Cut The Tie | Own Your Success

“I’m Not Smart Enough to Create the Investments, But I Know Where the Money Is” — Henry Yoshida on Playing the Right Side of Money

• Thomas Helfrich

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Cut The Tie Podcast with Henry Yoshida

Most executives spend decades earning, saving, and investing money without ever truly understanding where their capital sits or how much control they actually have over it.

In this episode of Cut The Tie, Thomas Helfrich sits down with Henry Yoshida, CEO and co-founder of Rocket Dollar, to unpack the mindset shift that separates passive investing from intentional ownership. Henry shares his journey from corporate finance at Merrill Lynch to building financial technology companies that help people unlock alternative investments inside retirement accounts.

This conversation explores why access often matters more than invention, how comfort can quietly limit opportunity, and why knowing where the money is can change how executives think about risk, freedom, and long-term success.

About Henry Yoshida

Henry Yoshida is the CEO and co-founder of Rocket Dollar, a financial technology company that enables individuals to invest retirement funds into private and alternative assets. With a career rooted in financial services and retirement planning, Henry has built multiple companies focused on giving people more control over capital they already own.

His work centers on access, education, and empowering individuals to make informed decisions outside traditional Wall Street structures.

In this episode, Thomas and Henry discuss:

  • Henry’s transition from corporate finance to entrepreneurship
  • Why understanding capital matters more than creating investments
  • How retirement accounts quietly limit choice and control
  • The role of discomfort in long-term success
  • Alternative investments and personal knowledge as a risk filter
  • Why diversification means more than stocks and bonds
  • Cutting ties with institutional thinking around money
  • Redefining success beyond titles, status, and safety

Key Takeaways

  • Access beats invention
    You don’t need to create investments to benefit from opportunity.
  • Capital already exists
    The question is who controls it and how it’s used.
  • Comfort can limit growth
    Security often delays necessary change.
  • Risk is contextual
    What feels risky to institutions may feel obvious to individuals.
  • Ownership creates clarity
    Control over money leads to better decisions.

Connect with Henry Yoshida

🌐 Website: https://www.rocketdollar.com/
🏢 Parent Company: https://www.retired.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryyoshida/

Connect with Thomas Helfrich

🌐 Website: https://www.cutthetie.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashelfrich
📧 Email: t@instantlyrelevant.com
🚀 Instantly Relevant: https://www.instantlyrelevant.com


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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the Cut the Tie Podcast. Hello, I'm your host, Thomas Alfrick. I'm on a mission to help you cut the tie to whatever's holding you back from your success. Now, that success has to be defined by you because you have to own it. Can't be somebody else's. Otherwise, you're chasing someone else's dream. And it's not going to be uh it's not going to be very good when you get there. It's going to be lame. Uh today I'm joined by Henry Yoshida. Uh Henry, how are you today?

SPEAKER_00:

Hi, I'm doing great. Thanks, Thomas.

SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate you coming on. Take a moment to introduce yourself and what it is you do.

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. My name is Henry Yoshida. Uh my background, my entire career, I started corporate like a lot of people on the show, was at Merrill Lynch in financial services. Uh, I broke away, uh, kind of did a baby entrepreneur step in 2010. I basically left Merrill Lynch to do the same business I was doing there, but actually on my own, uh, sold that business. And since then, I've built two financial product companies, all focusing in my area of expertise, which are retirement plans. And I currently am the CEO and co-founder of a company called Rocket Dollar, and we let people own private and alternative investments inside of their IRA. We've done it since 2018, and it's kind of funny because on August 8th, there was an executive order signed to allow private and alternative investments to be held inside of 401k plans, which are kind of the triple down before you get to an IRA. So I like to tell people that I was six and a half years ahead of the game in three presidents.

SPEAKER_01:

That's I mean, that's a uh as somebody who has a 401k that sits there and looks at me. I we look at alternatives like Robs and other things to go, what can we do with this money except the mercy of the market, right? Uh so this I I'm excited to have this conversation because we'll we'll get a ton in maybe to what you're uh doing now. I'll leave people, you know, you can tease it just enough. Uh the topic about uh there are there are choices out there for what you guys do. I and so I like to ask the question of you know, what is your unique uh why should people work with you on your products and and your tech or your offerings?

SPEAKER_00:

Sure. Well, um so uh most of the companies that are in our space, and it sounds like you're a little bit familiar, they were started by people that actually are usually the creators and sellers of these alternative investments. So I like to tell people that you know it wasn't really their primary thing. I mean, my background since the year 2000 was I accidentally fell into the niche of tax advantage retirement plans 401k's IRA. So I come from that background side, not the alternative investment and private fund issuance side. And this Rockefeller is actually my second tech company. My last one was sold to Goldman Sachs. So, you know, I think that our differentiator is that we are a brand, we're online, we have the best tech, and we come from a we come from the perspective of we love these accounts and the platform, and it's up to the individual to decide what they want to invest in. Like in other words, we didn't create the platform because we already have a real estate investment or syndication to sell to people, and that's not really the purest way to start the business.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean it sounds like you uh because you have so much experience in this place, and like like you said, you you didn't back into it because something wasn't working or you weren't selling enough mortgages or something, like where a lot of these individuals or they sold their business and they need some side money until their 401k becomes mature enough to use it uh ironically, uh you're you're from it. So you're solving a known problem that you knew was in the industry and you're being pointed about what it is you're gonna go do for somebody. So it's not like a saying of the old, like this is a problem, this solved it.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. And I mean we specifically say we don't even bring the deals. I mean, you know, although I'm trained as an investment expert, I mean, all the customers actually are the ones that find their own investments. My job is just to facilitate, and and I kind of fell into this business that I created six years ago, um, where basically people pay me to get access to money that they already have.

unknown:

Right.

SPEAKER_01:

We'll dive into that because that that blew me away. My discovery of Robs and some things you could do is we were looking at real estate or franchise or whatever else, and I was like, sure. I can take my money out now and make it a share and pay myself, and if I lose it, I don't owe anything back.

SPEAKER_00:

That's correct.

SPEAKER_01:

There's a way to pay yourself and just pay income tax on it right now. Um uh uh so the uh ADHDers out there who can't just listen have to be looking at something. Where should they give them the one link? We give them two, it's gonna be over. Give them one link, they should go stalk you a bit while we're talking.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, uh the good thing is uh I'm also a big proponent uh of easy domain. So the company uh is rocketdollar.com, so just rocketdollar.com, and you can find everything else about us there. And then uh my parent company, so I'm a part of a parent company, is retired.com, so R-E-T-I-R-E-B and RocketDollar.com. So we're one and the same. And we have a sister company we were talking about offline uh that specializes in just cryptocurrencies and digital assets inside of IRA. So we're the two brands and we both roll up to retired.com.

SPEAKER_01:

That's easy that's super easy. Uh and those were very cheap domains, I'm sure, Rock.

SPEAKER_00:

Um yeah, yeah, I'd cheap. And then the irony of having uh your work email address be Henry at retired.com when that's your work email address uh makes for great conversations at on airplanes. I've noticed. You're right.

SPEAKER_01:

Like, well, do you work or not? I'm like, kinda.

SPEAKER_00:

Kinda, yeah. Um it how do you define success? You know, for me, um I never defined it by money. Um I've talked about this before on plenty of shows, but you know, I didn't grow up with money. Uh my parents immigrated here to the United States uh right before I was born. So I was the first person born in my family in the United States, and they never they didn't come here to go to college. So, you know, you see a lot of Asian Americans and they, you know, their parents or their grandparents now came here to get education and then they end up getting a great job at a great corporation at the right time in the heydays of America. But my parents came here and ended up in the restaurant industry, so that's actually the other side of a lot of I think immigrant uh immigrants who come to the United States, they end up falling for the restaurant and hospitality industry. So I didn't really grow up with much. So to me, the definition of success uh for most of my life was actually ironically enough, being able to have a job where I could wear a tie and go into an office as opposed to like, you know, going into a place and walking to the back where the kitchen is or where the stock room is.

SPEAKER_01:

There life is irony, though. I'll tell you, I uh I've never worn a tie so much as started my own podcast about cutting it. Well, it's a half a tie, so it's uh the other is my my main company is named instantly relevant. The stuff that we do and put in system growth systems for companies, it's not instant. A lot of investment mindset and time, but not anything brand problems. Lots and right. Right. Um so with that definition of success, uh you've you've you've talked about your journey a little bit, but maybe identify in your journey where where uh you've had to cut that metaphoric tie to achieve that success.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, that upbringing, I probably didn't go into it enough, was you know, kind of what shaped my mindset, which is that most people when they get to that sort of uh you know corporate cushy job after doing the normal things, right? Studying hard in high school, getting a good score on the SATs, uh getting a chance to go to college, and then using college as a way to get yourself into uh some sort of career track or company track and so forth. But you know, the way I came up, uh, I guess when I got to that corporate level, I I was okay not being comfortable. In other words, there was no safety net for me growing up. So it didn't really matter for me to take chances or to see flaws or to identify opportunities inside. And I think while a lot of my colleagues, and we all started in a training class, we were all there. I was a uh I was at Big Merrill Lynch Bank of America for 10 years. Uh, I started in 2000, I left in 2010. I tell people that, you know, I survived two recessions, the company only made it through one of them at that time at Merrill Lynch. But, you know, I went into that organization with an open eye to maybe thinking about things that I could do outside of the organization on my own that they didn't care about because they were just too big. It wasn't worth their time or money. And I didn't get so mired into the you know, relying on the bonuses and getting getting too comfortable. And next thing you know, you're 50 years old and and you know, you've been at this place for 20 years to kind of doing the same old, same old. You hate it. And at this point, you're just trying to make it to the finish life.

SPEAKER_01:

Your your life is now wrapped around what you've built with it.

SPEAKER_00:

I mean, it's yeah, it it's it's being okay being uncomfortable, like being okay taking chances because you know there was no safety net for you growing up. So, like, you know, going back to where you started, if you started pretty low, it's not that bad. You've already been there and you know how to come out of it.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, and so so how would you describe the tie though? Is it was it the you did it seems like you've had a really good mindset with it. Was it was there difficulty maybe with family or anything else to be like, hey, you're you're gonna get rid of that corporate job and do what? Like, you know, did you have to deal with because that this a lot of people have to deal with sometimes the hardest things to go make a move to entrepreneurship or something else is the expectations of others on you. Did you have that challenge?

SPEAKER_00:

I did. It didn't prop it didn't come so much from my parents. Uh they just had sort of a maybe a lack of overall understanding of how things worked in in America or corporate America, just based on the backgrounds they told you about them. So they weren't, they were never really the people I leaned on. They were they were my inspirations in terms of just being hard workers and people who just always sacrificed you know themselves for for the ability for my brother and I to go to college, get great educations, get great job tracks, and so forth. But it was actually kind of hard on the home front in my just sort of nuclear family at that time. You know, my spouse was like, hey, it's comfortable if you leave and you go do these things, what if it doesn't work? And um, you know, I was kind of do the mindset, although it worked out much, much better for him of the Jeff Bezos. Was I used to think about it that, well, you know, what if I'm sitting here at 50, 60, 70, and in his case he used 70 and 80 years old um uh to leave and start Amazon, was to say that, you know, I'm gonna look back and say that I just never tried at that point.

SPEAKER_01:

That's right. I know uh I quote the Dave Matthews songs from Lie in our Graves. You know, why would we lie in our Graves? Wondering what we could have been, right? Like you uh and it's by the way, when you when as I have a spouse that also, you know, I was asked to leave the original name of this podcast, which isn't on that YouTube channel, so it's never been promoted. Yeah, I I could have called it asked to leave, to be fair, but um you know, at some point you just become unhireable in that scenario, and and it you you cannot give your spouse in that moment a good answer. Exactly. There's just no answer and there's no reassuring that it's gonna work out fine because you're like I'm because there's a financial commitment to get started.

SPEAKER_00:

So not only are you leaving something that's very steady, you're you're probably also per proposing, right? Like uh uh coming up with the scenario and a proposal standpoint to say, honey, not only am I thinking about leaving and doing this, it's gonna cost me money to get it started. So we're actually gonna go negative. Uh right. So this bit of money is gonna turn off, and then we're gonna tap into savings so I can go net more negative. Uh um, and then the next question naturally, is it gonna work? I have no idea. No idea. Yeah, I don't know. In other words, maybe I should work on my presentation skills, but uh, you know, I'm sure maybe some listener can comment with something better uh from that.

SPEAKER_01:

The thing I try to draw from that, right, is that uh even as successful as you've been, you've had that moment. Every entrepreneur is gonna have that moment of you don't know it's gonna work. You just believe in yourself that you can make something work. And this is the starting point. You know, it's like you're you're a giant vector heading somewhere different, and you're like, I'm gonna figure it out because I can't because I understand this area well enough. But even you who's had great success, listen, people, you like he didn't know either. And probably on your second, third venture, you're like, you're more confident, maybe have more fun, maybe like, I'm not 100% sure the market responds to this.

SPEAKER_00:

There's a lot of stuff. Maybe maybe the second one might be even harder because then there's an expectation that you won't actually fail, but you have the same uncertainty. I mean, that always exists in business. So I would say it's a little bit added pressure. I mean, I I liken this to like uh, you know, we're sitting here now, I'm getting kind of excited, it's preseason football, but I think about it, there's a way to come into the NFL as Tom Brady, you know, like a very low draft pick who exceeded everyone's expectations. And then there's a way to come in like Peyton Manning, you know, the the son of a uh NFL Hall of Famer, number one high school player in the country, number one college player in the country, number one pick in the draft. They both ended up being great, but I I just have this guess that it was harder to become great if you're Peyton Manning. And Tom Brady, no one's looking at you. No one looked, no one looked at him for five years.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's unbelievable what he did. Yeah, it's uh it's a great analogy. Uh if you could uh though go back in your timeline at any point, when would you go back? What would you do differently?

SPEAKER_00:

I think um when I left, uh uh when I left to do my services business, so that was when I left um the financial consulting in the retirement plan space uh to create a registered investment advisory firm. Uh, I think that if I could go back in my timeline to do that, I might have actually done that um uh with a little more analysis in terms of picking, let's say, a business partner. So, you know, I got into a partnership with someone, but it was the person I worked with there. And I think that we had different um, you know, different plans for the future, but we never talked about that. We were talking too much about the present. Um, and he was an individual who grew up, you know, with money. He was gonna, you know, inherit like a pretty decent sized empire. Um, and and a decent sized empire was much more than what I was gonna, what I was gonna get. I was actually staring more in the in the eyes of having to potentially pay for healthcare for my parents while doing this because they worked in the restaurant industry and you don't really have great insurance plans in that industry. So I think if I had it to do differently to be more succinct about it, I might have picked my partners a little bit differently. Like it, and and not that he wasn't uh the right person. It's just that just really understanding that is the mindset correct for the immediately pre-move, immediately launching the business, intermediate term, and maybe even long term, just you know, just see if there's alignment for that long term first.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, well, someone's you know hearing a hundred million dollars, let's say, like their interest in what they're doing, even if it's doing something great, like a couple million years, is gonna go to zero. They're like, I put that to an annuity and I'm gonna make two and a half times that, and I'll be on a yacht. I mean, like, my god, I don't care about this anymore. And you're like, well, I do because that's a lot of money and that's I need that. And if you do that, you screw me. So those are uh beautiful questions that to go back to. Like, you're not a line. Now, it could have been an equity investor. You might be like, hey, he's gonna have money, let's get him in here so when we need more, we get who you gotta ask.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. Yeah, exactly. But this was just a pure business partner and it was different. So when the business started working, yeah, you know, the other person wanted to scale back, take it easy, whereas I wanted to kind of lean into it and try to grow it more, and that ultimately led us into a position uh of just uh an impasse where we had to decide to liquidate that business and sell it essentially.

SPEAKER_01:

That's too bad. I mean, but it it it it it's fair to say at the moment you looked at it, it was happening to you as opposed to for you, but it looks like it happened for you.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. That's right. And then, you know, even the second business, same thing, you know, probably made you know a bad decision in terms of who to partner with, but with Rocket Dollar, it's a little bit different. You know, I made sure at that point that I was sort of the uh the primary person who founded the business. I have co-founders, but I was the primary person who started the business from my equity.

SPEAKER_01:

But I wanted to get to this point of kind of the show where uh you definitely solidified expertise that people don't know you, but tell me why when I hear the words alternative investment, how did that happen where I feel uncomfortable talking to you about it as a financial person? Do you want to talk about that feel of like, oh, this guy's trying to scam me?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, uh, and you know, the the term itself alternative and and wrapped around and used as an adjective to describe an investment's actually changed quite a bit just even in the last 25 years. I mean, when I started at Merrill, an alternative investment might have been actually, it was tangentially a mutual fund that might have invested in companies that were not registered in U.S. stock exchanges. So that was considered kind of alternative back then. And now alternative might be, I don't know, some sort of you know, crypto token or just something that's not publicly registered in the stock markets. But it's just changed. And I think for me, you know, I've always just thought that if everyone is invested in the same, let's say, 500 companies, because that's what the advice has been for decades, then maybe there's an opportunity. Now, personally, I actually do quite a bit of pretty boring investments because my professional life is tied towards these private and alternative investments. So I've been very public about that, and I've been quoting a lot of news articles and financial media uh about my own personal investment strategies. But, you know, it's an opportunity that that people wanted to diversify outside of, let's say, the S P seven, I call it, because really, you, you know, 85% of the returns have been kind of driven by the top seven companies in the SP 500. So it's it's really the S P seven right now and so forth. So it was really looking at it as a business opportunity and embracing the idea that there are people that maybe want to go beyond these stocks and bonds. And um the way that I kind of got into it was I thought I'm actually not smart enough to create the investments, but I'm pretty damn good at knowing where the money is that might potentially go into these investments, and they're held by 90 million Americans in IRAs and 401k accounts.

SPEAKER_01:

That's uh it's like because it's gonna be like it was like this marketing of you should put stuff in 401k, be safe with that money and this. But there was never an option of where do you take the risk, right? Where do I actually take risk? Is it myself? Do I buy a franchise, which is you know, whatever it is, right? And and those are all time-based things and those are hard to do. Uh give me uh if you're allowed to do this, I'm not sure for the record of you, but what are some interesting alternative investments that people don't realize they can do?

SPEAKER_00:

So I think people realize they can do alternative investments. Remember, the key is that they don't realize they can do it in an account where they can defer the taxes for 20, 30 years. But um, so let me answer this two ways. Maybe the weirdest investments that people have. Um, you know, we have people that actually own income-producing assets, but not what you'd typically think. So think like, you know, uh long life, long sustainability, durable, you know, construction equipment. People own those inside their IRAs with us. Uh, we have people who actually own cattle and racehorses. These are income-producing assets um inside of an IRA. Um, but you know, maybe more traditionally, you know, think about the single-family real estate property on the other side of town. Like you know that new airports are gonna be built, you know that the highway's expanding up to this area. So, you know, Thomas, you keep explaining that maybe this is where did people think about taking the risk? Well, if you're someone and you live in Austin, Texas, or Atlanta, Georgia, and you happen to know that a new airport or a new highway interchange is gonna pop out on the other side of town, then if you live in that locality and you have capital in the form of your IRA or 401k, it's not risky to you. You have that sort of personal knowledge, you have that private knowledge. It's risky if we live in Austin and I'm thinking about doing some real estate transaction in Atlanta. I have no idea about that market. But um, you know, what I've tended to find is that the customers I talk to, they feel actually very empowered. They feel like they have a little bit of control over what they're investing in versus this very intangible mega giant corporation or mega giant financial services firm has created a mega giant mutual fund to invest in mega giant corporations of which they never actually even talked to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

There's a thing I came up with with when we were looking at buying a franchise called Rob's RBS. And I'm you'll explain it better, but effectively, you could start a company and fund it with your 401k and it creates shares, C Corp, whatever else, uh, which allows you to have operating capital, which then operates like a company. Yeah, which you could buy lots of things with it. And I'm like, and you could pay yourself a salary to manage it, even, you know, and there's rules and stuff like that. But I I it blew my mind, that was my first opening to this, that well, I can have a whole 401k and I could go buy an investment property with it, so I avoid all the cost of carrying and stuff and flip it and go try to make 10 or 20 percent and just pay my tax or pay myself salary, offset the cost. And there's a whole bunch of ways you can actually collect money from those things differently. Um and and and I I'm to me, it's like if I was you saw you were coming on the show, I was like, that's like the one of a billion things probably I could do. Um So you know, they can pick your platform or others. One thing I've struggled with though, with with that, and why we've kind of pulled back, my wife and I was I'm going from let's say a JP Morgan Chase, known, insured, even though it's you know it's that they're known. Yeah. Less likely to have a made-off situation with that one right now. But I'm going to some pl other platform or some guy that I don't know who might own it. How do I get my head around who's got my money and where?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, so in in our case, uh, if you do look at one of the providers in the space, there's a lot that are just the front-facing side. So they have the platform and they open the accounts for you, but um, they have to outsource the custody of these assets. So in our case, we actually, the third company in our in our branded house at retired.com is actually our own integrated trust company. So we actually custody the assets. We have a state chartered trust. Um, and by law, those trust companies actually have to keep those funds segregated from any of our business investments. So, you know, and in most cases, we actually hold more of the paper title to the investments that are customers owned. So we have upwards of 10,000 to 12,000 different investments within that custody. But the money has actually gone to the issuer or whoever created that particular investment opportunity. So that's where the risk is from the actual money, because the money, actual money, is going to someone who's pulling it together to purchase a real estate development project, right? Not actually held by us. We're holding the paper title to that investment, but you've physically wired your money from your IRA account to some individual for a real estate development project. So that's where the risk is.

SPEAKER_01:

How do you manage that then? Because that's that, you know, like for someone who may have a half million dollars in their account and that that's it. Like, you know, that and maybe their home, right? That's a very common middle class, upper middle class scenario. You got a half million, you got maybe 200,000 in equity, and they're like, well, I got to make that work with Social Security. How do they get the head get their head around that risk?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, you know, I think one of the things, so this is my side of being a um a career financial services person, but uh but none of our customers actually do a large proportion of their overall investable assets with us. So, you know, I think that we sort of end up managing about 10 to 25 percent of the investable assets of the customer base. So at any one point, you know, they they're not putting all of their investable monies at risk. So we actually kind of advocate that they don't do that with us. So uh I know that doesn't answer your question about completely eliminating the wit risk, but it's no different. You wouldn't put all of your retirement savings into one stock, just like you wouldn't put all of your retirement savings into one private investment deal either. If you're gonna leave anything, we may do 15%, but not you know, 100% of it. And we typically at Rocket Ballar, we represent holding roughly about 10 to 25% of someone's overall retirement assets, which doesn't even include anything else they might have in taxable brokerage accounts, you know, equity, other assets, and so forth.

SPEAKER_01:

I mean, that's a good way to mitigate the uh I will tell you one of my favorite answers when I ask people like, hey, would you go back? What would you do? The best answer is crypto. Next question. We just liquidate everything and put in there and just got to make it up the make up here in 2025, it'd be fine.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. I don't know. I might even look at it differently. I mean, you know, you know, NVIDIA at five dollars, Amazon at one dollar. Any one of those. Apple and when I say Amazon at one dollar, I mean this was this was the case in you know 2003.

SPEAKER_01:

How many split since? Oh, you probably know actually the answer to that. Um but Henry, thank you by the way, so much for coming on today. Uh uh just tell somebody about their, you know, who should get a hold of you, how do you want them to do it?

SPEAKER_00:

So if they come to the website at rocketdollar.com, it's not designed to actually sell anyone anything. It's actually designed as an educational site. So we have tons and tons of articles. So I think one of the things that's been our key to success is that our articles and our information and knowledge base is actually what gets indexed online. So as we go from a Google search world to maybe a chat GPT search world, I noticed that ChatGPT actually pulls up a lot of information. It links back to articles embedded within our website or blog posts that we've written or information pages that we've written to teach people about Rob's transactions, self-directed IRAs, investing in private alternative investments using tax-advantaged accounts. And um, you know, I think if you go there directly, you can spend a lot of time just learning stuff. And it's up to you to decide if you actually want to do business with us or with any of our competitors. Uh again, like I said, I think our edge is that, you know, for me, uh it's founder DNA in the company. I come from a traditional financial services background, deep knowledge and expertise and background in the retirement space, a retirement account space, not the investment space. I don't I don't sell any investments. Um, and then couple that with great technology and and we allow you to sort of create and manage the account online.

SPEAKER_01:

Now, before I let you go here, there was a question I should have asked today, and I didn't. Yeah. What was that question? And how do you answer it?

SPEAKER_00:

Let's see. Uh I saw all the questions that you were gonna ask me, right? So things like, let's say the quotes, and I was thinking that did I give a quote that no one's ever given before? Maybe, you know, who knows? Maybe Thomas has a bunch of Asian American people. I'm Japanese by by nature, but um, but this is also if if you were to ask me how do I live my life, it actually ties into the quote that I have, which is that I've gotten to the point we're both almost 50 years old now. I'm 48 years old, and I've just thought about that I don't have time to waste um on things that don't matter to me anymore. So I always go back to the the Bruce Lee continuous learning, continuous adaptation, always like improving yourself, but you know, just absorbing anything that's useful, uh discarding anything that's not useful, and just add what's uniquely yours. And that's usually a combination for success. And it's just really a mindset uh if you ask me, like, how do you live your life now versus how you might have lived it 15 years ago? Well, 15 years ago, I cared a lot about what other people thought and what I showed other people. Present me today, I care a lot less, and I feel like I have 10 times more time and control.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm with you, man. I'm actually I'd rather just move into a condo, no mortgage, and and then be like, hey, do we even need all this stuff? I'd like to go through like what do we really need? Anyway, just like it's the value bucket, right? You're if happiness is a bucket and unhappiness is the holes, and it if you just fill holes, you don't need a lot of drip to keep it away from uh evaporating, right? You've got to keep but just enough above evaporation level to fill it and it'll stay.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Yeah, you you start to learn what what makes you happy and what you value, and uh you know basically your your your habits are basically what would kind of create who you are. Um and they would yeah, and the two most precious things are probably at this point in life and just in general are health and time. And if you're healthy, you'll have more time.

SPEAKER_01:

I think uh actually I'll leave we'll leave on that note, but that actually I think is the most important thing the entire time. Your health and your time, because that determines what you get to go do and when and what you dream about. Yeah, and they're tied to each other. The man with uh uh with his health has a million dreams, the man without has but one. Exactly. I like that, and that's a great way. Thank you. Thank you, Henry, for coming on today. I appreciate it. Thank you, Thomas. And listen, everyone who made it this far uh in the show, thank you for listening. If this was the first time here, I do hope it's the first of many. And if you've been here before, you heard me say this get out there, go cut a tie to whatever's holding you back, own your success, get after it.

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Thomas Helfrich

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