TRAP: The Real Adviser Podcast
Four business-owning entrepreneurial knuckleheads chew the fat on the sometimes murky, always quirky, world of UK and Irish personal finance.
TRAP: The Real Adviser Podcast
64 - Escape Artist On FIRE
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TRAP LIVE25 - 14TH MAY. REGISTER INTEREST HERE: http://www.therealadviserpodcast.com
In this latest pile of TRAP, the Trap Pack discuss
- Topical Titbits including LifeStrategy figures, NEST talking tripe, Vanguard says “No” to BitCoin, scrapping Cash ISAs, Abrdn selling advice branch, Dan Haylett podcast, Ben Carlson on how much is enough, Hargreaves Lansdown says Hargreaves Lansdown is great value, Robin Powell on how active fund managers invest their own money
- Meat and Potatoes: Barney Whiter AKA The Escape Artist https://theescapeartist.me
- Culture Corner
- TRAPist question(s) from Patrick S
Show links: http://tiny.cc/traplinks
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Music, welcome to the real advisor podcast, T, R, A, P, trap. Please follow us and join in the conversation on Twitter at advisor podcast, where you can suggest ideas and themes you'd like the trap team to discuss. Also remember to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave a six out of five star review on iTunes. Doing all this really, really helps us, which means we can do more to help you. Now, let's head over to the studio for the latest pile of trap swing. Low. Sweet
Nick Lincoln:yes indeed, dear trap is welcome back to what many people are calling episode 64 of the award winning real advisor podcast, T, R, A, P, Trapp. My name is apparently lick nincom, and joining me as ever in the studio of doom are the three other Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Alan the storyteller, Smith, Carl de la voce, the voice widget, who's won some rugby game? And Andy Ultra heart, now. Jen,
Andy Hart:oh, we have a show. 7575 absolutely won a rugby game
Nick Lincoln:of the weekend. Okay, go on. You do the talk about it. You do the intro. You finish the intro.
Andy Hart:Wow. What a game. What a game. What a game on Saturday, close game between England and France. We Pimply. And finally, when I win, finally, know what it feels like to win a game by one point on the on the winning team. And then Ireland smash Scotland on Sunday. So how did that go? Cole,
Unknown:yeah, that's exactly how it went again. They smashed it 11 now, 11 in a row. I don't know
Carl Widger:how most only lost four times in 25 years to Scotland. Seems bizarre. Anyway. Delighted for England getting win on the board because it was looking like zero from two again. But yeah, well done. Congrats to England. Really delighted for you guys.
Andy Hart:I think Alan's muted intentionally. He doesn't want to speak during this rugby segment. That's fine. Okay, we'll move
Carl Widger:on to heading for another grand slam, potentially this year. So as
Alan Smith:I always say, the only trophy that we want to win is the Cal Cup, which we have won for the last four years. Counter boys, four years, bounce Home and Away. Not quite so confident this year. But we'll see. We'll see what happens that
Carl Widger:South African fella, Yvonne the wing, is brilliant. I mean, really, better
Alan Smith:than your Australian or your South Island or the whatever you've got a couple of Irish in the team. Though. To be fair, you have new that. New pretends pretty good.
Barney Whiter:About 12, yeah,
Unknown:good, yeah, another Johnny Sexton on the way.
Alan Smith:Undergrad, yep, yep. All right,
Unknown:fuming. We are very
Nick Lincoln:fuming. It was you. There's no way it was you gotta assume I've done my intro, which means it's your time for the reviews. I
Unknown:wasn't going to mention anything.
Andy Hart:Okay, the reviews. Two reviews today. The first one is from Chris pedals. Five stars best podcast in the business. I recommend this podcast to every advisor I meet for experienced, well and successful professionals, sharing their experiences with what works and doesn't in this great profession of ours. It's also it also has entertainment value in the frequent banter and tall tales from Mr. Smith. Final review, Matt the Lancer, five stars, entirely sensible and yet completely nuts and precise at the same time, trap has to be the go to podcast for the next generation, or agile members of the current generation of quality financial advisors. The TRAPPIST, unrelenting focus on financial planning leads elegant simplicity, simple, equity focused, local straight talking financial advice is spot on, loads and each episode to take away and actually use in your day to day business. Incidentally, there's a fair number of the switched on SJP partners, often who use SJP passive range and price extremely keenly for their precious clients who sign up to the trap ethos, keep up the good work. Back to you. Nicholas,
Nick Lincoln:very good. Thank you, Andrew and thank you TRAPPIST for those lovely reviews. They really do give us a shot in the arm. So keep on sending them in. Six out of five stars is a minimum. Okie dokie, let's put a timestamp on episode 64 with some topical tit bits, and we're going to kick off with Ultra life strategy,
Andy Hart:Vanguard life strategy. These are a wonderful fund range that sort of pioneered the ONE FUND solution. It could be argued that various different companies did this, but the Vanguard life strategy range of funds are an enormously successful range of funds. Very simple. Statistically, there's the Vanguard life strategy, 2040, 6080, 100 and that denotes the representation in what I call low risk assets. 100% is 100% in low risk assets being global equities. Anyway, these funds have done fantastically well, and they came out with their sort of long term annual figures recently. Now it makes some quite interesting reading. I'll just highlight a couple of things. The annualized return from the low risk portfolio, which is 100% global equities in my world, has done 10.3% since it started. Superb numbers. The high risk portfolio, which is 20% in global equities in my world, has done 3.79 and obviously there's a divergence between the split here, the total returns have done exactly what they said they were going to do. Some advisors in the UK have got a bit of a problem with it, because they've got a bit more of a UK slant to them. I think the 100% equity portfolio is 15% UK, and it should be four, but this is splitting of hairs. If you're going to say to someone, you're not interested in investing, you want to get a good return long term, you can't be asked to faff around and, you know, move companies when some die, some fly. You know, it's an invest and forget, set it up once, and you're good to go. A huge fan of these, this fund range, and I think they've actually weirdly rebranded themselves as an MPS, which is obviously the flavor of the month in the UK, managed portfolio service that they could be argued, they do everything that an NPS does, or not anywhere near as much as what an NPS does. We're not going to get into the NPS debate, but was it a recent networking event, and a guy I met who's an NPS provider, I think he said there's like 250 MPs providers in the UK. Now I'm like, Whoa. How have I missed this? I thought there was like seven, right? 25 boring. It's just, it's rebranding,
Alan Smith:isn't it that
Andy Hart:you see, yeah. So there's a lot of disguised MPs is, and there's a lot of, let's get onto the bandwagon. So, yeah, it's quite interesting reading the
Carl Widger:Yeah, you can see it is. They're brilliant funds and a brilliant fund range. You can see why they would kind of rebrand just to so people don't kind of misallocate where they should kind of sit in the in, you know, the whole fun range thing. So, yeah, I think,
Andy Hart:yeah, good point. Carl, you mean someone says you need to get, you need to invest in the NPS and Vanguard. Don't want to get sort of overlooked, or something exactly yeah, and yeah, the the if your boys have gone through the PDF, very interesting. So the worst calendar year out of any of the Vanguard life strategy funds was the year of 2022 and it was, in their world, the lowest risk portfolio. Now in my world, the highest risk. It did keep it simple, minus 16% the worst year the 100% global the worst calendar year, not from high point to a low point peak to drop. The worst calendar year the 100% global equity portfolio had was minus six. Again, it's a travesty that people have been sold this high risk, low risk, Bs and the returns of night and day. Had you invested in the vanguard life strategy, 20 on launch, compared to the Vanguard life strategy 100 on launch, your money would be six times the size. Wow. This is insane. But they filled in a mumbo jumbo questionnaire. They got put in the wrong portfolio. They had a bit of gray hair. They can't go new global equities. You know, all the usual stuff we bang on about. So
Carl Widger:I didn't. I didn't even see the show notes. Andy, so I didn't. Are all those numbers in that PDF, detailed PDF. It's really for everybody. That's like,
Nick Lincoln:when did, when did the when did the
Andy Hart:fund range launch? The fund range launched 23rd of June, 2011 This is decent. Okay, so
Nick Lincoln:they haven't had a, we haven't they haven't. We haven't had a prolonged bear market in that time in equities. That skews the figures and also bang a reason i The Bank of life strategy gives me slightly Willies, is they invest in long, dated guilt, which are a waste of time, which will be, we're not,
Unknown:not in 100% global equity portfolio, 20% equity.
Nick Lincoln:That's why it was down 16%
Unknown:but yeah, look,
Andy Hart:he it's not perfect. I have you showed me the portfolio boots, my portfolio, I'll show you portfolio boots both and by nightfall. You know, it's always the case like this one beats that one that was beat this one. You know, I I've
Alan Smith:often recommended, on, on or suggested, you know, your friends, family, relatives who are regulated, aren't you Alan who say, I said, Go and have a look. I've got 300 pound a month to save for something. What should I do? I said just go and check out. Because, you know the D to C model, you can click through this. But of course, it does have a natural risk profiling tool at the front end of it, which they, I guess they have to do, and it will direct people towards there and really how you framed this and at the beginning, and often say that as well. It's not high risk portfolio low risk portfolios. Do you want a high return portfolio or a low return portfolio? Which one do you prefer? Naturally, everyone says, I'd like the high return portfolio. And then you might have to caveat it by saying, okay, we can deliver that. However. Just be aware that it is a bit more volatile. It does tend to go up in. Down a bit more than the others. Is that okay with you because you're investing for the next 30 years? Yes or No, framing is framing is really important than this. Unfortunately, it's framed in the wrong way, because you plug yourself into that, you put your details in, you get risk profiles that says, yeah, it's focused on volatility. You say, I don't want that. I don't like that. So you end up getting shoveled into the 60 or 30 or 20 or whatever. The numbers are interesting, six times, six times return in a short period.
Nick Lincoln:No bear market, no bear market in that time. Let's just keep this realistic, right? We'll see. We'll see how people stick in that 100% fun when there's a proper prolonged bear market, which these funds have not had.
Unknown:Have you know, I do medication this
Nick Lincoln:morning. I've not yet spoken over anybody yet. Andy, I'll leave that to you. Carl, do you have Irish versions of these funds? Yeah,
Carl Widger:look just under on the on the bond portion of the portfolios, as you know, I like them, and I'm okay with long duration bonds being in a part of the portfolio, because you're right. Nick, there hasn't been any serious market correction. And when that does come, the bond portfolio should, and I would say, will smooth it out. And I'm all about keeping investors invested in what we recommend in the long term, and I think that will help. So there's also an argument, of course, if 2022 was one of the worst years ever, well then there should be a little bit of an uptick in the performance of that bond portfolio as part of those funds. So yeah, I think really, really good. And I think there's arguments for and against, but I think the point here is, really, if we're going to recommend stuff to clients, it's what can we keep our clients invested in? Is probably more important than actually the specifics, as long as we are predominantly invested in equities. Yeah.
Andy Hart:Well, thank you, yeah. I mean, final points on this, I mean, they're not perfect, but they're pretty close, too. And also, they've been reducing their fees ever since they've launched. So again, that's part of the Vanguard ethos. So I
Carl Widger:think they're doing that again right now, but you're right. Andy, that is the exact point anybody shouting to Norman about, I have the best and the perfect investment. It does not exist. Does not exist. Okay,
Nick Lincoln:okay, thank you. Right? 12 minutes in, and we've done one typical tidbit. Smithy, this is, well, the guy was talking tripe, tell us about what the guy was talking about. Well,
Alan Smith:the the origin of this is I was contacted by a TRAPPIST, an avid fan and listener called Steve Newton. I have his permission to share his information. He's very keen to be part of this expose a if you like. Interestingly, Steve is not a member of our wonderful profession, but he's an avid listener. He works in a different industry, but he likes trap, and he tunes into it, and he listens and watches other personal finance podcasts, one of which is something which I hadn't come across before, Damian Jordan, who apparently is a pretty good personal finance YouTuber, and and Steve was keen to sort of have our take On this, and actually specifically said, Nick's take on this, because Damian Jordan recently on his YouTube podcast interviewed a gentleman by the name of Paul Todd, who's the head of nest pensions and nest card. You might not know this, but our big auto enrollment schemes across the UK nest are one of the biggest providers of auto enrollment, and they currently are responsible for managing 45 billion pounds sterling. Well, they've got up to, wow, yeah, of sort of pensions, people that people are kicking generally, people who are in work, workplace pension schemes accumulating for the longest. It's the default kicking
Carl Widger:in here, in later on this area. So okay, so Paul Todd is obviously a person
Alan Smith:of influence at this company. Apparently, on this interview, was saying that the best returns are available through private equity investing, and illiquid investments will do better than investing in equity index funds over the long term. Bear in mind his again responsibility and position of influence over 45 billion of long term pension holder savings money. I thought that was interesting. I thought arguably, I mean, what my immediate take record is, what? What part of the last 50 years of academic research and just independent research evidence, report, any number of things has he missed throughout this? Because there is little or no evidence that supports his view that investing for retail punters, people saving 300 pound a month for the next 3040, years, that investing illiquid assets and private equity. Would be the most more appropriate strategy. So arguably, yeah, I don't know this gentleman, but a pretty reckless statement, I would have thought, What do you think? Nick Lincoln, Nick Lincoln, what are your thoughts? Because Steve wants to hear, Steve
Nick Lincoln:wants to hear, what Nick Lincoln thinks about this arrest. I listened to it, and I did. I think the guy was, I think it was a bad thing to say. There's definitely a push for private equity. It's been the thing du jour, hasn't it? All the trade press. It comes in the first few months, the last few months of last during the first couple months of this year, it's been various articles about private equity. There's obviously a groundswell trying to get money into it. Maybe it's because the UK listed stock market is just becoming less and less. I don't know. I think, yeah, not, not nonsense, nonsense. Just, just, this has got to be a plain vanilla, plain nest. Got to be a plain vanilla, highly liquid, highly transparent place. It's bad enough. You're, you know, you these people invest in the nest, are going to have no interest in pensions. By and large. I know that's a sweeping state, but they really are not going to have an interest in pensions. The last thing you want to do is put them into something where it could go theoretically, very wrong, illiquid. I just don't just have a, I think this has got one global equity fund, which is a Sharia compliant fund, you know, that's, that's, that's where they should be putting the money. I just, yeah, garbage, garbage, Mr. Newton, is my opinion.
Carl Widger:There we go. Did the interviewer push back Alan, or did he I didn't listen
Alan Smith:to it. According to Steve, he said he came across like he was biting his tongue, you know, he just, he wanted to push back, but he allowed the guy to continue. What were you quite good about
Nick Lincoln:making money? Podcast, the two young chaps have run it. They're quite good. Actually, they're quite disagreeable. They don't I listen to it. There was other things they pushed back on him about, about how the cost too high, because nest does levy an initial charge on contributions and so forth. They were quite aggressive about that, and quite aggressive about one point, 1.8 or something, one point, yeah, but they didn't, as I recall, push back on the private equity thing, which, which perhaps they could have done. That's a good podcast. Travis to
Andy Hart:next, don't allocate any money to private equity. They don't current, they don't currently allocate any there for 45 billion to private equity, though, that wasn't clear. Okay, no, then
Nick Lincoln:no, no, they're thinking about it. That's right, that's right. Okay, fine. No, no, it's definitely. They're not. They're not doing not doing it, but they are think about, okay, well, on a similar vein, maybe move on to the third topic or two bit, because this is another company saying no to a very in trend. It's not an asset class, it's a currency. But basically, the head of Van No. So not the head of Vanguard, but a high up person at Vanguard. Now, this person's name is Janelle Jackson, not Janet Jackson, but Janelle j, A, N, E, L, I'm not sure if that's a lady or a man. I guess it's a female. This lady Janelle Jackson. She's Global Head of ETF capital markets and broker and index relations@vanguard.com and in this long Vanguard article on the Vanguard corporate website, they basically say we are not doing bit Bitcoin or crypto. It's quite a long article, but there's one, one line from the article, which, which resonated with me. I know you obviously, you know, you read stuff that validates your own opinions a lot of the time. But quote, in Vanguard's view, crypto is more of a speculation than an investment. End quote, you know, which? Which coming from a brand as powerful and as and as dominating as Vanguard historically has been certainly, I think that's quite a from my point of view, a refreshing, a refreshing starts to take them, to be that honest about it, because obviously they're going to miss out on a big bit of that, that ETF Bitcoin. Slice any thoughts about that?
Carl Widger:No, I might just kind of slide into the next part, the next up until, because they're connected. Nick, I will
Alan Smith:let me then just Yeah, so that that that's fine. That's a, kind of, almost a an ethical or a moral stance that they and vanguard of all you know, they remain a mutual company. They're kind of for the they're far less, I would say, a commercially aggressive beast than the bigger fund manager in the world called BlackRock, who are all in on Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs, who've clearly taken a different stance and seem to understand more of the the underlying issue. But Blackrock always, in my opinion, are they've got an eye for the main chance. BlackRock jumped on the ESG bandwagon in a big way. And I've noticed they've jumped off it. They're all jumping off it recently, and they are all in now. They've got a replacement one called Bitcoin. I would just say one thing. I mean, probably we'll come back to this later on in the show, and as we go, I would say there is a there is a difference between Bitcoin and crypto. Bitcoin would not see itself as a subsidiary part of crypto. Crypto and all these crazy tokens and coins and Trump mean coins and stuff is a different animal, but Vanguard are perfectly tied to their opinion, and that's fine, and they would. They certainly would have lost out significant future revenue by avoiding that asset class. But yes,
Carl Widger:an interesting quote from Larry Fink of Blackrock, he previously referred to Bitcoin as an index of money laundering. Like today. He sees it as a legitimate financial instrument.
Andy Hart:Yeah, there you go. To be fair, you can change your mind, which is, you
Carl Widger:can change your mind, but you can't change, can't change your values. And this is one of the greed things that is really speaking into.
Andy Hart:I'd say he's changed his mind. There not his values. I don't know. Does
Carl Widger:that man have any values? But anyway, there goes
Nick Lincoln:the sponsorship for BlackRock. Yeah,
Alan Smith:inbound from legal letters. Yeah,
Carl Widger:no, I guys, this whole cryptocurrency thing has gone bananas. And if people can't see that, this is the greatest bubble of all time.
Nick Lincoln:Totally with you, totally, right?
Carl Widger:So I've shared two things that will be in the show notes. First of all, is something that came across my LinkedIn feed from Coinbase asset management, and I'm gonna read a couple of things now, so just forgive me, right? So they all goggles have to go on for this Coinbase on their LinkedIn post, we believe the future of finance is on chain. Maximum efficiencies will happen with technological adoption when assets are natively digital and create and credit lives on chain. The opportunity to work with Apollo Global Management Inc, and securitize and invest in their tokenized fund is an exciting leap forward. Okay, I have no idea what that meant. And then I absolutely none at all. And like, nobody should know what that means, because that makes no bloody sense whatsoever. Word challenge. And then there's, there's a podcast from two folks who interviewed Eugene Fama. Now, this is about cryptocurrency, and Eugene Fama widely considered the father of modern finance, as we would know because he's involved with dimensional predicts Bitcoin will go to zero within 10 years. Now, I will say that
Unknown:prediction. I think that. But what do I know?
Carl Widger:Maybe he could put across his views a little more humbly in the podcast, right? So I will say that. But if you actually go on to this podcast, link in the show notes and read the summary of the actual podcast. There's some absolute gold in there. Legendary investor Ray Dalio called crypto a bubble a decade ago now. He calls us one hell of an invention.
Nick Lincoln:He's another one. He's another I read
Carl Widger:the Larry fail to change and less than 36 hours after launching his own cryptocurrency, before his second inauguration, President Trump appeared to have made more than 50 billion on paper for himself and his companies during his first term, Trump called crypto not money whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. So I just think that there's so many people getting absolutely and utterly carried away with this thing. I'm not sure it'll go to zero. I think that's probably too harsh of a prediction, but I think the more and more I read about this stuff the more and more, the first quote I read out like I haven't a clue what's happening here. I just don't have a clue what's happening here. But you talk to me about Vanguard life strategies, and all day long, I can understand it, I can recommend it, and I am confident that my clients will make money out of it in the long term. There's no possibility that you can lose all of your money by investing in Vanguard life strategies or something similar with cryptocurrency. You see the volatility every single day. At the moment, it is absolutely crazy. What Trump did was an absolute disgrace. What they're all doing is absolutely disgraceful.
Alan Smith:TDs, you should get off the fence. Carl, really see capital, isn't
Nick Lincoln:it's the name of the podcast, isn't it? Yeah,
Unknown:I'm going to
Alan Smith:mention this later on in this podcast. This, this is going to be a little bit of a recurring theme, and it will come out. And I would just repeat that thing. Don't conflate Bitcoin with Trump coins and meme coins and shit tokens and all that stuff. It is a different technology. No. And so I we just need to understand. Is the key thing right now. I enter this whole thing from a spirit of curiosity to say, Hmm, what does this mean? What is the whole framework that exists? And you and you could say that the exactly the same thing. It's all built on nothing, the British pound, the euro, the dollar. What's that? What's that built upon? There is an endless supply trust and governments and, you know, whatever. It's just you could, you could level the same thing about a lot of all currencies, all Central.
Carl Widger:I like what you said there Alan. I do and and it's very, very valid. My issue here is that they're all they are being conflated, and people are investing in things that they do not understand because they think they're investing in Bitcoin, for example, or Ethereum, and they're not, and there's, you know, like, so if a client reads out that thing to you, you're kind of going, I don't really understand that. That just please, please, everybody, please, every single financial planner out there, just say to your clients having a clue what that means, that's actually a load of old shit, because that makes no that makes no sense whatsoever. But have the balls to say it. Don't pretend that you know what this crap means when you don't say,
Nick Lincoln:Yeah, saying I don't understand is a superpower. Just just having the ability to say that and not try and be the expert, yeah, don't lose face. I don't think you lose face if you say to someone I don't understand it next. No idea. No idea. Okay, right. Thanks. Thanks voice for that. So next one is me. So I think it's me as it is me. So this might be just dying legacy media floating stuff out to get the clicks. But there is up, there is apparently there's some idea gathering, gathering steam that momentum UK cash ISIS are seen by some in the wealth management area, fund managers and so forth, as being sort of holding back the UK stock market, and we should scrap cash is to get people invest in that cash in the UK stock market. Seems to me, it's slightly insane. This is also a classic example of the problem we have in the UK and the West. But I think really in the UK more than anywhere. And Douglas Murray has spoken about this. It's our focus on second order problems. Now, the sort of reward example at the minute is we have these industrial R, A, P, E, G gangs in the north of England. But that's not the problem. The problem is Elon Musk has spoken about it. And so everything focused on Elon Musk are not the big issue. The big issue with our stock market being now less than 4% of world capitalization. It's not because Mrs. Miggins has got 16,000 pounds in a cash ISA. It's because we're over regulated companies do not want to list here for the hassle, or they are de listing because there's too much hassle. There's an anti corporate, anti capitalist mindset. We're tax de buggery. Why would you list here? But no, the problem, apparently, is because Mrs. Miggins has got her money in cash ISIS, and to say that we're going to get rid of cash ISIS, and she's going to put her money into GlaxoSmithKline, and we're somehow going to recover, you can stop It's so insane. All Mrs. Biggins will do is put her money in cash still, but leave it in a taxable account. So I'm not sure this is, this is just them floating a boat here. I really hope not. Yes, there is loads of money in cash ISIS. And for a lot of people, that's probably not wise, but for a lot of people, that's probably all they've got, and to sort of corral them into saving, let's save the UK stock market by slashing regulation and taxes, not by getting Mrs. Miggins to put her bloody pot into the market. There you go. There's a rash. You
Alan Smith:give yourself very good,
Unknown:very good. You can give yourself around spot on. You
Alan Smith:create an environment which is pro business and encourages people to set up business, to grow companies, to list them, float them. You don't need to dick around with ice allowance and stuff. The world will flock to your just,
Andy Hart:just, just, yeah. Sorry, go on. That's it. Yeah. The Times also picked up on this. So last year, 41 billion went into cash ISIS, versus 28 billion into stocks and shares. Ices. I'm a massive fan of incentives drive behavior. So if they did put the ICER allowance down to 5000 on cash and 25,000 on investments, we would see a sea change. And I'm not saying it's just because they're all direct that money to the UK stock market, but it will certainly promote a saving and investing culture and behavior. So I'm, I'm a fan of them editing the numbers and balancing it between each other, as in, reducing the cash is a limit and increasing the investment investing, investing isa limit. So I think that's that, that's, that's, that's, that's that's good news from the government. But who knows what's going to happen? Hockey.
Nick Lincoln:Docky, right? Conscious of time and the fact that we, we've got a guest coming on this episode, Episode 64 of the real advisor podcast. So this is both, both the story channel and Ultra. You're both gonna have a stab at this one looks like according to the agenda, Aberdeen, selling its financial planning arm.
Unknown:Allen, you get a bit confused? Did you not pick up on that?
Alan Smith:Mate? No, I saw it. Okay, I saw that. You put it up on the list, but he's
Unknown:had a busy weekend for you, but he's a bit of a celebration. We're not going to talk about it. Talk about it. What do you think about
Alan Smith:this? What do you
Andy Hart:think about this? Enough talking about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think about me? Okay, so Aberdeen, the old standard life have put up for sale. They previously, I don't know if they, they bought a few companies and amalgamated it, and it was called 1825, that was when Standard Life was founded. As you very well know, Alan day one, and then day one is there a big. He's at a big celebration this weekend, Jesus Christ. And then they rebranded it to Aberdeen, financial planning type thing. Last year, they lost 34 million Aberdeen is one of the dying brands in our space, because they're predominantly make their money through active
Unknown:charging. Where does Phoenix come into all of this. That's a whole other
Alan Smith:run. Standard Life, sold life and pension book. Is that right? Alan, I think, yes, yeah, Phoenix, apparently Phoenix have bought loads of brand names standard life. That's what was really confusing, because I you know, the rebranded to Aberdeen, you know, too much sort of Merryman and mirth, because they dropped the vowels. You know, stupid. Goals, about paid about 50 million pounds or some agency to do this. And it was, it was met with
Carl Widger:standards by Phoenix, yeah. So they saw Aberdeen, no, no,
Alan Smith:it's not as Phoenix, basically. And all of a sudden, nice posters or bus stops and stuff, saying, Get your standard life pension here. I thought, hang on a minute. But it's a different company who's because, guess what? Actually, despite everything, the standard life, original brand from 1825 was worth something. You know, it was a listed business. It had a couple of centuries of history. So you thought they were just, you worked there, but no, they didn't just drop it, like some companies do. They sold it so that? Well, I mean, that's sort of it
Nick Lincoln:was a very easy brand for broker consultants to flog their wares to, ifas wasn't it once anyone could do it, whoa. I can't see my wheelbarrow with props signed by the week
Unknown:Willie,
Nick Lincoln:I was 21 and the rest.
Alan Smith:Glory Days. Glory Days Come on, gold plated wheelbarrow walking up and down the street. I think,
Nick Lincoln:I think the biggest, just to try and corral this slightly back on, I think the biggest story is yet again, yet again. We're seeing this thing with these, these firms with big pockets buy financial advice businesses thinking they can somehow make money out of them, and then three or four years later on, they divest them, a huge loss. Repeat. I mean, you know, people who climbs and this, this, we should, we should buy
Unknown:it and call it trap
Andy Hart:for planning. I mean, with the better job at it than most of these people that you know, these, these, these lifetime corporate warriors that take over companies because they, you know, worked out on a spreadsheet. Well,
Alan Smith:this is a lot different. This is the reality and having, as Nick's just reminded me through that wonderful jingle, I've lived both sides of it. I've lived in there 14 years at that big corporate bemoth. And quite interesting, because when I became an IFA, in my mind, I thought it must be, I used to, you know, call an IFA. So really easy. All they do, you know, they go play golf, they meet a few punters, they flog a few pensions. How it's not it's not difficult. And I think that's there's a degree of the mindset that exists in corporate life that, you know, they've got all the systems and structures and processes, and they go, Well, we can just all we need now is to take control of distribution, as they call it. And that's a whole other story. I hate how they call it distribution, because it'll be a lot more than distribute, but that's the idea, you see. So they do it, and it's, you know, it's a well, well trodden path. This happened so many times they buy up distribution. You spend a fortune, the overpay for companies, and they work out. There's a lot more to it. There's a culture that exists in the planning community. There is, as Nick often says, there's an art about it's not, it's not just spreadsheets and P and l's and profitability that corporate life revolves around. That's just the nature of particularly big listed companies. And it's inevitably, it's very, very, very, very difficult to maintain that, that independent, creative, entrepreneurial culture that exists in planning businesses whilst you're owned by a huge company. And yes, they're putting up for sale. They'll sell it, no doubt, at a significant loss. Yes,
Andy Hart:just on that. Alan, what is this worth and who wants to buy it? You know, all the advisors gonna leave, all the staff are gonna leave. It's losing 34 million a year. The other thing that's quite interesting.
Alan Smith:How exactly was it losing 34 million on 26 million turnover or so, I don't know. Again, it's
Carl Widger:to be exceptional items. Guys, that's, yeah,
Andy Hart:I know. Carl, yeah, right, yeah, accounting, trickeries and stuff. The other thing that is definitely not going to be the case. They've only earmarked 299,000 pounds provisions for clients where they didn't receive their contracted services. This is missing annual planning meetings. Good luck with that total. Bs, barely 300 grand. Very much. Earmarked. So dangerous pace. Are going to make a guess. They're better organized than this, than these jokers. They fear, they fear mark 462 million. I know the numbers are bigger. They've earmarked 300 grand. That will be one client. Are these people insane? There's one client that they've not seen for nine years. They've had 3 million invested. All of that money is coming back. Oh no. We earmarked 300 grand. It's, this is an absolute.
Unknown:We withdraw the offer. Like most of our ideas,
Andy Hart:not quite so good. This is not an asset. This is an insane liability. So who on earth will buy this? Someone will rock up anyway. Okay, I'm just
Nick Lincoln:conscious of time. Guys, thanks for this really, really good Heinz episode so far. Thank you. Voice, Dan haylet, friend of the
Carl Widger:show, yeah, I mentioned that I did a kind of client interview story the last time, and it's gone down really, really well. And I actually did another one, and it's gonna be really good. But Dan Hale interviewed a client of his on his podcast, and I can't remember, I'm sorry, what's the name of the podcast? Again, no
Unknown:money. Human versus sorry. I mean the next thing,
Nick Lincoln:sorry, yeah, yeah,
Andy Hart:the humans versus retirement, yeah. And
Carl Widger:it's brilliant. And his client actually was in the financial services industry, and I think kind of investment management, but still employed Dan and they have a chat about the kind of year long process that he went through. Really brilliant interview. I highly recommend us Sure. You know what I think. I think everyone should be doing this for all of their clients. If you're financial planner, there are loads of clients who love what you've done for them and tell the stories. But this particular guy was very eloquent in how he described where he was and the, I suppose, the process that himself and Dan went through really, really good, great client story. Tune in to Dan's podcast. It's brilliant. Okay,
Nick Lincoln:great stuff. Thank you. So right? The next point was, was the one I that's what I misread. My one is a wealth of common sense by Ben Carlson, who's a US financial, money blogger kind of guy. And he just writes, he's very nice essays, very good quality. He's one of the better ones. Thank him. And Jason Schweiger, the two American authors I like the most. And he's just put out an essay called the perfect level of wealth. And it's not this bigger subject. I think we all, you know, we're all aging. Obviously, our clients are aging. They're coming to that word zone. You might want to call it retirement. You might want to call it financial independence. But the bigger question, the question that's becoming bigger and bigger and bigger, third act is, what are you not What are you retiring from? But what are you retiring to? Yeah, the third act. And this essay is about that, and about how, you know, people who do retire with oodles of money just aren't happy. So the founder of Mvmt movement, I believe that's short for their sell. You know, sunglasses, another shot like that. He sold his company for $100 million at the age of 27 this guy says, fast forward to now. I've been separated from the company for two years. I'm 31 single and never have to work again. I've also been lonely than ever and deeply depressed. And it's this fact that you and I'm not going to read it because a long quote, but basically the sub thread of this article, the underlying thing is we have to have purpose, and we don't understand quite how work gives us a real sense of purpose. And there's one other guy in here, if I could say the guy who made even more money than that, he's a guy who sold his company for $975 million and he's saying that I've infinite freedom. I don't know what to do with it, and honestly, I'm not the most optimistic about life. And then Ben Carson closes off bit of a bit of a reaches. But he says, I may be generalizing here, but the sweet spot for being rich but not feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of the wealth is somewhere in the seven to ten million range, which, you know, so people that probably have got enough maybe don't know, but just get just interesting. You know, Money does not buy happiness. It buys you choices, but for a lot of people, it's been driven people who build really good companies that sell lots of money. They are, as I just said, they are driven, right? They are going to be like restless souls. So it's not all just about the money. And that's that's something that we need to incorporate, I think, in when we're talking with clients who are selling their businesses, you know, it's not just, oh, well done. You sold your business and we've done your financial plan. You've got enough, right? Those 70 hours you are flogging to the business for the business for the last 10 What are you going to do? What you're going to do? Think about
Unknown:it for your time. Yeah,
Alan Smith:this is just a a constant recurring theme on my other award winning podcast, the bulletproof entrepreneur. And honestly, one of the reasons I started that is because I used to have these con i still do have these conversations with those business owners to sell and exit, and they become clients of ours. And you go through that, and there's, you know, quite just almost surprising. But then, on reflection, not surprising, real life stories. The one that I always remember this guy, Mike Ames, who saw sold a recruitment business, and his public information is sold for 26 million. So he's above he's not. The hundreds of millions, but 26 million is enough for most people. And he very candidly, went through his experience, and he said I had to have therapy. I said I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I literally no purpose. And the kind of the challenge, even more challenging thing is no one's get any sympathy for you, because everyone around you says, What the hell have you got it? I wish I had your problems. You got 26 million.
Nick Lincoln:Sorry, sorry, ultra Do you have our guest mobile number? Because he's waiting in the lobby. If you do, do you want to send a message? Just say we'll be like, four minutes or five minutes, please. Thanks. Yeah. Okay, yeah,
Alan Smith:it's a good I haven't read that article. I shall certainly
Nick Lincoln:just subscribe to Ben Carson's a wealth of common sense, and it'll just landed. Yeah, it's very good, isn't he? That's one of those good he just
Unknown:knows how to write
Nick Lincoln:as smithy harvest down, Mark Stone home.
Alan Smith:Yeah. I mean, this is, this is one that it comes up in a regular basis. I just saw it again. Another article. You know, these, these situations where fund groups, fund managers and platforms, are effectively expected to, what I call mark their own homework. They've got to do a value assessment, yeah, and write up. And it's just, I mean, I mean, you could name any, any of these companies. The one that came up, it was on trust, net article, Hargreaves, Lansdown, and it just goes through, and they, you know, they're asked to look at it and guess what, on all these various metrics, investment performance, against the benchmark costs, against market averages, and a bunch of other things. And they mark their homework, and they've come up with a big, long list. Not one of the funds listed gets a green light, sort of the green amber and red. And their list of funds have got, you know, quite a few reds, quite a lot of ambers, quite a few, you know, a few greens. Not one fund was available to tick all the particular boxes. And then the inevitably, there's a there's a commentary that comes with it. And they come back and they say, along the lines of, well, going forward, we're going to, you know, readjust the portfolio, hire a new portfolio, managers, whatever. And I just think, what is the point of these things? It doesn't seem to be any consequence. You're like, you mark your own homework, and even under pressure, you say, Yes, we know that it's really bad and it's underperformed and it's expensive. But going forward, we're going to do this, that and the other. So don't worry. Back to work. Nothing really happens about it. It's a bit of a waste of time. You
Andy Hart:want it to come out on page 48
Nick Lincoln:Nick, do you think the US wealth managers and us fund groups have to go through this nonsense? Here's another example of why companies. Why bother? Exactly? Why bother? Kind of the market. The market should tell you, if it really is crap you're after, the likelihood is less people are going to invest in it.
Andy Hart:The irony with HL, they've having to produce all this crap that we think is a load of a load of BS, but their company is amazing. It's getting bought and taken off the US stock market, the UK stock market, sorry, one of the most profitable for 200 companies, and they're getting taken off the stock market. So again, all the good companies are leaving, yeah, out great value. First Order. Problems, but
Nick Lincoln:let's get Mrs. Megan's cash out so she can bring back Hargreaves lands down to the footsie. 100 good stuff.
Unknown:A good slavery policy as well. I believe they have a fantastic Yeah, you know,
Nick Lincoln:statues of Peter, Peter Hargreaves into the into the river. And I other guy, right. Watch Robin Powell, active fund managers.
Carl Widger:Yeah, did an interview the evidence based investor I posted on LinkedIn, where do active fund managers invest their own money? Yeah, everyone should watch it. It's a nice, short video, and you'll not be surprised to hear that they don't invest it in in this particular study, they found that the active fund managers didn't invest the money, their own money, in their own funds. It was pointed out to me by a few people on LinkedIn that, Oh well, I know some active managers who invest in their own funds. So yeah, I was going to reply. And then I went, Okay, life's too short.
Nick Lincoln:Life, okay, um, okay. Case are with that last point. So 44 minutes in, and we've got a guest, dear Trappist. We have another guest on The Real advisor podcast. This guy is a chap called um Barney whiter. He's also known as the escape artist. And then we're moving on to the meat potatoes. And potatoes. Now we covered the fire movement, fire financial independence. Retire early in Episode 30. We gave it a bit of a good going over. And now we got one of the people who's very much involved in it and very much respected in it, and I'm gonna let him into the room now, hopefully the software doesn't crash, so we're gonna let in. Barney whiter,
Unknown:hey, there's somebody at the door.
Barney Whiter:Not guilty, not guilty.
Nick Lincoln:Mr. White, or Hello,
Barney Whiter:oh my goodness. What sort of operation you running here? My broad. Band settings block porn, and they block Riverside,
Nick Lincoln:yeah, we have a separate car that involves, that involves pornography. You managed to make it in. You managed to make it in. Barney, thank you very much. Andy, do you want to give the TRAPPIST a little bit of an overview of the escape artist, I
Andy Hart:will Barney, your volume is a little bit loud and your headphones maybe turn it down a little bit. It's coming back through your mic. I give a little telling off before I introduce him. Barney's bunny is a close personal friend of mine.
Nick Lincoln:Oh, God,
Andy Hart:Nicholas. He's appeared on my my other podcast, Maven money. He's coming a couple of times. He's a financial coach, non regulated to end consumers. He writes a lot. He's very outspoken in the financial independence retire, early movement, however you want to slice and dice it, and I thought we'd get him on to have a chat with him today. Are you ready to go? My friend?
Barney Whiter:I am. I've just turned myself down a little bit. Does that make a difference?
Andy Hart:I think that sounds a bit better. Yes, my, my, my audio is now not coming out of your headphones. So all good. So welcome to the show, my friend. How are
Barney Whiter:you? I am very well indeed.
Andy Hart:Good, good. Where are you speaking to us from today,
Barney Whiter:from downtown Farnham, the center of the known universe.
Nick Lincoln:Superb. That's that Hampshire.
Barney Whiter:Hampshire, Surrey border says, Actually, I'm actually in Surrey, but it's, it's close to Hampshire. Hampshire
Nick Lincoln:is older than, I think it's the one of the oldest counties, and it's older than most of the European countries. Yeah, that Barney
Barney Whiter:Winchester is. And, yeah, Winchester is like an ancient seat of, like, Anglo Saxon, uh, kings. So I'm trying to, like, tap into that tradition,
Alan Smith:right? Very nice. Okay, going, well, so we are,
Andy Hart:we're going, we'll, we'll get back into the nitty gritty subject of personal finance. So, yeah. So what is what inspired you to pursue the fire movement? You know, what were the biggest challenges you felt along the way? We'll start with that
Barney Whiter:one, yeah, well, I didn't follow the fire movement, because when I started, I didn't know any anything about that. So, I mean, I got on this. How did I get on that, on that particular path? Well, you know, my parents got into some financial, a little financial scrape back in the day. So in 1981 when I was 11, my parents bought the biggest house that they could afford, borrowed as much money as they could, and that year, that same year, interest rates went to 17% and they were a little bit screwed. And so my dad had to, like, stop buying beer and brew his own awful, evil, home brew, cancel the newspaper. Didn't go on holiday that year. So my takeaway from that, you know, it was fine, you know, we didn't know. No one died, no one we didn't, we didn't get made homeless, but I took from that little episode that it was kind of a bad thing to, like, be in debt. It was bad thing if the bank can take your house away, and it was kind of good if you could get yourself mortgage free. And so, like, from that point onwards, I made a series of decisions that kind of took me in that direction. So I kind of followed the money. I followed the money, as a lot of people did in the 80s and 90s. So, you know, I chose to do economics at uni, and then I trained as a chartered accountant, and then I went and worked in corporate finance. I followed the money.
Nick Lincoln:Nice. Okay, yeah, I looked at you. I looked at your website. Barney, really nice. Loads of things on there. You've got a, if I'm wrong on this, by the way, shoot me down. But you've, you've got a you've got a family, yep, okay, because one of the things I often think about, and it's just me, probably because I'm just the fire movement, and I know you're saying you weren't originally inspired by it, but I think you're certainly looked up to within the fire movement, a lot of it seems to be delaying gratification. Now, for for for this idea of saving enough that you can walk away from work, paid work earlier. Yeah, you seem to have pulled it off. You seem to have balanced it. But how did you manage that? Okay, it's always the easier if you're living in your mum's basement, you don't have children, and you're shoveling all your money into a pension pot of you know, 50% of earnings, or whatever your rule of thumb is, how did you how did you pull it off?
Barney Whiter:With some difficulty, with some pain, with some difficulty, with some regrets, with some grief along the way, with some burnout along the way. I. And so, yeah, no one, no one said it was going to be easy, right? But I, you know, I, I had three kids, and so, you know that, in itself, is a big challenge. And you know, I wanted to have the best of both worlds. I wanted to have a sort of nice middle class lifestyle, and I wanted to achieve financial freedom the way I kind of had, the way I had to square that circle was by earning more, as earning, you know, much more than, like, an average salary and but, but so I was kind of in a profession, in a world in a sort of like middle class bubble, where people were people were making a lot more than normal average income, but I didn't let my lifestyle inflate up like a lot of those people did. So I was kind of earning high and spending low and investing the difference.
Alan Smith:Barney, can it? Can I ask you for for the for our audience who aren't familiar with your work? What if you could summarize what are the kind of key principles, whether you call it fire or just your version of this kind of way you operate? Yeah, what are the few things you would advocate and you would obviously be writing and talking about,
Barney Whiter:yeah, the four principles, the four pillars of financial independence are, one, earn more. Two, spend less. Three, invest the difference wisely. And four, know how much is enough.
Alan Smith:Okay, and so that sounds, you know, absolutely, perfectly rational and sensible. And it's probably something that the four of us and many others would 100% advocate for. Why is this considered to be different to mainstream financial planning, which is what you know, that's, it's about accumulating, saving, working out how much is enough and normally, and optimizing for, you know, investing, tax planning, yeah, all those things. Well, I don't know you're not saying you're necessarily the kind of the poster boy for fire, but there's a community who kind of adopt these, these things, yeah, tell me. Tell me what's I'm struggling to find out. What's the difference between what is just core, sensible financial planning.
Barney Whiter:I think it's the lengths that people are prepared to go to. So Right? It's how extreme Are you willing to go? And I was willing to go extreme. Okay,
Alan Smith:so, so give us an example of what you did or what you sacrificed.
Barney Whiter:So I mean, in my, in my, in terms of my the job that I was doing, you know, I was a partner of a big firm in London, and so I'm, you know, I'm, I'm working, God knows how many hours a week in like, mergers and acquisitions advice, you know. So I'm, I'm working 80 hours a week. I'm, you know, traveling. I'm staying in hotel rooms, you know, not seeing the family for quite a lot of the time. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm earning at, you know, I'm making those sort of extreme career decisions. I'm operating in a sort of an extreme career world, and at the same time, then when I'm, then when, then when I'm at home at the weekend with, you know, we're going for a walk, you know, we're not going to Alton Towers like we're going for a walk in the park and we're going for a walk in the woods, and we're kind of keeping it natural and wholesome and low cost and non consumerist. And so, you know, I'm, I don't, I mean, I've never, I've never paid for, like, a business great, a business class flight my life. You know, they don't intend to. It's just these, these things that people end up inflating their their budget to be able to spend on. Just never really appealed to me that much in the first place, and I was able to kind of negotiate that with my wife and bring the children up in a way that avoided, you know, lifestyle inflation. So, you know, a classic example of that. A lot of people who were in the job that I was in would have sent their three kids to private school. And once you're on that particular escalator, you're making it very, very, very, very difficult. Unless you're the sort of guy that that, unless you're a sort of an entrepreneur who sold a business, it's it's really, really hard to put three kids through private school all the way and then University, and so I, you know, I mean, I could have done that, but if I had done that, I would have been locking myself into that world essentially forever, and I'd probably now be, you know, dropped dead of a heart tank and or an or be an alcoholic, or
Alan Smith:both, or both, um. So in summary, and that's kind of a dead that's really helpful, because that clarifies it for me, you, you have just intentional is that is the word, I would say from it, from a very early stage, you knew, like the next 510, 1520, years, to optimize to achieve this. And it was that what you were aiming for this thing called financial independence, which means you didn't have to do anything, you didn't have to work into anything. You'd sufficient resources that throw off enough income to satisfy your lifestyle expectations. But you decided to do that you were very conscious, which most people aren't. I have to say about lifestyle creep,
Nick Lincoln:well, not just, not just that. Can I just tackle that? Obviously you're you've got a singular mindset. And people who do, do do do what you've done or doing what you did, strong willed, singular mindset. But you've also got to find a partner who, who's on this journey with you and did with a did that ever lead to tensions in terms of, you know, you know, it takes two people to to plow this furrow?
Barney Whiter:Yeah, yeah. So, so that my constant challenge from my wife is like, what is the point of all this? Forget this. What is the point of the sacrifice? What is the point of galaty? We can afford it? Why? Why can't we spend it so and so I can't. I lost count of how many conversations like that we had. What I was trying to explain to her is that the job that I was doing was like a sprint, and I just couldn't see myself lasting at that until I'm I was 67 I was going to keel over before that point. And so, because I was operating in an extreme environment, I knew that I just I knew it just couldn't run on forever. And when you were, you know, and also I looked around me and I was looking at my career change options. And, you know, in some ways it wasn't, it just wasn't that easy for me to see a way to drop down into a sort of middle ground. And I could see that I could go and work at McDonald's or be a barman or something, but I couldn't quite see a route to a sort of middle ground, sensible
Unknown:career, alternative, alternative.
Barney Whiter:And so my mindset was, whilst I'm in this situation, I've been given a gift. I've been given the gift of high income. It won't last forever. Let's fix the roof while the sun is shining. Let's stash as much as I can. Let's build originally, I just thought of it as like getting clearing the mortgage. Once I've cleared the mortgage, I was like, Okay, let's build a redundancy slash retraining fund. But I just pushed through until the point where I was 43 and I'm like, Do you know what I've done? It? I can quit. Brilliant
Nick Lincoln:Carl, she bring you into the conversation, my friend, yeah,
Carl Widger:everyone is taking a big goal of air now, Barney, because I suppose I've been the one that's been a little bit, I won't say, critical of the fire movement, but I've questioned it a little bit, right? And obviously, as financial planners, the the fi bit, I get the financial independence because we're trying to get people to financial independence and as quickly as possible to give them kind of those options. It's the retire early piece is the is the bit that I'm a little bit conflicted with having said that, I have, I've, I've listened to a number of your podcasts in the last while, and you seem, you seem very balanced in it. But I have a couple of questions, and I suppose one of them is, you did speak about, and you've mentioned it just you're here today as well, about kind of burnout, and you nearly, you know, you got kind of unhealthy, didn't you? And you got yourself in a bit of bother, like, is there is are there sacrifices you think that you went a little bit too far on, and are there? Are there regrets? Are there things that you might have done a little bit differently if you had your time back,
Barney Whiter:for sure, for sure. So, I mean, I think essentially, we're all converging upon the truth, like from different directions. So financial planners, financial advisors, people in the fire world, I agree with, we're trying to get to the truth. We're trying to get to what makes sense, what is objectively real. And, you know, we're learning as we go. And so I quit at age 43 quit my job had no you know, and I didn't know what to call that. I mean, I've never called myself retired. I don't like the word retired. I don't like the sort of associations it has, but, but, but I quit, and I had to just figure out a new life, and that is pretty disorientating us, actually. So this is why don't, this is why don't sort of push it onto other people. It's quite disorientating to go, as I did, from like very structured life, where. I've got to work 80 hours a week. I've got this many meetings to do. I've got to do, go fly here, fly there, keep the show on the road. To go from that to nothing like a clear diary. You lose your anchor, you lose you can lose your identity. Yeah, you can lose your structure. You can lose the sort of social, your social peers. You're the people you work with. And that's like being cut loose on the ocean in some ways. And so I did that, and I had to kind of figure out and, like, reinvent myself and create a new life. But that's not very sensible
Unknown:way to approach it, yeah.
Barney Whiter:And so if I wanted to exaggerate for effect, I would say early retirement is death. Because essentially, if you just, you know, lose your mission, lose your purpose, cut yourself loose and just like, go to the beach and wait to die. That's like, okay, that's probably not a great idea for most
Carl Widger:people. Yeah, and this is one of the difficulties that I have had. And I love hearing you saying this, because, look, there's in our world, there are extremists, and in your world there are extremists, and I love that you, you, you make the point that we're all kind of coming to the truth together, and we'll kind of meet in the middle somewhere. Because I think everything that I've listened to Barney and the few couple of podcasts I've listened to you in advance of coming on today, I'd say, yeah, I totally agree with Barney, because you've never spoken about, I'm just retiring to the beach, and that's it, you know. And I suppose my thing always is, you need a purpose. And this, I hate that word retire as well. And I I'm trying to coin that this phrase, or get everyone to coin this race third act. And you know, what does it mean? What, what does getting up in the morning mean? What does it look like? And what's the purpose of that day, that week, that year? And especially as I think, you know, we're all going to live longer, aren't we? And with the, you know, AI is going to help all of that, and the 100 year life and all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, trying to match money to live for just a very particular till age 81 is probably, you know, that's a bit of a risk as well. So I think, you know, going going forward, matching the values of what you're saying and what we're saying. I think that's, that's kind of the sweet spot. But, you know, yeah, I Andy, I'll bring you in here, because I'm thinking we're all actually on the same page here, just
Andy Hart:in your experience. Bonnie, how many people that have sort of lived the fire life, have retired with no purpose and have been very unproductive in society. Is that common? Is that rare? Is that
Barney Whiter:everyone goes back to work? Everyone goes back to wow.
Andy Hart:Okay, so they they try it for unretirement. We call it unretirement. The unretire movement is quite big. The fire movement is bigger. The unreturned breaking news
Alan Smith:part has been, uh, back to work.
Nick Lincoln:So before you join the show Barney, we were just discussing one US journalist called Ben Carlson, who writes these blogs, very good. And he was just about how money is not everything. And these, these multi millionaires in the States, they just feel depressed. They're worthless. They've lost their sense of value, their sense of place, because they haven't got that thing. They've got them out of bed. So it's not just about the money, isn't it? It's about what are you retired NOT WHAT ARE YOU retiring from? What are you retiring to? And is a horrible word, retirement. We try not to use it. You know, financial independence, whatever you want to call it. It's a big it's a
Andy Hart:big thing. Moving on to the next topic. And I want you to be as honest as you can here, Barney, and I know you will be you've got your own thoughts on the financial advice profession, because you see how we work from the inside from the clients that you work with. You know a lot of them. So yeah, what's your thoughts on the financial advice, financial planning profession? Be careful
Nick Lincoln:with your answers. Barney, we like you, but be careful.
Unknown:Be as honest as you can be. Go for it.
Barney Whiter:So I'm in my notice period, back in whatever it was, 2013 2014 and I'm kind of like looking for something, what's next? Okay? And so as part of that, I toddle along to meet the nice people at Saint James place. So I taught you underestimate the power of the dark side. Here we go. So I go and talk to the nice people at St James place, and we talk, they have this thing called the academy where basically they train you and they train in quotes. Still do air quotes, and the. They essentially, they set you up as like a self employed salesman for their for their products. And they told me at that time that the average St James place client was charged, was being charged 2.4% 240 basis points per annum, to for the pleasure of their their services. And I just like, are you joking? Are you joking me? And and I saw what those guys had optimized for, you know, they were taking I saw the other people that were applying for the process. And there were the ladies were very attractive, and the guys were very, sort of sensible looking. And we were kind of being team. There was you, and then there was me, and we were teed up to be actors, kind of pretending to be financial advisors. And I'm like, This is bullshit, and what it but it's but they have optimized for marketing so they understood marketing better than any people that I've ever, ever spoken to, without a doubt. So they were, they were not done people at all and very, very smart people doing things that were in totally legal with the with the blessing of the regulator. I just thought, This is crazy. This this cannot last. So I kind of expected that business to struggle, and I've been amazed at how long it's run for. Obviously, the times and the Sunday Times and now got their their teeth into their leg, but I was amazed at how long that run, so I just came to the conclusion that there was, shall we say, room for improvement in the sort of mass market of financial advice and wealth management.
Andy Hart:So what do you think about financial advisors. Financial Advisors, from a wider sense, rather than just SJP in isolation, do not come across the work that we do in the coaching that you do with your clients or
Barney Whiter:so. So essentially, the way I see it is that it's like, everyone has to, like, figure out money. Like, money is like oxygen. You don't have a choice whether to deal with it or not. So there's, you know, however many people, 60, 70 million people in the UK, everyone has to, like, figure out money. And it's something of a hostile environment in the sense that we're, we're plonked into this world that has been optimized for marketing purposes. So, you know, if you, if you just live in London, and you go from the tube to your office, you've passed 100 adverts on the way. You've passed, you know, 100 shop fronts, you've passed 100 opportunities to let the money leak out of your life. And so like, everyone has to, like, figure out the money game. And everyone has to decide, well, can I do this on my own, or do I need help? And if you need, you know if, and I think, like Andy, you've put this very well, like you, what you you're you guys have the offer. You have the regulatory ability to say to people, we can do anything. We can do anything for you. So you know you could, you could just focus on running your business. I'll focus on running your portfolio. I will think about your insurance needs. I'll, I'll just, you can just outsource it all to me, and so you guys can do that, and I don't do that, and I can't do that, and I don't want to do that. My point is it's an it's a huge, huge market, and it kind of makes sense, if you believe in capitalism and choice and freedom. It makes sense for the consumer to have different options available
Carl Widger:to and what does the escape artist do then, Barney, is it. Did you do kind of one on one coaching with people who want to try and get to this financial independence as quickly as possible?
Barney Whiter:Yes, yes, I do, okay, but, but what I what I figured out pretty quickly, is that all the people I was talking to, they kind of already got the money thing sorted. Okay, so the to the my average coaching client, I am talking to them about a mixture of things, which is largely career, career change, health burnout, like life decisions, moving country. And they also, and they also want to talk about, you know, what they're investing their money in, but they don't want me to tell them what to do.
Carl Widger:Okay? And typically, what, what does that look like? Do you like engage with them over a period of, kind of 12 months or or is that entirely up to the client? Or how does that work? Yeah,
Barney Whiter:so that's. It's, it's up to the client. But, I mean, yeah, but what I what I realized, is that if, if someone is, let's say some, someone might come to me and they're, you know, they're burnt out. They're trapped in a job that they that is kind of burning them out or running them down, and like, there's no immediate exit from that, like, that's a period of time and a period of work that needs to be done, and that might include some health changes, that might include some some research that might include need some like, brainstorming about what else that person can do that might require some like looking at, you know, their their financial setup,
Carl Widger:yeah, so that's more holistic, so than just fi, yeah, yeah, okay, and just from a from a financial planner, financial advisor point of view. Is there a big demand for this service? No,
Barney Whiter:no, not really, no. It's a terrible business model.
Unknown:He used to
Alan Smith:go back to work again soon.
Barney Whiter:No, I would have been. I remember, I went to see the St James place, and they said, like, Oh, our average person, they spend like, two or three months in Barbados or skiing in Chamonix or whatever, and I'm like, oh, that sounds good. Yeah, 2.4% a year. Yeah? Why that's a better business model? Yeah, so mine's a terrible business model. Mine's
Alan Smith:awful. Yeah? Interesting. Bonnie, can I just ask you something specific? You said there that the people come to you and they're off, they've kind of got the money thing worked out in many ways. But just just to clarify, and what strikes me is you're all about optimizing in every way and avoiding leakage, if we call it in terms of just costs and lifestyle. All that 100,000 does that? I mean, I'm not trying to feed you the answer, but ultimately, where does that lead you to deploy your investable capital? What sort of funds, investments structures, Where does money end up in your life on the likes the lives of your clients?
Barney Whiter:So for me, I've just got a very simple, like asset allocation, like framework in my head, which is, it can just be as simple as you have an emergency fund, you own a house, I mean, ideally without a mortgage, and then everything else just goes into, like, Vanguard global equities, ETF and so like that. I'm not saying everyone else should do that. I'm not saying else everyone else has to do that, but it should. It can be made because it'd be right if he said that. It can be made that simple,
Alan Smith:yeah, yeah. What really strikes me is that you are you effectively, you're kind of an industry outsider, but you've had a very close and continue to have a very close look at the inside of the industry. And it's a constant theme that we talk about, and you know, again, the advertising you talk about, the promotions everywhere, the this is an industry that loves to complicate things and make things sound much more confusing, because you Mr. Mr. You know, punter investor, you don't understand this stuff. Leave it to us. Leave the preference. But if you were to just remove all that first principles thinking, distill it all down. So just what are we trying to achieve here? Which is we all as as we've all agreed, financial independence is a good thing. It creates freedom, opportunity and peace of mind, all those good things. So how do you what's the best way? So what you realize, what we've all come to conclusion, and we're all on the same page. It is those things. It's trying to, you know, remove or reduce debt, you know, own your house, have cash on hand, and then invest the long term using, you know, the lowest cost means of engaging with that. Let me throw a little curve ball at you on that, on the same, broadly, same subject. But it's, it's come up a couple of times on this podcast. It will again. What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?
Barney Whiter:Yes, so I was, like crypto Bitcoin skeptic for years and years and years, and I only got into, I only basically flipped in 2021 so 2021 I thought I bought my first 100 pounds worth of bitcoin, and I went down the crypto rabbit hole, and I, I've been, you know, pretty obsessed with it ever since. So, like, I've not, I, you know, I'm not again. I'm not pushing it on other people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it is going to but essentially, this is like a huge historical like moment. It's a huge historical change. What Bitcoin represents is the separation of. Money and state, yeah, and, you know, just like, you know, back in the like reformation, you had this sort of, this idea of the separation of church and state, like this is kind of a similar moment in a similarly big thing in history, that the the separation of money and state, and so the the idea that you can have a store of value that cannot be arbitrarily inflated, debased, confiscated from you by a powerful government is a game changer.
Alan Smith:Interesting, that's a good answer. That's, that's a considered answer. Thought you'd might, might say that. And yes, it's a subject we'll come back to. It was very interesting to get your take on it as you are. You're not sort of conflicted by this industry that we're, that we're in, and the regulated industry who's got a particular mindset. You're just coming at this from a, you know, from an open mind, I suppose. What does this mean? What is it? And you've obviously done the work to understand it more. So it's, it's interesting that that that's, that's your view. Nick,
Nick Lincoln:we've, I'm conscious that we've taken, we've taken quite a bit of Barney's time, and he's actually in the office now working on another m and a deal. He's only with us because he got an extended tea break from the boss. Barney. Barney, Barney, thank you so much for that, fella. Do you want to hang around for we What about another 20 minutes of the show to go? Some more segments. You're welcome to hang around and contribute.
Andy Hart:If you'd like to hang around for us, rambling, or you can jump off.
Barney Whiter:Tell me what to do. I'll stay or go to
Nick Lincoln:you stay or go. I think you could add some value just Barney's website is the Escape artist.me. And there'll be a link to it in the so called show notes. But I think we do need to move on to the next part of trap episode 64 because we're at Christ 76 minutes in, and it's time for listen TRAPPIST questions. And I know that because I can see at the front doorbell the postie is dragging the bulging sack of TRAPPIST questions up the drive. And we will answer some more questions if you want to submit a question to us, do it on the pinned link in the tweet on x, or the X on the tweet, or whatever, and we will get around to them. These are questions from August last year, and the first question, I think, is from someone. Let me open this one up. This envelope is from Patrick s who says it's on Twitter as at Patrick, I checked that, Patrick, that's not true. You're not on Twitter. At Patrick is someone called Patrick to leave, who lives in Amsterdam and is a host of shows, that's not you. It's a nice try. Anyway. His question is, this, this, again, deep breath and Barney, if you can contribute to this, that's great. If you can't, that's that's fine as well. High trap pack, at the outset of your career, how would you recommend navigating, joining a financial planning firm for the first time, building your client bank at that firm, and then subsequently leaving it to set up your own or going to a smaller outfit where you may have an ownership stake. Intention would be to begin with the end in mind, which we like, but undertaking this would create challenges, ie, SJP advisor, and then joining an IFA challenges with non competes, exit, charges, etc. This will create poor cart experience and may not even be possible. Interested to hear all of your thoughts, given you have all done this at some stage. Thanks, right? Hopefully, guys, you've had a chance to look at pat you haven't, finally, but the rest of us had a chance to look at Patrick's question.
Andy Hart:Any quick thoughts? Well, this is a question of my first job in a financial planning type firm, question, I believe. I mean, he's massively thinking ahead here, which is commendable. I would just say, get stuck in you just got to get a job. The traditional route is administration, power planning, then advising. I recommend going to work for, you know, not a very good firm, the firm that's got a lot of wheels that spin, and you can get involved in various different areas of the firm. If you go of the firm. If you go to well oiled machine, you don't realize how good it is, and then you can't learn from all the different parts of it. So get a job anywhere. I wouldn't overthink client, bank and non compete agreements. This sounds insane. Well,
Alan Smith:I I would counter that he's obviously is thinking about, look, he wants to be a financial planner. He wants to have some sort of ownership of a financial planning business. So he's looking to navigate the it sounds like his early stage career. And interesting on in Bob garney's had some experience, by the sounds of things on this. That's, you know, people do talk about the academy. St James's place is one. There's, there's several others out there. And there's no question, if you're from a standing start, you do get infrastructure marketing, any number of other things. But if you're doing that as a stepping stone, you say, I'm going to do this for two years and exit and start my own IFA firm and take my clients, well, it wouldn't be SJP first rodeo. This is the first thing they are pretty well buttoned up for, you know, exiting, no, within the contracts that the clients currently buy with exit, charges and penalties, what have you very often, but also with your contractual obligations that you've got. So I don't think it'd be very easy if you, if you, if your end ambition was to run your own independent firm, that probably would. Be the best route to go Barney did it was I ever talked about Barney when you were looking at the SJP Academy?
Barney Whiter:Well, they no, they didn't want to talk about that.
Alan Smith:Probably worked out. It wasn't going to be what I would say. Again, as a founder of a business with advisors. This thing about starting and effectively leveraging all the resources that the advice firm is going to give you, then to go and set up on your own and take all the clients that wouldn't be a great thing necessarily to do or to become known for. There are firms that will offer self employed contracts. So you will get an infrastructure, you get sort of some admin and stuff, and you'll pay for it along the way. And ultimately, the clients are yours. You'll grow them yourself. If you wanted to leave and set up your own show, you could do so. So just be careful about navigating the contractual obligations and expectations, and you don't want to be someone that's known as jumps about from one company to the other, tries to take clients with them wherever they go. I know you boys have got
Andy Hart:Nick as as a fellow overthinker, I think this guy's Well, overthinking it. I think he just needs to get involved. He's at the beginning of his apprenticeship stage. When you start moving from the apprenticeship stage to mastery, then that's when you need to worry about these sort of things. Just get involved. He could be doing this for 10 years, just, you know, hitting the streets, hitting the phone calls, having client meeting, making the mistakes and make mistakes in someone else's time and money, obviously you want to add a lot of value, because that's how the world works. I think he's overthinking this potentially. And I never thought
Nick Lincoln:of you as an over thinker mate. You are. You don't strike me as someone who suffers. No, no. I don't mean the derogatory for once, I mean you strike me someone who doesn't vacillate and think this is what I want to do. So why do you think that's a massive overthinker. You don't, yeah, he wouldn't just to close on this. We actually know an SJP advisor who has just joined an IFA so it can, it can be done. And shout out. They're both trap fans. Shout out to Graham and and Julian. So you can't, you can do that. It's not as easy as it maybe should be. And we'll leave it at that. Okay, I'm conscious we're now 85
Alan Smith:minutes. Yeah, Ollie has just joined us from SJP. It does happen
Nick Lincoln:and, and, yes, the Academy, the training, it is sales orientated, but they also do other stuff as well. It's supposed to be very high quality in terms of business planning and and that kind of thing. So just,
Carl Widger:just my, just very quick point that the guy here, and his point is, right, he's at the very start, just get your head down and start working. And work really, really hard. But I think the clients aren't being really thought about here. I know there's a there's a there's a one common old, you know, sub optimal outcomes for clients, or something like that. The clients need to be thought about first and foremost, and that has to be your main priority. And if you do great work for clients, no matter who you're working for, whether you're working for somebody else or for yourself, you're you will have no problem in your career. But I think trying to plot a course very early in your career, before you've done the hard work. Yeah, too early, my friend, yeah, sorry. Probably become really valuable
Alan Smith:to your clients, your
Andy Hart:employer. Everyone knows what the just offer is going to be like in 510, years time.
Nick Lincoln:Exactly. Can you tell them to hurry up? Because they'll listen to you. They don't listen to me. Let's move on 83 minutes, shoot me. Let's move on to the final part of the show. This is the so called culture corner.
Unknown:Oh, shit, no, it's another question. Nick, now we did another question. You cut it. No,
Alan Smith:you dropped it. All right, yeah, it's gone on too long. Okay.
Carl Widger:Yeah. There's a David Mac Williams podcast that everyone should tune into. And this one was about the deep seek story. And it was, I just loved the way it's kind of two Irish guys. David MacWilliams is a pretty famous economist here. He's very entertaining as well as very well read and a very clever guy. But I just love this was a real typical Irish type podcast, because they were, like, totally and utterly. They were just celebrating and giggling about, you know, these guys coming in and doing, you know, the same stuff as all the other AI merchants doing it, but at a 10th of the cost, and kind of celebrating the underdog and that kind of stuff. But they do bring in a an American Born Chinese lady, and she gives some really good insights about it as well. But the podcast in general is really well worth, well worth listening to the David McWilliams podcast.
Andy Hart:Great start. Go on, Nick. Go on. I don't I don't know if other people on the call now, but so, so obviously, deep seek have done what, let's keep it simple. Open. Ai have done for a 20th at price, keep it simple. But so open, aI have scraped data from all over the internet. It comes under this Fair Use policy, and I don't know well enough, this is Fair Use policy. And then deep. Seekers basically just stolen a massive chunk of what open aI have done, and they've got a problem with this now. And that deep seat was saying, well, you're stealing all other people's information under the Fair Use policy, yeah, we'll just let you do it. It's still yours. And they're like, no, but we've got a problem with that. No, but you're seeing the sort of merry go round. You
Carl Widger:should listen to the podcast. Andy, you'd love it, because they do, they do say that, you know, gone, you know someone giving out about Robin. Everyone else is Robin. Everyone
Andy Hart:else Robin. And then, and we're gonna rob you at the end. And yes, it's quite interesting. So this Fair Use policy, again, it's like built into websites and built into a lot of media companies. I don't want it, I don't know well enough, but it's interesting, but it's funny.
Barney Whiter:It's gonna be litigated to hell and back in the US so, so essentially, you mean
Andy Hart:those companies going off the deep sea called, Who knows if you're,
Barney Whiter:if you're the New York Times and The FT, you're pissed off that all of these AI models have just scraped your whole data set and they've not given you a penny. So you're going to court. Right?
Alan Smith:And there are agreements coming into place as well, whether again, to pay for it. I mean, open, AI just steal all the music,
Andy Hart:and then we'll come to an agreement five years later, type thing. Yeah, it will get worked out.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, next one, please, gents,
Alan Smith:I would encourage everyone who listens to this podcast to watch a 30 minute video. It's on YouTube. It's on a few other places, and it's called, What's the problem? Barney, I don't know if you've seen this, what's the problem created by a guy called Joe Brian. And I just had Joe Brian on my podcast, bulletproof entrepreneur. He is a very smart, humble guy. He is Oxford graduate. He was a Goldman Sachs for 10 years. He was an entrepreneur, created a business, sold it for a lot of money, and went down a rabbit hole of identifying this, as Barney was talking about a moment ago. The fundamental problem that is wrong with the money system, the economy, and regardless of whatever you think about it, it is in the way it's delivered a very professional, easy to understand video, and it's worth anyone investing 30 minutes of your time to watch, listen and understand, because it does have an impact on our lives and the lives of our clients. Go and watch it, link in the show notes.
Nick Lincoln:Okay, cool. Me, new podcast I've discovered. It's been around forever. It's about 700 episodes, and they knock one out every three or four days, and they're quite the long form podcast. But the series is called, we study billionaires. The latest episode is a two and a half hour interview with your friend Andy and your friend Terry Smith. But he really goes childhood and everything, and he's, you know, he's you know, we he's an active fund manager. Obviously, I'm sure Barney, you've heard of Terry Smith as well. He's probably the UK's most high profile fan manager at the moment. But regardless of what you think about active fund management, he is an entertaining and entertaining Listen, so two and a half hours. Nick, well, the show is two hours. 25 I mean, it just started the show. Great. Yeah. So there we go. So there's me and Barney, by the way, if you've got, if you've got any, if you've got one resource to give to the TRAPPIST that you would recommend, maybe I'll come to you last just to put you on the spot, just I've got one. Okay, cool. Um, right. Mister Hart. Nava, I'm gone. Sorry. Can you not pronounce it? Nick, well, naval Ravi, can, but you don't like it when I start announcing the culture corners, it's gotta be silence. So I'm trying to be
Andy Hart:silent. Okay, so mine is a podcast. I watch a YouTube podcast channels, naval Ravikant, who is a very deep, wise thinker, is on the Ranveer show, which I believe is on the biggest shows in India. Only from listening to this latest one, lessons on growth, life, spirituality, love, family and more, if you're a fan of naval Ravikant, who's come out with the laws of wealth. He's been on the Tim buries podcast, which is the most downloaded Tim Ferriss podcast. He's way too deep thinking for you boys. I'm sure Barney's listening to it, but that's my culture corner. Over to you, Barney.
Barney Whiter:So yeah, my greatest claim to fame is naval Ravikant answered me on Twitter.
Unknown:Hey, he's a fan.
Barney Whiter:So my, my, my suggestion, if you want to understand what's coming in the US and what the new regime holds, watch the LEX Fridman interview of Mark Andreessen. That was, I think it was 10 days ago, and Mark Andreessen is essentially the guy who has been coordinating the Silicon Valley assistance to Trump and so. And Mark Andreessen is plugged in with David Sacks, the new AI and cryptos are, he's plugged in with Elon Musk, and he's kind of like, he's the sort of, in some ways, he's the sort of less visible power behind the throne.
Nick Lincoln:Do you listen to people? Yes, yeah, yeah,
Alan Smith:yeah. I, I've i. What I've watched that woman, the LEX Fridman Andreessen. My god, he's He talks so quickly, and yet the podcast is still about three and a half hours
Nick Lincoln:long talk. So slowly.
Andy Hart:Yeah, that's exactly right. One at 2x speed and one at 05, at 1.5 you're buggered. This one normal. This one's like, yeah,
Alan Smith:it's, it's good.
Nick Lincoln:All right, okay, all right. Are we there? Super Are we there? Barney, thanks very much, my friend, for coming on the
Unknown:show. Thank you guys. Thank you, Barney, that was brilliant escape artist
Nick Lincoln:got me. There you go, dear TRAPPIST, Episode 64 comes to a close, and another part of trap slides down the U bend of Father Time. Thank you for your precious time. Do leave a review. Barney, leave a review. Okay, six out of five stars on iTunes is mandatory, but until the next time, dear TRAPPIST, take care out there and we will see you on the other side. Goodbye. Bye,
Unknown:bye.
Nick Lincoln:Music's not starting.
Unknown:Come on, absolute shambles. Here we go. You.
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