Thank you for making 2023 a smashing success! As the year comes to a close, we are taking a moment to share our reflections and key takeaways from past episodes and series.
For those of you who are new to Ditch the Suits, we want to catch you up on all you've missed this year. But don't just listen to this episode; go back and binge some of the episodes we discuss that resonate with you.
In 2023, we covered a range of topics, including caregiving, early retirement, exposing economists, ESG investing, artificial intelligence and the impact of financial planning, tax planning strategies, rethinking retirement, financial literacy, understanding the impact of windfalls and inheritances, the FIRE movement, retirement reality, and passive investing.
Takeaways
Achievements
Thank you for making this a memorable year. The best is yet to come! Let us know what topics you would like to hear in 2024 by visiting www.ditchthesuits.com
______________________________________________________________
Looking for additional content that can help you get the most from your life? Check out Unleashing Leadership with Travis Maus, premium bonus content from Ditch the Suits Fans, at https://unleashingleadership.buzzsprout.com/
Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com
Ditch the Suits is produced by NQR Media. NQR also produces the One Big Thing Podcast with Steve Campbell.
You can watch all episodes, as well as other great content produced by NQR Media through their YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@NQRMedia
📧 For more information or to get in touch with us, visit https://www.ditchthesuits.com/ or email us at info@ditchthesuits.com
👍🏼 You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @nqrmedia
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We'd also love for you to subscribe to this podcast and leave a 5-star rating and review
Thank you for making 2023 a smashing success! As the year comes to a close, we are taking a moment to share our reflections and key takeaways from past episodes and series.
For those of you who are new to Ditch the Suits, we want to catch you up on all you've missed this year. But don't just listen to this episode; go back and binge some of the episodes we discuss that resonate with you.
In 2023, we covered a range of topics, including caregiving, early retirement, exposing economists, ESG investing, artificial intelligence and the impact of financial planning, tax planning strategies, rethinking retirement, financial literacy, understanding the impact of windfalls and inheritances, the FIRE movement, retirement reality, and passive investing.
Takeaways
Achievements
Thank you for making this a memorable year. The best is yet to come! Let us know what topics you would like to hear in 2024 by visiting www.ditchthesuits.com
______________________________________________________________
Looking for additional content that can help you get the most from your life? Check out Unleashing Leadership with Travis Maus, premium bonus content from Ditch the Suits Fans, at https://unleashingleadership.buzzsprout.com/
Thanks to our sponsor, S.E.E.D. Planning Group! S.E.E.D. is a fee-only financial planning firm with a fiduciary obligation to put your best interest first. Schedule your free discovery meeting at www.seedpg.com
Ditch the Suits is produced by NQR Media. NQR also produces the One Big Thing Podcast with Steve Campbell.
You can watch all episodes, as well as other great content produced by NQR Media through their YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@NQRMedia
📧 For more information or to get in touch with us, visit https://www.ditchthesuits.com/ or email us at info@ditchthesuits.com
👍🏼 You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at @nqrmedia
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ We'd also love for you to subscribe to this podcast and leave a 5-star rating and review
Welcome to Ditch the Suits, a movement awakening and opportunity for you to start getting more from your money in life. I'm Steve Campbell. With my amazing co-host, travis Moss, we're going to share industry insights nobody wants you to know about, so buckle up and enjoy the episode. Welcome to Ditch the Suits, steve Campbell, here with Travis Moss folks, we are very excited to actually have you on this episode today. Hard to believe. 2023 is coming to an end. You blink and the year is gone. I know that Travis and I have looked at recently that we have a lot of new subscribers and listeners to the show, so we thought it'd be fun to look back on the year it's been. Look at some of the series we've covered that may pique your interest to go back and listen. So, travis, why don't you kind of lay the groundwork on to where we started the year, back in January?
Speaker 2:We started focusing on caregivers and that had actually come up in a couple of different, I think, online chats and things like that. People were talking about long term care and being a caregiver and some of the challenges of being a caregiver, so something that was on our radar, I think, for a better part of a year. Actually, what I liked about that is that we focused on the actual caregiver, so a lot of people want to talk to you about long term care. Do you need long term care insurance and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:We talked a lot about what it's like to actually be a caregiver and how to take care of yourself and how to provide care for a loved one, and maybe some perspective for a loved one as they're getting older and thinking about what type of situation do I want to put my kids in, and so that was, I thought, just a very good perspective, because one of the things we try to do, steve, is we try to have conversations that other people aren't Get, the people who are really going to be impacted from the information that we're talking about. So it's people that need to have a conversation, but where do they actually go to have a conversation? So trying to bring some of that out before you. All of a sudden are in crisis mode and going now what do I do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I thought that that was a great series, that if you're new, to Ditch the Suits. We have always tried to take episodes, put them together, to make them what we call a series. So always describing that first episode a very high level introduction to a topic. Second episode, bring it home a little bit more and in that third episode really tie it all together with our professional viewpoint of how it is. And I know that that caregiver series it lives on as an evergreen topic. I know that I have sent that episode to many people personal friends, family, people that have reached out to me going through things in every single one of them and said thanks so much.
Speaker 1:We didn't know that somebody kind of understood that I've went through. So we started off caregiving and then we kind of jumped into this very cool idea around early retirement. This came from some social listening that we were doing, various Facebook groups where retirees were kind of getting together and posting the questions around how can I retire early? When should I take Social Security, how does my pension work? So we got out in front of that and started talking around those three areas, really looking at Social Security, the semantics of it, looking then at the pension and then kind of, just how do you bridge these gaps between 55, 62, whenever benefits kick in? So I thought that that early retirement series was a really cool way to build off of maybe caregiver. That may not apply to everybody.
Speaker 2:And that was a lot of fun because it was in response to questions that we had gotten, because I believe you posted online and some chats in place and it was like what's one question that you would like to answer. And that's a lot of fun to prepare for that Because, even if we've covered the similar kind of topics in the past, addressing somebody's question is a lot of fun. So I'd like to encourage if we have listeners that want to hear something next year, let us know while we're making the show lineup, because it's something that we can potentially work on. But it also tied in really good with our last series of 2000,. Our last complete series of 2023, which was the simple, complex questions, although that wasn't a simple complex question. We started out with explaining Social Security, explaining pension, because it's hard to understand what to do in your retirement gap years, which is really what the question was. If I retire early before I get my social security pension, what the heck should I?
Speaker 2:do so we got a good explanation of our context around social security and pensions to help people understand how to address the gap years. So that was a lot of fun and, I think, again another interesting way to address that question and bring additional knowledge to the table. And then one of the things we try to do is we try to do one for one. We try to rotate the financial planning, the personal finance part of it, with investment planning, because I think that there's a lot of people out there that want to talk to you about investments. In fact, most people want to tell you about how brilliant they are with investments. So you got all these investment shows out there and so we need to talk about investments because it's a big part of your financial life. But at the same time, we believe that your investment plan should be driven by your financial plan. Your financial plan says this is what is going on in my life and what I'd like to achieve, and the investment plan says, ok, you have these resources to work with. Here's the best way to get from point A to point B. Well, if you don't know what point B is what you're defining in your financial plan, then how do you actually know how to line up those investment pieces.
Speaker 2:So we try to dance back and forth between financial planning and investment planning on purpose, because we don't want people to get bored. You're like, oh, all you guys talk about is investment planning, or all you guys talk about is financial planning. I'd like to know more about investment planning. Or sometimes people look I am brilliant in my own investment plan, I'm only looking for you for financial planning. Yeah, we need to take you a little bit of humble pie there every now and then. There is stuff for people to learn. We're learning all the time. Still I don't believe we have a listener that's not learning, and so we want to make sure that we give an opportunity to hear things a different way. That maybe will spark intrigue and a personal growth opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that episode in March, we really was our third series of the year, which kind of if we back up dovetailed off of something cool that happened towards the end of 2022, travis and I had one of the episodes on negative news and headlines that was picked up by Samsung as a featured podcast and over that weekend we saw a massive spike in downloads and we picked up probably many of you from just being sponsored as one of the shows people should listen to.
Speaker 1:Well, in March we kind of went back to this idea but understanding economics and I thought it was a very cool understanding of what are the leading economists out there saying and is it really what you should be doing with your money? How should you take this information? If they're giving this information out, does that mean that they're filthy rich because they're doing everything that they're telling you to do? And it was just a fun back and forth kind of exposing what you hear, what you read in the like how do you actually make sense of what a talking head or what somebody says on TV?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's an awful lot of people making an awful lot of money to give you advice, but that's how they're making their money. They're not making money based on the advice they're giving you. They're making money. They're getting paid to talk, and the question with that is, if it's so lucrative with the advice that they're giving, why aren't they actually out there following that advice themselves? Or how do you know?
Speaker 2:And in today's day and age, where it's sensationalism sells, it's the more extreme it is or the more promising it sounds, or the more authority and conviction I deliver it with, the more chances are, the more you're going to watch a commercial to hear me speak, or click on a thing on the internet to hear something I'm saying or read something I'm saying or something like that. So and the problem with economics is it's not an exact science You're taking something that's complex and undefinable and you're trying to create rules around it. But you can't create rules around things that can't be controlled, but we try to do it because we're humans and it makes us feel good to control things, and so we just have to take it all and put it in perspective. It doesn't mean that there's not lessons to learn out there or messages to hear. It means that we need to make sure we take things and put them in perspective. And you know, steve, it's the end of 2023. We're coming into an election year and you're going to have doom and gloom economists out they're talking about. You know, if this person's elected, this is going to happen. That person elected, that's going to happen. So it's good to go back and re-listen to that series because we're about to hit another cycle of it where very smart sounding and very smart looking people are going to come out and start saying things and we have to somehow try to filter through it and it's a big challenge.
Speaker 2:Then we did so, we did that series, and then we we stuck with investing for another two, two episodes, and something that I think is particularly Big this year to talk about, especially early on in the year, I think in 2022, is crypto.
Speaker 2:This year, I think social responsible investing, or ESG, was really important, and we did just kind of a grab bag, and that's when we have some different ideas that pop up but they don't really equate to like a an entire three episode series or something like that. So we just kind of group them together and talk about them and Fill in some of the downtime, and we did the depth of ESG and social responsible investing and that's going to sound like we're talking about Negatively about ESG and we really weren't. We were talking about where we think it's actually going and how it's going to evolve, because in its current form Is extremely undefined and it needs definition so that people you know, in our opinion is really that people start driving it based on their personal values, not A value is assigned to them from investment companies or what not so very interesting take on ESG and social responsible there. And then we also had an episode the secret to winning in the stock market. So we don't want to give that away because it's a secret.
Speaker 1:But that episode was great because you know you hear secret to winning in the stock market. You might assume that you're going to come on and hear Travis and I just give you a list of companies to go by today and it wasn't.
Speaker 2:It's a secret. It's a secret.
Speaker 1:I know, but helping the listeners understand. Our heart has always been to help you get the most money in life. We have to give you a paradigm or way of thinking through things. We're not going to tell you when exactly to take social security, but we're going to help you understand how it works so that you can apply it to your life. Same thing with when you're making investments in ESG any of these topics and right around this time we made a big change for us as podcasters.
Speaker 1:We assess how our shows do, how much people listen to them, their reach, their distribution. You know when we started off ditched the suits back in January of two thousand twenty one. We're doing hour and a half long episodes and that was a long time and it took us, you know, ten, twelve of those to get through and be like man. I think we need to shorten the listener ability of these shows, and so we made a major shift going to these three episode series. Well, right after this secret winning in the stock market, we made a decision to you know what, why don't we, instead of releasing episodes every other weekend, a Tuesday? What if we went every single Tuesday? Which means we're gonna have to come up with a whole lot more content, be prepared, a lot more recording time, but it was a big shift and it led to some really cool opportunities Frost again in front of a lot of you as new listeners, and coming out of that, we had also looked at some of the big questions that people are asking online, are starting to think about.
Speaker 1:Was this whole idea of a If I is beginning to affect us in the workplace, if it's taking our jobs? If there's apps that are doing things smarter, faster, quicker than we can do as humans, can I then do the same thing when it comes to financial planning and choosing investments and like, how does that work? So we spent, you know, two episodes talking around this idea of a I and you know some different topics. I just thought that that was a fascinating conversation, that we gave you what we see, what we understand, and then, hey, you do whatever you want with this. But this is kind of how we're looking at how can affect you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think this is where we can put a plug in for seed planning group, because that's our day job. That's where all this comes from, right, that's where the inspiration for just suits came from. That's where we get all of our experience and so our artificial intelligence is. We work with that in our profession. We work with that in our field. Right, because there's a there's there's for the last decade they're decade and a half now they've been talking about how Artificial intelligence going to replace advisors whether their investment advisor, financial planners and there's lots of technology out there and we try and we spend a lot of money and technology. We're open to the idea that technology might make this better for people. So when we come out and we talk about AI and jobs and that kind of stuff, we're not talking about, we're not oblivious to it, right, like we're having real life hands on experience. And I mentioned our day job. I mentioned seed planter for a reason, because it seems like when we make that switch from biweekly to weekly and you mentioned that we spent a lot more time recording and stuff so it seems like that's a distraction. I know we have clients that listen to the show to write, so it seems like it's a distraction.
Speaker 2:What we are trying to do is push a conversation To our employees, to our clients, to the broader community in general About what is better financial planning, what is better investment management, how to make better financial decisions. It is raising the bar. I think every single episode we do raises the bar of how we can Conduct our regular business. It raises the bar and the experience. It raises the bar on with every single team member that we have. Right, it raises the bar with the expectations from clients. So it's as much a mechanism to us for self improvement as it is communicating with the world out there and saying, hey, how can I help you make better decisions?
Speaker 2:You just basically on this journey with us, whether or not we ever meet you and Steve, you actually met some of our listeners, but whether or not we ever meet you, you're on a journey with us as we're, you know, observing and experiencing the stuff that we're talking about. Anything that we talk about we have real life experience with. So when I come out, I say you know, the economists don't really, they're not very helpful most of the time. Well, that's because I've got 15, 20 years of bad advice from economists and looking back and saying that hurt that client, that hurt that client, that hurt. You know, these people believe this and this is what happened to them for believing us, all from credible sources, all from people doing, trying to do the right things. And so, whether it's well-meaning, you know, investment companies, or well-meaning economists, or artificial intelligence, or whatever it is, our experience is what we're talking about and we're, you know, we're trying to raise the bar for everybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you know for us, you know, creating content. Does anybody care? Does anybody want to listen? 2023 has also been a notable year for Travis and I, just in terms of as we went to weekly, as we created more content, we noticed that our names were popping up in a lot more blogs and articles as top podcast, best podcast in the realms of financial planning and making decisions with your money, and a lot of it was. I think our listeners just get informed ideas from us as professionals as to what we think what they go and do with that is up to them, but it's been very cool to see, you know, the six or seven different articles this year listing ditched asuits as one of the best podcasts that you can listen to.
Speaker 1:So if you've come from any of those, we want to thank you again. Subscribe to these shows so you don't miss them. And I think that that kind of leads right into and I want to give you the space because you've talked about this quite a bit is a big component of your money and your life is what you do with your taxes, and I know that you have very strong opinions about you know our industry, the future of it and how tax planning fits into that. So I just want to give you a space if you want to talk about that tax strategy series that we did and how important it can be to go back and listen to it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I the planner of the future. When we talk about artificial intelligence and whether or not it's going to take your job, and when I look at whether or not you need a financial advisor and if you can just use online calculators and stuff like that, one of the things I look at is the more complicated or even complex questions. And so when you, when you get into financial planning, a lot of times what you're seeing as the financial planner say, go talk to your tax professional, the tax professional says go talk to your financial planner. There's not a lot of integration with them. In fact, there's a lot of firms that prohibit their advisors from being able to give any kind of tax advice, and there's a lot. The vast majority of advisors that I've ever worked with, no matter where I worked or recruited or interviewed, really don't know hardly anything about taxes. Half of them don't even. I bet you cannot even walk through their own tax return with their own tax return. That's like just knowing your own stuff. And here comes along somebody who's giving you financial advice so you can make good financial decisions and they don't have any concept of the tax ramifications, short term or long term. That seems extremely dangerous to me, and so what you're getting is really much more generic advice where, if you don't have to worry about the tax ramifications and some of the complications with that which are during your life and during the life of your errors, you know there's there's a lot of different things to consider here. If you're not able to consider those things and actually position the trade offs and have a very intelligent conversation that takes into account personalities, anxieties, like everything that people are dealing with you know, financially, with their families, that type of stuff If you can't bring taxes into the equation equation, then I think that you are being generic and I think that you are going to be replaced and I don't see why people need to hire a financial advisor in the future who doesn't know anything about taxes.
Speaker 2:You, I am completely convinced and we talk about this all the time internally I am 100% convinced that you cannot be a good financial planner if you do not understand income taxes and you do not incorporate tax planning into the financial planning.
Speaker 2:I'm not just talking about generic tax planning, like actually really understanding how tax planning works with your specific clients, being able to explain to them how everything that happens on the you know in their investments, where that shows up on the 1040 and when it happens, you know, and the impact on the income taxes and the difference between dividends and capital gains and all these other things like really getting granular, because if you're making a $5, $6,000 a year difference, which is a small difference, but difference in taxes you're talking over a long time period, like more than a million dollars.
Speaker 2:You know, if you looked over somebody's working career, it's a dramatic difference and to me that is the future. And if you're thinking about, you know, do I need advice or should I seek advice or am I getting good advice? Or kindness, online calculator, do everything. There's so much nuance in there with tax, that's where the value really is. It's tying that in with the investment in the financial planning. You know, and I don't even think we call tax planning separate from financial planning, but I really do think it's one in the same with financial planning. I don't know how you do financial planning without accounting for the bill that you owe the government.
Speaker 2:It's a literal liability that you owe, and one of the last thing I'll do and then I'll get off my pony on this is with tax planning. Tax planning is it's a liability, right, and it's one of those things that there's. There's rules all on its own on how you address that liability. You have to have that as part of the discussion when you're making any financial decisions. Right, because it's a bill, it's literally something that's going to come do, so it's part of that your financial picture. It's even hard to do investment planning without understanding tax ramifications. You can make an enormous amount of money, completely destroy the value because you mismanaged the taxes.
Speaker 1:Well, I know that we had a lot of listeners during that series reach out to us and you know, just say I'd never heard of some of these strategies that you talked about. So if you just came on to digital suits because maybe you just listened to our conversation that just came out about Roth conversions, well, this is kind of the foundation leading up to that, and so I would encourage you to go back and listen and this just you know, kind of taxes affect your retirement effects. Financial planning kind of moved us into this next series that we deemed rethinking retirement and really began to challenge the kind of just across the industry, across, you know, from people, this idea of you should never take more than 4% from your retirement accounts. And if you've ever heard that kind of like, where did that school of thought come from? So that was a fun series, just kind of having you again break down from your years of being a planner.
Speaker 1:You know when people say these things, travis, I can't take more than this amount, or that like where did that come from? How do you think through that? And then, how do you really personalize concepts to your own life, because your situation is very different from your neighbor, from your colleague, even from a brother or sister. So how do you begin to personalize financial planning very rather than just this generic vanilla advice that everybody gets? We're going to stop right there to hear a word about our sponsor. You know we're here to help you get the most money in life as host of this show.
Speaker 1:But that doesn't just happen. You need good financial planners that have your best interests in mind, and that's why we want to take a moment to talk about seed planning group. Seed planning group is a fee only financial planning firm that has a fiduciary obligation to put you as a consumer's best interest first. If you're not sure if they're the right fit for you, we would encourage you to head over to seedpgcom. That's seedpgcom. Fill out the contact us form and schedule your free discovery meeting, because you could be one good decision away from getting the most from your money in life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and people are just trying so hard to do it right. And that's normally what we get is people are trying really hard to do it right and make sense. But again it's going back and looking at the context of where some of this conventional wisdom comes from. But here's what I'll say about the 4% rule and kind of where that comes from and everything like that.
Speaker 2:In 2008, when the market we had the great recession, everybody who visited I was working for a Fortune 500 financial company at the time every single person who visited that they had come in to speak to us and train us and educate us and everything like that told us that the days of making 8% a year were gone. You could no longer tell clients they could take 5% a year out of their accounts. They now had to take 3% a year. They had to expect to get 3% a year for the rest of their lives. The days of the high stock market returns was over. This is right after 2008. They brought in person after person after person. At the same time, they're also trying to sell 4% guaranteed annuity, which might have had something to do with that right, because 4% is better than 3%. But anyway, regardless of their motives. The same exact thing happened last year. Last year, the market crashes. What did they do?
Speaker 2:Everybody comes out and says you can't take out 5% anymore, you can't take out. They started ratcheting back the numbers. Long-term project returns went from 8.5% something percent down to 6.5%. It's like wait a second. Something happened this year. Now you're saying that the next 30 years is going to be disproportionately impacted. You weren't right in 2008. You haven't been right any time since. I know people who are still sitting in cash from 2008 because they're still waiting for the market to go down 50%, because somehow they picked out a thin air when the market gets back to 12,000, it's going to go down to 50%. I'm like well, why that number? It's a pretty nice round number. They're still sitting in cash waiting for the market to crash because these people are out there saying, hey look, it's never going to be as good as it once was. You need to start asking why. Why and where does it come from? Because when we do that, we find out that 4% rule. Maybe it's just a little bit of a conversation starter.
Speaker 1:That episode series was a lot of fun. I'm just going to jump through this one quick. A big part of it is financial literacy. Sometimes you talk about topics and people will not be like, okay, I think I understand. What we did in this next series after that was we talked about financial planning and investment in terms of collectors' baseball cards, investing using football fantasy strategies and then a gardener's guide to investing. We tried to hit on three areas that people might have passions or just want to know more about. How can you take these three ideas and explain the concepts that we've been talking about for quite a while in a way that might help somebody understand fantasy football inside and out? How can you get money and investing work Just a fun series. If you're big financial literacy, gaining information, go back and check out that series.
Speaker 2:Then we jumped into in August. We got into windfalls and inheritances. We've seen this a lot People getting large inheritances and just absolutely eating them to death, literally eating their inheritances. Unfortunately, a lot of inheritances and windfalls don't really last to the next generation. They're kind of we have to really consider how we're setting people up to inherit this stuff. But, steve, somewhere around August, right around August I might be way off on the timing. When did we get recognized by Quill?
Speaker 1:I just wrote that down right in August.
Speaker 2:All right, we'll nail it. When was that? That was August.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were selected by Quill podcasting for their annual podcast awards and they asked us to submit our work. People had signified that our show was worth listening to, so we submitted a whole bunch of work to them and then their judges went and listened to various podcasts from all different genres. We thought it would be great if we got named business podcast of the year, which was the category we fall into, because there was all these different categories. We kind of waited, waited. Then the results came out and we opened what the final decision was and it was pretty freaking cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were shocked.
Speaker 1:Do you know why? It was pretty freaking cool Because they named us the best podcast of the year, not even like the best business podcast, but the best of all of the podcasts that they actually listened to, for two guys who set out to make some conversations that we think people wanted to listen to, especially when we're not murder mystery, we're not some of these other blogs.
Speaker 2:We're just hanging out in conference room talking about what we get every day.
Speaker 1:To be named podcast of the year right in August was a very, very cool confidence boost for Travis and I, so that was great.
Speaker 2:Then we got to master and money in September. This was another one that was sparked, I think, by it was inspired by a group someplace, I think there's various.
Speaker 1:Google searches that we're looking at different age groups and how much you should have for retirement, what you should be doing. Was that what it was? Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay. So everybody's got this measuring stick of trying to figure out where they should be at by a certain age. So we tackled redefining retirement for those in their 20s and 30s. That's focused on the fire movement, navigating financial freedom in their 40s and 50s and unlocking the secrets of financial and dependent retirement. One quick thing on the fire movement. I thought this was interesting. I found it on the internet, so you know it's true, but yeah that's a joke.
Speaker 2:There was a. You always get these For every person who's not happy. There's probably 100 people that are happy. But there was one person who made a comment about the fire movement and she was like look, I'm in my early 30s, I got $600,000 saved up. I'm realizing that the fire movement was wrong. The premise of it was it was wrong because she had been sacrificing everything in her 20s and early 30s to pile up a bunch of money so that by the end of her 30s she could do whatever she wanted, which is the fire movement right.
Speaker 2:Basically, get financially independent by the time you're 40. But at what expense? If you close your eyes for 20 years and you never get to enjoy anything for 20 years? You're talking about relationships and children and career development. I mean doing things different than what you would have otherwise done Because you're on a race to not have to work anymore.
Speaker 2:I just I thought it was a good message because sometimes we need to look at we always talk about financial freedom and looking at things from a financial freedom perspective, get yourself set up when you're young, but don't try to win the game by the time you're 40. Give yourself some grace there. Enjoy it along the way. If that means that you don't win the game until you're 50 or 45 or whatever, at least you have those people that are coming along with you. Because I can tell you from somebody who's extremely driven, who's put my head down and worked through countless events and countless opportunities to do things with people, you do sometimes regret the things that you haven't done because you had your head down so hard working, especially when, if it's just to pile up money, it's one thing.
Speaker 2:If you're building a business, right, it's one thing. If you're building a community, it's another thing. If you're just counting dollars Right, just counting dollars, you're going to get to 40, maybe be hanging out by yourself. Be going, what do I do next? It's, it can be, it's got to be more than the dollars. So if you're, if you're, if you're in that movement and it's about more than the dollars awesome, if you're in that movement, it's only about the dollars spend some time making it more than about the dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and one thing that I'll say, trev, that I'm excited about is, I think, the range of ages of our listeners of Ditch the Suits. There are definitely financial planning podcasts that skew just to 20 and 30 year olds and if you looked at their numbers, that's who they're going to catch. We really do have this really nice blend of younger people that are not getting started, but they're in their 20s and 30s. We have a lot of listeners that are nearing retirement, and so I think what's great is that you know you could come to our show and maybe not every single series applies to you, but maybe it does to somebody else, or you can just acquire information that can help you at some point in your life. And so, having this balance of listeners, we just received our Spotify year end wrap up and it was very cool to see that for a couple thousand listeners of ours, we are one of their favorite podcasts to listen to on Spotify. So that's just neat that every time we're releasing an episode, you know there's this handful of people that were there first listen.
Speaker 1:And so, again, as we kind of closed out and moved towards, you know, this fall of 2023, it was kind of this just retirement reality, you know, and having more meaningful conversations, that retirement is more than money, kind of along that idea of what you just said for fire for people that are under 40. It's the same thing for people that are turning the page on this next season of life called retirement. It's not just the end of work, but it's that life has to have purpose, it has to have meaning. How do you use money as a mechanism to help you do the things you want to do? But that cannot be the sole focus. So I thought that that was a really humbling conversation that maybe many people don't get to hear from people in our industry talk about. It's got to be more than money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everybody's focused on money how many investments, how big to file, all that kind of stuff. And I think that that's another interesting perspective on the industry in general, because I've talked a lot to young advisors and I've heard young advisors talk at conferences before and they talk about I only work with people my age. Once again, have perspective here. You should be working with people that are not of your age, and the reason why you should be working with people not of your age is if I am working with an advisor who is my age that only works with people my age, how do they possibly know what I'm going to need in the next stage of life? They have no experience, they're not open to it. In fact, they've made a point in saying we're not interested in that part of life because we don't get along with those people. We only get along with people going through. Oh, we're going through right now. Okay, so that means you're all going to make the same mistakes together. Same thing with younger people working with older people.
Speaker 2:Older clients should not be afraid of having a younger advisor just because they're not at the same point as you are in life, and stuff like that. They can also bring you perspective. If you're holding on to something too tight, if you're strangling something, it's helping you understand. Okay, I'll let that go a little bit. A lot of parents are struggling with that in their 50s, 60s and 70s right, or struggling with how to connect or struggling with should I gift now or wait? You sometimes need that perspective from somebody younger and you need to not be threatened by that. We need to not be afraid of working with people outside of our age groups.
Speaker 2:I know that has nothing to do with any of this stuff, but you kind of sparked it by that idea of you need to hear from people that are not just your same age or your same socioeconomic category all the time. Sometimes you need to hear from people with different perspectives. That got us into retirement reality and really this idea of creating a fulfilling retirement, setting expectations, finding the right help and what I call over committing, balancing relaxation and obligations. If you roll into retirement and you don't know who you want to be next, you might actually just be depressed.
Speaker 1:Yep, and if we speed up, kind of where we are today, we spent 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 different episodes talking around passive investing. We basically let Travis loose for six episodes to talk about his true feelings on how it comes to passive investing. But again, just like crypto, I think you did a really nice job of explaining your stance on passive investing, kind of where the thought patterns came from, and you can walk away from that series if you are a passive investor or ever considered it, kind of understanding the semantics of how it works, how it's involved and is there potentially a better way to do your investing, and that kind of got us to where we are around these simple, complex questions. So I'm not sure we'll get into those areas.
Speaker 2:Well, if we look at the active investment first, passive investment I think the biggest thing there is you got to understand when you're talking about investing, you're talking about an industry, talking about buying products. You're talking about hiring services. It's commercialized. Whatever you think, your hearing has been designed to get you to buy what people are making money off of. So you got to ask the right questions, you got to have the right vernacular and if you don't have that vernacular, it's going to be very difficult for you to actually figure out if something's good for you or not good for you, or something could be better for you than what you've got. And that gets you to simple, complex questions, which was the next series and how we're kind of wrapping up for the most of December, which is where we get into questions where people come in and they say, hey, when should I take social security? As if that's, I just want to pay you by the hour, tell me when to take social security. It's like that's not an hour discussion, that's a very complicated discussion. And it's a particularly complicated discussion If you haven't developed a financial acumen.
Speaker 2:That would be required from a foundational standpoint and you might say well, you know what. You know I've had financial advisors are not very good at what they do. They don't know really much and I find more looking at the internet. That doesn't mean that all financial advisors are like that. I think you could make the argument about doctors like that there's doctors that are good and there's doctors that aren't. There's lawyers that are good, there's lawyers that aren't Right. There's school teachers that are good and school teachers that aren't. So it has to do with really what we're getting at is the vernacular and also being able to parse down in between, like where am I getting information from Yep and you know, and how am I getting this information? And so that kind of wraps up most of our work for 2023. We also got one other award in there. Or not award? It's just a recognition. It's kind of cool An award. But podcast, right, podcast, what did they do? They had us. I think we've been consistently like top three, but somehow we got the number one.
Speaker 1:So podcast came out.
Speaker 2:Shout out to podcast.
Speaker 1:Appreciate. You guys Came out with this article of the 25 best finance podcast on Spotify and again you open these links and you're like, okay, I wonder where we're listed and to be the very first one. And what's neat about that article, if you go read it, is they've built in code so that every time you populate it it takes the most recent episodes. So let's champion those other 24 podcasts that are also listed too. You might find other shows that pique your interest, but a couple of awards this year, a number of articles that have signified that we are a show you should listen to. It's just been a banner year for picking up all these new listeners and having you guys subscribe and just a shout out. We also do have a YouTube channel.
Speaker 1:Ditch the Suits is one of a few shows that we produce, was part of our media company and you can head over to NQR media. That's NQR it actually stands for not quite right, because everything that we do is well. It's not quite right. But on NQR media you can also watch our other kind of banner shows that we produce, which has been a very cool part of the change that's happened for us this year, and I don't know that you know one of the things. I'll just leave you guys with this. We had a note. Did we want to just briefly mention the other shows that we have at all?
Speaker 2:Well, I think for a second time we could just rapid fire this. We got cut through a college planning out there that's Hector Lopez and Kayla Rackard, and they get into all things about the business of higher education and so the things that you need to know before you make something the most expensive, really, business and life decisions that you or your child could absolutely possibly make. As of the time that we are recording this show, they've got about six episodes in, so that's a new podcast. You've got the one big thing. That's your show, your host, in that you try to bring on people who have, I would say the commonality is they've all done something somewhat inspirational or they are themselves an inspiration, and they're sharing. I'm probably unfairly, I'm probably not doing you just, but they're sharing the things that they've learned in their life with people so that other people can have some strength from their experiences. I get that right, Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep, and so it's called the one big thing You'll hear from ex NFL players, influencers, people from all walks of life, so it's an interview style show that I think has really helped, inspired and encouraged a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely worth checking it out. There's some very, very interesting guests that you have on that show. And then I've got unleashing leadership, which is where we stuck the business part of this show. It used to be. It was business and personal stuff mix when we used to do the hour long shows and so we said get that out of there. Let me go rant and rave about business stuff here. We'll just talk about finance, and we're close to 100 episodes in that one.
Speaker 2:So back to your show. We were at about you're in about 14 episodes or so in your show as of December 2023, I just recorded episode 100 on unleashing leadership. The big difference with them is not that I'm doing that much more than you. It's just minus five to 15 minute shows five days a week. Yours is every two weeks and then cutthroat is what? Every two weeks, or is it every month? Every two weeks, all right? So there's a lot of really good stuff to listen to. You've got finance and investing with ditches suits. You've got college and higher education cutthroat college. You've got life and inspiration one big thing and you've got business and leadership development. With unleashing leadership, I mean, we're kind of rounding out this.
Speaker 1:So get more from your money and more from your life, yeah, and I've been recording long enough with Travis folks that it was like you know. I know he's very sensitive to our time and wanting to speed up here at the end, but I'm going to tell you, folks, these episodes are really fricking good for each one of these shows. So I want to make sure we do do justice to you should definitely go out, subscribe to all four of these shows, because you're going to get a little bit of everything from each one of them. So there is a lot that we should be proud of this year and it's a big thanks to all of you. So, for this year in review, go back, listen to some of these series, share them with a friend, subscribe, and the big ask that I have is if this show has impacted you, leave a five star rating right to review. It just helps other people view this show. But, as always, thank you for making ditch the suits. A successful 2023, and the best is yet to come.