'll have to give them your email address, but they're going to give you some information and you can see what we actually do and how we do it and better investing. You can learn more about it. many years. Like I said, I started my first one in 87. They started in the 50s in general. And people find that they enjoy working on with clubs. I myself enjoy working with clubs because I can then share different ideas with them. I get to do all these things on this page myself by spending the time and doing it. Not everyone has the time. Not everyone enjoys it. I have plenty of people that would tell me, Craig, I really don't have an interest. This borers the living daylights out of me. I go, great, buy an index fund or get someone to do the financial work for you. It will make you a better person at the end of the day. But you can choose your own stocks. I can, you know, I can also avoid paying all those management fees I talked about earlier. On the next slide is investment clubs. And we have one in locally in San Francisco, the San Francisco Model Club. If you want to learn more, we'll touch on that in a second. But this is a way for you with other like-minded individuals can go find some stocks, can invest together. You can learn about the markets pluses and the minuses. And you can learn how to study and learn how to own companies. You can manage your financial future. We have found investment clubs be a very good way for people to, you know, again, this is not where all your money goes. This is where a little piece of your money goes. But it will show you how you can think about investing and then you can start building your own investment account outside of the club, learning and leveraging off your club's activities. And on the next slide, we have San Francisco's Club. We meet every month, the second Thursday of every month. Typically, since COVID, it's been online, but we did actually meet in April in the, in San Francisco Main Library and we'll meet in July in the San Francisco Main Library, I believe again. And it's open to visitors. Come to the, go to the Better Investing website, go to San Francisco Chapter. You can email me. There's many ways you can find out about this. You do need to register for it so that we, we know who all can, or might be attending that meeting because we are limited to space when we meet live. But this is a live club. This has been around for a little, almost 11 years now. It has 16 members, 15 members in it. We have a portfolio of about $130,000 and it's a way for people to educate themselves about how to invest. On the next slide, then we're almost done. We are done. So on this slide at the very bottom, again, two different things, Better Investing.org, go to the open house, go to the website, see all the educational stuff we have. We have a ton of educational stuff for people to learn on how to invest. Lastly, if you have more questions outside of this, feel free to reach out to me. This is my personal email that I use for better investing. Well, in general, I use this personal email. But I believe in Better Investing, I mean, we're not perfect. You know, we make plenty of mistakes in Better Investing as we think about investing. But it's a good way. It's been a good organization from my perspective to give good, basic financial information for people to learn more about life and investing. So with that, let me stop. I've sucked a bunch of time out of your life and see if there's any more questions that I might have stirred up in the second half of the presentation. So Craig, we do have quite a few questions and this is supposed to be over at 5.15. But if you want to stay on for a few more minutes and get through these, is that okay? Are you willing to do that? I'm willing to do that. I apologize for going long. Okay, that's all right. It's really interesting. So JP has been keeping track of the questions. Go ahead, JP. Yeah, thanks. And we'll try to get through as many of these as we can. And I trust that Craig is going to be back for a future class, so those that we don't get to can be answered in the future. Anyway, Craig, any suggestions for finding registered financial advisors and their ratings? FINRA, go to FINRA.org. You can go look there to look for different firms out there, I believe. I would also ask a friend who, if someone has a good financial advisor, they're usually willing to share, they might not be over it about and say, hey, you got to go use this guy. But if you ask someone and ask them, do you like your financial advisor? If they say yes, say, gee, can you give me the contact information? Referrals is how we get most of our clients over time. And that is the way most financial advisors like to grow their business, business over time. If they're advertising quite a bit, I tend to shy away from them because I wonder why they need to advertise so much. They shouldn't have to. Okay. Should we still contribute to a 401K even if our employer isn't matching? Yeah, unless you're going to put it into an IRA. But the problem with an IRA is you only can put $6,000, maybe $7,000 next year into an IRA where your 401K, you can put double that or more. I think it's $18,000. So I would do a 401K over the IRA every time. Okay. And how about what can we do now to make a return of 4% annually or higher? That's not a 401K IRA or something where our money isn't readily available. So you want to get a 4% return without having money regularly available? No, that is readily. Oh, I got you. Well, there's no guarantees out there, as far as I can tell. So I'm not sure what you can get with a 4% return. It should be generated theoretically over time in the stock market, but with a lot of volatility in any particular year or time. You can own stocks that pay dividends. I'm a big fan of dividends paying stocks. But with the market yield of around 1.5, maybe 2% today, 10-year treasury around 2 and change percent. A 4% yield says you're taking above average risk relative to that to get a real kind of return out there. So I guess I'm not sure what is out there that can or surely get me a 4% return out there. Even real estate hasn't been paying a 4% return the last couple of years, at least safely. Okay. And someone asks, they had stocks in the S&P 500 and they've watched some of them lose value and they wonder when is a good time? When do you know when to pull out or do you? You never know when to pull out. So from that perspective, stocks go up, stocks go down. And usually what happens, they'll go up when you least expect it and it will probably go down when you least expect it. That's been my history for the last 40, 50 years. And so from my perspective, what I do do is when markets are up, I typically trim money off the market when things are up. And I'm usually trying to find dollars to go into the market when markets are down. Not more complicated than that. Not much more effort that goes into that. I do spend my time trying to find good companies. But again, sometimes you pick the right ones, sometimes you don't pick the right ones. I have found by investing with other like-minded people, they will share thoughts about companies that I might not have thought of. And so that's always benefits me at some point down the road. How about recommendations on investing for the benefit of four-year-old grandchild? Well, we're not supposed to make too many recommendations. But again, young person should be thinking about something in the stock market. So make it fast and easy. Some S&P 500 index, some total market index. I mean, there is a belief that I would have right now that the international market should actually outperform the domestic markets at some point. They haven't for the last five, six years, but they should at some point in the future. So maybe you tilt a little bit some dollars more to international, but just make life easy. Buy an index fund, let it grow. And someone says bonds have been a poor investment for over the past numerous years. Dividend stocks have been recommended instead. What are your thoughts? True and true, but dividend stocks will go down like the stock market when the stock market goes down. So it works until you if you need that money, and this is the problem that people have. Owning dividend stocks is just another version of stocks. So when stocks go down, all stocks go down, including dividend paying stocks. And they did that this first quarter just as well as other things. So maybe they didn't go down maybe as much, but they still went down. This quarter was particularly bad for bonds. But if you talk about going into a real recession where markets are really under pressure, and the Fed is talking about lowering interest rates, bonds actually do pretty well in that environment. That's why you have bonds. You have bonds for the emergency side of the world when you need money and your stocks are now down. That's what I use my bonds for. I fully understand I'm not going to get the best return there. That's not the goal of that money. That goal of that money is to be there when I need it. And when the market is down, I'll pick a time, March of 2000, my stock market is down 35%. I sold some bonds to give me the cash that I needed to live on for that period of time in my life instead of selling stocks. The rest of the time I'm usually selling stocks because that's an automatic way of diversifying my risk over time because stocks grow over time. And so I'm selling things that keep on going up and that works out. But don't ignore bonds in differently. Ignore bonds at your own peril in the long run. I think dividend-paying stocks are great things to own, but they go up and go down just like the stock market. Someone asked if you could discuss the differences between a financial planner and an estate planner and the fees associated with each. Well, an estate planner is typically trying to work out to try to figure out how you should hold your assets in case you happen to pass away. I don't know all their fees there. I know I've paid for one when I had my living trust done. They are somewhat a couple thousand dollars, I think is what I paid. I don't remember exactly. But it's a good thing to go do if you want to have your assets set up the right way for if and when you pass. Whereas a financial advisor is trying to help you manage your assets while you're alive and also maybe when you pass, but they can't do all the estate planning paperwork that you're going to need to do, build the legal trust that you're going to need that will help you get through all the issues that happens when you pass. So there are two different things. And I would say try to find an advisor that's relatively affordable. If you need to find someone that you like, that you trust, and then figure out how much they're going to ask to be paid for that. And I have plenty of friends that work with other advisors that have been friends of mine for 40 years. And I've told them very bluntly, I said, if you like the guy and you trust him, stay with him. There's no reason to switch to me. I'm not going to also change the world by you moving to me. But that's their choice and they have to figure out what makes best sense for them. Thoughts on annuities. Are they safe? Many recent financial educator groups are trying to get people to roll over their 401s into an annuity. They're safe. Not sure you get great returns on them, but they're safe. So I mean, that's really two different questions there. Yeah, I would be a little hesitant. I know what their marketing tours are marketing to risk and fear that, oh my God, the bear market's going to come. You're going to lose 50% of your money or 25% of your money. And if you're a young person, I would ignore it completely. If I'm looking towards retirement, you can restructure your portfolio to have a lot more bonds in your portfolio, which is what the annuity owns anyways, in many cases, to be more conservative. And you should do that anyways, as you're getting close to retirement. Because when you're getting close to retirement is the key issue that most people need to think about is how do I protect my money so that when I step over that threshold towards retirement, that I have the longest time horizon ahead of me for this money to work. And that's a key. So I don't use annuities in my business practice too often, very rarely. I have considered them at different times. And I think a straight annuity that's not complicated that says I put my money in and you give me a 3% or 4% return, okay, I could live with that. I have to be happy with that 3% or 4% return. But that's a different issue. But I don't really use too many annuities. And maybe we got time for just a couple of more. For a first-time investor who already has a 401k, which would you recommend additionally, robo-investing or cryptocurrency? Oh, good one. Robo-investing only because I have no idea what cryptocurrency might or might not do. I mean, there's nothing. Robo-investing, at least you're buying into some indexes that I least have some belief that they should grow over time based on the earnings of the index, of the securities that are in there, the index. A robo-investing or crypto, I mean, if you go to crypto, what is the value of a crypto? That's the problem that no one can answer. So I don't own anything in crypto. My son does. He's young. He can afford it. He can afford it whether it works or doesn't work. So I'm part of the older generation. I have not gone over to the crypto world yet. So I would lean towards robo-investing. Okay. And one final one, and there's more, and we'll get to them the next time you come with us. But are you, for a person living in a remote area, are you aware of any online investing clubs, i.e. don't meet in person? Yeah, there are. In fact, Harriet, who's also better investing, who's taught a couple of times. I think she's in the process of starting an online one. But I think if you go to betterinvesting.org, there are several online clubs that meet around the country. And on ours, if you want to just dial in and join and just observe and see how we operate, you can do that as well. We do want you to be local to join on occasional meetings. That might change down the road. I think the people are actually really enjoying doing it virtually. It's much easier to run the meetings that way. But ours are free to the public. We just need to know about it in advance that you want to join, so we have enough room in our meeting place. But at betterinvesting.org, I do believe there's a number of different virtual clubs around the country. Okay. And with that, we have to stop. The questions keep coming in, and we could be here all night. But I want to thank you, Craig, for joining us this afternoon. This is really interesting. And you're welcome back anytime, so we could talk about that. Everybody, I will try and get that email sent out later this afternoon. Hopefully the recording will be ready, and I can get it out by six. There will be the slides and the recording, so you can watch this again. And I want to thank everyone for participating and for your questions, for staying with us all afternoon. Thank you, Craig. And with that, we have to say good afternoon, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thanks, Trin. Thanks, JP. Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it. All right. Take care.