Tae Kim discusses lessons from ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’—emphasizing slow, steady investment strategies and a frugal mindset for lasting financial growth.
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About Tae Kim
Tae Kim is the founder of Financial Tortoise, a YouTube channel focused on getting rich slowly. Slow and steady is the name of the game and he firmly believes in this mantra. He creates weekly content about personal finance, investing, and building wealth slowly.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Here’s your host, Alex Nottingham. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. We are talking about how to get rich slowly, and our guest is Tae Kim. Tae Kim is a popular YouTuber. He has the YouTube channel and website, Financial Tortoise. It’s great knowledge on…
00:29
all sorts of financial advice, how to save, how to make money safely and do it slowly and effectively. Please welcome Tay. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Alex. Yeah. So I was looking at your bio a little bit, I think was kind of fun just throughout there. You were a military guy? You were in the military? Tell me about that. I was. So I did ROTC when I was in college, undergrad, and they helped me.
00:57
pay for college, but part of the obligation was that I serve X number of years after. So I did six years active duty in the army after college. Okay. And it was just part of this frugality that I know you talk about your videos as well. You got the government to pay for your college. It was free because a lot of things you talk about as well as college education can be pretty expensive and you have all those loans.
01:22
Yeah, I wish I could say I was wiser and as strategic as, you know, you might make it sound to be, but it was just kind of dumb luck at the time. I wanted to join the military. I wanted to serve. And then it just happened that they had a program where they paid for college and you also got a commission into the military. So yeah, it just kind of worked out. I mean, for me at the time.
01:50
The biggest drive was really to just serve and to just challenge myself. And I think it was a great experience. I got to meet people. I think one of the great things about the military is that it really exposes you to a wide array of people from all over the country. So that was one of the first times where I met people from states that I never, I was like,
02:18
very naive at the time. I came from California and to meet people from all over the country, meet people from places like Guam and Puerto Rico that I was learning about the history, learning about just different diverse backgrounds and how we can work together. So it was such a great experience, I think, in my formative years.
02:48
uh, knowledge from there, but it was more of just character building that helped me later on to get better with my money. And so how did you get from there to now Financial Tortoise, a really great YouTube channel, uh, pretty well known and you’re a writer, blogger, speaker. So what got you into this? How did you end up teaching and coaching on finances?
03:17
So after the military, in order to transition to the civilian world, I went to business school to get my MBA. And when I went back to school, I wasn’t so smart about how I financed it. So I took on close to $100,000 in student debt. And that was a time when I also met my wife and we got married. And we looked at our balance sheet right after we got married. We had a pretty expensive, a traveling and wedding that wasn’t very smart financially.
03:47
And combined, she was just graduating from nursing school and combined, we had $105,000 to student debt. And I think that was a kind of a wake up moment for both of us. Up to that point, I think we didn’t have a lot of debt. We didn’t make a lot of money, but we didn’t have a lot of debt. So we didn’t really feel the gravity of bad financial decisions. But then that was one of the first times where we looked at our balance sheet and we…
04:14
we were like, wow, we are razor thin on edge. If one thing went wrong, if one of us lost our jobs, or if we had a catastrophic event, it could literally tip us over into a very bad place. So this is when I got a lot more interested in personal finance, because I realized I had to get my financial household in order. And then I got introduced to Dave Ramsey, went to his conference.
04:43
took his course, financial peace university, read his book, and then we went, you know, uses his term gazelle intense and paying down our debt. So we paid off our student debt and hundred and five thousand dollars student debt in about three and a half years. And then I think those years, it was hard, but it was we kind of look at it as a blessing in disguise because it really forced us to build these financial habits that we didn’t have before.
05:10
such as budgeting and living below our means, and then asking really hard questions as regards to the difference between wants and needs. So I think those things really help to pay off our student debt. And then once we pay it off, I think it just kind of cascaded into wanting to get better with our money and learning to wanting to get better with our investing. And I think those interests just kind of built up to a point where now I have this YouTube channel where I talk about
05:40
personal finance and my personal experience on YouTube. And so our topic about getting rich slowly, I looked at one of your emails in preparation for our call today, and you talked about the tortoise and the hare. And well, actually tell us a story because I say it often to my dental crowd and I could talk about where I reference it and what…
06:08
I use that story as, and then we’ll talk about how you use stories. So tell me, what is the story of the tortoise and the hare? What happened here? Oh, I don’t know. Who won? Yes, yes. Guess who won? So, a tortoise and the hare is a pretty classic story. We tell our kids when they’re trying to rush something or when they see somebody that is… I tell this to my son all the time. He plays club soccer and he tells me, this kid is bigger than me. He’s faster than me.
06:38
And now I have to constantly remind him about the story. So the base of the story is that, um, tortoise and the hare, uh, they have this race, but the hare, uh, is fast naturally, just, you know, genetically he’s faster and the tortoise is super slow. Um, just that’s the way it’s built. But then they approached the race in two very different way. The tortoise decides that I’m just going to follow a very simple strategy. I’m just going to stay on this road. I’m not going to be distracted. I’m going to stay focused.
07:08
uh, put one foot in front of the other and just keep on going. Uh, I’m not going to get distracted by how fast the hair is going. I’m just going to, I have my strategy. I’m going to keep on going. And the hair, because he is genetically faster, he gets a little cocky and he decides that, you know, Hey, I could take my time. I’m going to go chillax. I’m going to go, you know, hang out with my friends. I’m going to go play some tennis. I could take a nap. And then what happens at the end is that by the time he wakes up,
07:36
And he realizes, Oh my goodness, like, like how’s the race going? He sees that the tortoise who’s been very steady, consistent, uh, taking one step forward at a time is pretty much at the end of the race. And by the time the hare tries to catch up with him, it’s too late. The tortoise wins because he was slow and steady. Um, he didn’t get distracted. Um, and then he just stayed very consistent.
08:02
And that’s kind of the philosophy that my wife and I constantly talk about. That, you know, we don’t see ourselves as being genetically gifted with anything. We’re not any, we’re not smarter than anybody. You have nice hair. You have that going for you. That is definitely, that’s one gift God has bestowed upon me. So I’m very thankful for that.
08:28
Um, but with, you know, like money and career, um, my wife and I, we never really felt like we were, um, any faster or smarter than anybody. But one of the things that we kept telling ourselves is if we have staying power, if we can keep this, stay on this lane and keep on going, um, most people have a hard time doing that, the fundamentals. Um, when it comes to money.
08:53
If you step back and look at the principles of wealth building, it’s very simple. It’s like live below your means, don’t spend more than you make, try to stay out of debt, and then invest the rest into appreciating assets. Very simple principles, but simple, easy to comprehend, but super hard to execute. So that’s where I feel like leaning onto.
09:22
both my wife and I are strengths into, let’s not, we’re not gonna try to, we’re not gonna get swayed into these fancy, get rich quick schemes. There’s no such thing as double my money in a month or a week. When it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true, doesn’t exist. Let’s follow the principles of compounding, let compounding do the heavy lifting.
09:49
Let’s focus on what we have control over. Let’s focus on today, living, you know, spending, saving, you know, $1 and investing that. And then, you know, if we do that for long enough, then wealth will naturally build. Let’s not try to get clever and try to figure out, you know, this a hack that, you know, everyone else is talking about in order to get rich quickly. Yeah. And the story, wow.
10:17
You told it a lot better than me. You’re a really good storyteller. That’s why I enjoy watching your channel and how you explained it. My example is, okay, you have these two, this one won, that was it. You know, very straight to the point. It’s, and by the way, on YouTube, they did a, they showed a real tortoise and hare race. And some, you saw this tortoise, the hare getting distracted by wanting to look at this person or this situation, the tortoise has kept going straight. What I use the example is I look at
10:47
the with our dentists or actually going back when I was in in college, I ended up graduating summa cum laude straight A’s, but it wasn’t that I was so smart. I think I studied little by little. I never crammed. I was a study skills specialist. And also what I teach our dentists with our online training program, as I say, just doing 20 minutes a week, you can get a lot of results versus trying to cram one only one seminar is all you do all year.
11:15
versus a little bit of training. I’m not against seminars, but if that’s our only training, it’s the same thing as why dentists say brush your teeth little by little. You can’t just do it once a year. So it’s that little by little that you be amazed on. And this is pervasive in all industries on dieting, on weightlifting, on a sport, on learning a language, little by little, our brains work better that way.
11:43
when it’s just that little by little, as you talk about compound interest. Now, there were some values you talked about in your article about comparing the high speed, high stress. I have this philosophy that I say, and I’m sure you agree with, I tell our dentists that, I wish for you to have a boring life. You come into your practice, everybody’s happy, patients are happy, you’re making great money, you have a great work-life balance, there’s no drama.
12:13
There’s no drama. Some people are drawn to the drama. I mean, I talked to this guy a week ago. He goes, you know what? I put all my money in this situation in South America. I’m making 68% return on my money. And I’m like, no, you know, the risk for that. I have a buddy of mine that’s like, oh, buy NVIDIA. And I’m sorry, Tay, I did it. I bought NVIDIA. I dropped $20,000 into it. And this is a very popular stock.
12:42
Uh, and it went up and then it went down and then the guy texted me and said, did you sell it? Was I supposed to sell it? Cause I’m used to buying and holding. Yeah. So I ended up selling it. I lost a hundred bucks, thankfully. And I’m just like, all that drama. I’m going back to what Tay says. Like why do I, because my point for dentists that are listening is the most people, even people that are good at the stuff and stock brokers or whatever, they’re losing money.
13:11
But if you’re in any profession, a lot of the books you talk about, I know dentists, you love books. Taye, he goes into every major money book on his YouTube channel. And the, so anyway, so this is some of the things that, so what I’m saying is with dentists in any profession, focus on what you make money in, focus on your profession and leave
13:40
and then make your investing boring essentially, right? Because it’s not only the money, but you get distracted. My father was a dentist. He still practices, he’s retired, but he would get so distracted from the stock market and what was going on that he wasn’t able to sometimes focus at work. You know, it was a distraction. So tell me, so does that kind of fit with what you’re talking about for individuals is enjoy your life, focus on what you do or tell me about that.
14:09
Oh yeah, totally. I mean, I talk about, I mean, the whole concept of boring, slow is boring, right? I mean, it’s synonymous with like the tortoise. I mean, the way he ran the race, even if you watch him, like it’s not a race that you want to sit there and watch, you know, just him, you know, slowly just kind of like, there’s no sensation. There’s no like suspense. There’s no like, oh, is he going to win? You know? Um, but so I think, uh, what do you call it? You know, I guess.
14:39
We all do need excitement in our life, but then don’t look for that excitement in investing or with your money. Um, I talk about this in our chat and my channel too. It’s like you’re investing so you can live the life that you want. You’re not living to invest. Invest. I mean, that is, I mean, there are people who might disagree, but I, you know, like I would rather spend my time, you know, like watching my son’s soccer game, then looking at.
15:07
my stock portfolio. My whole philosophy is you want to maximize the opportunity for your money to grow, but at the same time, at a certain point, there’s a diminishing point of return. Then I think from an investing perspective, if you could follow a simple two-fund, three-fund, low-cost, broad market index from portfolio, that will work for most people.
15:35
that statistically there’s a higher probability of growth. You understand what you’re investing in. And that’s the other thing too, is that in the investing world, there’s just so much complexity that’s built in. And then people have this… You watch any movies and they make it seem like, oh, they’re making these numbers move and like…
16:02
You have to understand the charts, you have to understand all these different P-E ratios in order to make money. And yes, for a certain subset, if you’re deep in that industry, that might be necessary. But for the rest of us, if you want the best chance for growing your money, but you don’t want the suspense, and really, you don’t really need that suspense, a simple broad market index fund will work for you. But it’s not appealing.
16:32
I think what’s most fascinating for me is that, like after having read a lot of personal finance books and digesting a lot of information, it was still hard for me to just kind of accept the concept that, oh, the answer is so simple. Like it just almost feels like, I feel like I’m missing something. I feel like it’s not like, is this, this is it? Like, really? Then like, why is there so much other like,
17:01
um, information out there regarding how to beat the market, how to, how to make money quickly. And the truth is that they’re not there really to make, help me, me make money. It’s how it’s helped that person make money. Um, so yeah, I mean, uh, I don’t know if I answered a question, but no, no, you absolutely did. Yeah. Well, often they’re drawing the article or the video. They want attention by this stock.
17:29
Like I see some of your compadres on there. Oh, this is the best stock. This is the best fun. And you got to get this and you got to, it’s a common fear of missing out FOMO. I mean, I got a buddy of mine that he, again, NVIDIA, I mean, he made $5 million on it. And I’m just like, wow. And that stock, if you look what it did, if you just got it off, I just, and it can drive you nuts. And I think there’s a lot of that going on.
17:58
is I don’t want to be left out. Now, going back to the wisdom is you’re right. I’ve also looked at so many instruments in terms of stock methods. We talked about dividend stock investments, buying individual stocks, as well as looking at these complicated whole life policies. And I’ve coached clients years back when I worked for Tony Robbins on these whole life money policies. And sometimes, what was it that…
18:27
The Warren Buffett said, if you don’t understand it, don’t invest in it. Right. And so, or even I kind of understood it, but I’m like, there’s so much complexity here, but then if you look at other situations, dieting, exercise, healthy living, whatever it might be, it’s always slow and steady, it’s always boring. I don’t care how you cut it. No pun intended. You have to cut your calories if you want to lose weight.
18:54
It’s pretty simple. It’s calorie deficit. There’s no way around it. You can take a drug. What is a drug doing? It’s not making you hungry. That’s why, you know? And so we’re always, you know, looking for that trick or that shortcut. It’s just baked into, I think it’s just human psychology, the law of the herd, things like that, that, you know, there’s the people that are making it. And also dentists would be very careful.
19:20
careful and lawyers and so on, high level performers that keeping up with the Joneses, I have to have this and therefore I have to, an 8% S&P 500 return is not enough. I need 20% of my money or something like that, or this stockbroker does this. So yeah, that is very difficult. I think you’re fighting, the issue is you’re fighting human nature is what’s happening. Yeah. Where, where appeal to that.
19:50
person that they know the new secret, the new, that’s what we have probably what, a thousand religions out here. Some other profit figure out something else. Well, they have the answer. I got to put it in them type situation, but you look at like the millionaire next door and others, the millionaires are the, are the police officers and teachers. They just, they have their pensions. They put money away, they retire early and they’re millionaires. It was slow, slow and steady.
20:16
You have your famous VTSAX, which I could never pronounce until I heard you say it 100 times, as probably your favorite type of stock. It’s a mutual fund that has, that’s the total stock market that has all of the stocks in it. And I think what you said before is you said, wait a second, you said, well, you’re paying, this is your big thing. You’re paying a broker 1% of your money to diversify.
20:45
You can buy one stock that miraculously, miraculously, it’s buying thousands of stocks for you and getting rid of the bad ones automatically and keeping the good ones in for you. It’s doing all the work for you at pennies. Yeah. And if you just got to think about, about that, it’s, it’s boring. But then again, maybe you can draw a picture of what VTSAX looks like, and you can say, Hey buddy, thank you for doing that work for me.
21:12
And so something just as simple as that is slow and steady, right? You’re making, what is the performance over, well, not even that. Well, yes, talk about expense ratio, what that is, and also what the annual returns are and how it’s compared to if you’re paying somebody. Yeah. So, the historical return, I think is kind of a high level, a good indicator. So.
21:42
the total market or the S&P 500 in general, the last when you look at it, the longer you stretch it, it goes maybe like 8% or so annually. So the return on this fund specifically, I would say is probably like, yeah, between eight to 10% in the last like 30 years or so. But I think what’s good to understand is the, when I also talk about like,
22:13
simplicity and slow and steady. I think it’s important, you know, you were alluding to earlier, it’s important that we understand what we’re putting our money into. And I think that’s the challenge with a lot of other actively managed mutual funds or even individual companies. I feel like we might glean certain information about a company from the 10K or from what we see on the media.
22:40
But the thing is, we don’t know all the inner workings. And there are people whose full-time job is to watch this specific company. They talk to the management on a regular basis. They’re looking at their new product offering. They’re looking at their five-year strategy. They’re looking at their cash positions, all of these things, how they’re reinvesting, and they’re trying to say, okay, like this company, I believe the stocks are, you know, their forecast is projecting this, but even then they don’t get it right. So.
23:10
There’s a lot that we don’t know and we don’t understand. And when you’re investing in a broad market index fund, you’re kind of taking this like 10,000 feet kind of view or taking a huge step back and saying, okay, I don’t understand all these individual companies, but historical trends have shown that the American economy, American companies as a whole, they are producing value for the customers. We’re not gonna know what the next Tesla is going to be.
23:39
Because we all look at Tesla and we’re like, yeah, I know that company was going to do well. But there’s 100 other companies that try to be Tesla that we never even hear about. And they failed. So the key is not trying to pick the Tesla, but believe in that all these companies that are competing against each other, there’s going to be a few that’s going to rise to the top. And I want to participate in the value that they’re creating, the growth that they’re creating. And then the best way to do it…
24:09
is by, you know, Jack, Jack Bogle talks about this all the time, right? Don’t try to pick the need to find the needle in the haystack, just by the whole haystack. And then, so you’re buying the whole haystack by buying a fund like VTSAX instead of trying to pick individual companies. You’re saying I’m just going to buy all of them. And then you were kind of alluding into earlier the recycling of these funds. That’s another huge benefit is that the fund is automatically recycling out.
24:39
companies that go bankrupt. And then it’s also whenever a company goes public, those are added automatically into the fund. So you don’t have to do anything. The recycling is automatically done by itself. And another nice part about this fund is that the expense ratios, the expense that these funds charge are super low, because there is no fund manager or financial advisor or investment advisor.
25:09
that is studying all these companies and trying to pick the winning stocks, trying to design this perfect mutual fund. All it does is very simple. It says, hey, if a new company goes IPO, add them on. And then if a company goes bankrupt, it goes off. And that’s all done via a formula. And based on the percentage of market share, so that bigger companies take more market share of that fund. And it’s really almost at the market. So this…
25:37
VTSAX, which is Vanguard, and you can get the same type of fund in Schwab and Fidelity and others. It’s a total stock market, or you can get the S&P 500, which they’re almost the same in terms of a money market and I’m going to mark it mutual fund. It’s basically this total stock market is policing itself. Supply and demand and competition is policing itself. So basically, what you’re saying is we’re buying the market.
26:08
We’re buying the market. And here’s another thing you probably have mentioned one of your videos. It’s almost too big to fail in a sense. Because if you think about it, you’re investing in the US stocks. Granted, many of them are international players, but you’re investing in America, right? So you’re investing in America. Essentially, yeah. And America is not gonna, it doesn’t wanna fail. It’s gonna do whatever it can to survive, and it has. And-
26:37
And, you know, people are like, well, what if something happens? You have bigger problems. If the market fails completely, you have bigger problems than your investment. Right. Total society will not function if the market does not succeed or have some success. And we have a certain baseline inflation that’s going to happen. And you would hope that these are the best companies in the world that they’re going to do a little better than inflation. So you’re not going to be losing money. So it’s almost like
27:07
You’re right. I like how you said you have to understand the workings of it is that you have so much working for you in these companies baked in diversification. The government basically supports it through the economy indirectly. It’s policing itself. It needs to win your whole lot. You know what I’m saying? So it’s going to the issue is though you you just have to you know ignore it went up 20 percent of.
27:34
23% over the last year before that it was down. Now it’s down the last month or so. But you have to ignore all that and just say, I’m gonna bet on, I’ll take my 8% and I’m happy. Right, and the percentage returns, I know you were alluding to it earlier regarding what the return was. So there are historical trend. However, I think we can also, we have to be careful not to fixate so much upon past performance.
28:02
Because I think this is where a lot of people go to Morningstar and they start looking at these funds and they’re like, oh, this one’s got 12%. Oh, this one’s got 15% last 10 years. But I think the key is to understand, you know, as you’re talking about the whole American economy, what is this fund trying to do? And this strategy of ETSAX is it was the same when it started, and it’s always going to be the same. With the mutual fund where someone is individually picking stocks and pulling it out.
28:30
The strategy is going to change based upon who’s managing that fund. Right. And you never know what it’s going to be. So then last 10 years, it returned 15%. Who knows what the next 10 years is going to be? What is the strategy? I don’t know. It depends on who the, what, you know, which flavor of the ice cream, you know, like he wants to eat this week. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think that’s like, I mean, you, you, you clarified it, but it’s like saying, okay, American economy, American companies as a whole.
28:56
through the competition, there’s going to be value created. There’s going to be growth created. And if something happens and all of these companies lose value, we’re not gonna be debating, oh, I should have picked that mutual fund. I should have had, you know. Think about what stock, if the total stock market goes down to like 10%, what stock is safe? What mutual fund is safe? You really…
29:23
maybe you hope you invest in China, but here’s the problem. We’re all interdependent. If the total stock market goes down, the international markets go down, they’re all linked. And they have to do better than inflation, but they will because they’re better companies than an average company and they’re designed to grow. And so my point is, is as we talk about from a macro economic perspective, dentists, I hope you’re following us here, but just the point is, is this type of security
29:52
is designed to win. It must win. Now, certain years will go up and down. So that’s where the timing don’t do it. But if you like, I like what you said, if you understand it better, then you see what you’re looking to do. And you can just buy it and ignore it. And then when you look to sell later, what you told me in a prior interview is that if you’re looking to then take that money, take it on a good year, but have a certain percentage of cash or whatever.
30:22
available liquid to be prepared because it could have a five-year cycle. So you may need, when you’re in retirement, a certain amount out to be able to handle because you don’t want to necessarily sell when it goes down. However, you have also had it double multiple times by the time you do that. Let me ask you one last question. Tell me about being cheap versus frugal, because part of it is, okay, we talked about investing
30:52
We talked about cutting costs and being mindful. And you also talk about it’s important frugality. It’s not just how much you make, but how much you spend. What are some tactics? How do you balance between, because like for example, it’s important to invest in people that can support your team or your profession. So you don’t want to step over dollars to get pennies. So what would be your thought of cheapness versus frugality?
31:22
Yeah, for me, I think it really comes down to value. So I think frugality gets a bad rep because people automatically associated with this, this image of just kind of cutting back on everything. I’m not spending money. However, frugality is really just being smart about your money. You have a limited resource. So how are you going to deploy this resource? So you get the maximum value.
31:52
And I think from a personal stance, it could be personal spending. It could be what are spending that gives me the maximum joy versus things that, you know, I don’t really care. Um, uh, what the, the quality of, you know, my spending is in this area. So for example, like my wife and I, we talk about this often, like, um, she is into clothes.
32:21
So then we talk about how, okay, like, then you wanna spend extra, like Rumi Sethi, the author of, Our Teacher Should Be Rich, he has this quote, like, spend extravagantly on the things that you love and cut back mercilessly on the things that you don’t. So that I think is another element of frugality is, okay, if you wanna spend extravagantly on the clothes you want, what are the things that we don’t care about, that we cut back on? And for us, we’re like,
32:47
You know, we don’t, we could care less what car we drive as long as it takes from point A to B and it’s safe. Like what brand it is doesn’t matter. Um, we could care less what our, uh, like our, uh, furniture looks like. We still have like a lot of the furniture from, you know, Ikea that we got like 12 years ago when we got married or like the table works, the table works. Like I’d rather keep this for the next 30 years and spend as much as money, as much money as possible on things that I love.
33:17
uh, um, uh, then, you know, try to spend an all. So yeah, I mean, I think that’s what it is. So like cheap isn’t like, you know, just cut back on like cheap, I think is cutting back on everything. Just like, don’t, you know, this like don’t spend money. It doesn’t matter. The joy factor really doesn’t matter. I say that’s a good answer. Yeah. Versus frugality, I think is about recognizing value and saying, okay, like
33:45
What’s the maximum value I’m going to get? And then I think it works, you know, when you’re alluding to, um, you know, what the dental practice and businesses is about, like what dollar is going to get me the best maximum return in value, what investment is going to get, you know, so then like, it’s, and then that requires a bit of thinking and just kind of being strategic about it, like I’m going to cut back on, you know, I’m not going to spend money on this stuff, but then I’m okay.
34:12
investing in this because I feel like this is going to get maximum return in, you know, investments. I see what you’re saying. So some people could, could, and this is just clarifying your values because you could just be cheap to be cheap, you know, just to cut, you just get into that mood or I’m going to see what’s important to me. Like Rameet says, and I’m going to cut everything else out that doesn’t provide joy or value to me, or it doesn’t help me in the short or long term. It’s, it’s just, you know, or I’m valuing
34:41
I joke a little bit. My wife likes to collect close. We can get them to chat with each other. And she said to me, well, I’m a collector. And I go, oh, OK. That makes sense. Anyways, we won’t go there. So lastly, one other thing though for clarity. When it comes to many of these mutual funds, like the total stock market or S&P 500, they have a very low expense ratio.
35:11
Whereas if you are paying a actively managed fund or a broker, it’s going to be what? One plus percent, no matter what the economy does. If it goes up or it goes down, you’re paying 1%. So you have a million dollars with this investor, you’re paying $10,000 a year. Contrast that with one of these low mutual funds, what are they at? They’re 0.005 or something?
35:39
So like a VTSAX, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund has a 0.04% expense ratio. So in that million dollar example, it would be $400 versus $10,000. So 1% versus 0.04%. Now we can go back to this idea of cheap versus frugality in value.
36:04
am I getting $10,000 in value from my actively managed fund? What am I making? Now, if they’re making you 20% or 15% every year, and it’s pretty consistent, okay, maybe they’re onto something. But if they’re keeping you about the eight or 10% more, if you’re making 10% or 9% or whatever, take out 1%, you’re paying for that.
36:32
But typically, as you mentioned a lot, often actively managed underperform these total stock market S&P. And it’s also simple because you don’t also have to have those conversations. You don’t have to be looking at it and stressing about it and worrying about it. You’re buying one or two funds. You might change the ratios. You let them go. And again, you’re betting in the US economy that it is too big to fail.
37:02
And I think it is, it’s gotta be, it has to be. So tell me about you. So you are also a coach. And one of the things that I’ve certainly heard from you and others is it’s better to invest in coaches or financial advisors that you pay on an hourly basis that give you advice and support versus having to spend the percentage. Because a couple hours with you is a lot less than $10,000.
37:31
for an actively managed fund. So tell me about you, a couple of things. One, how can people learn more about you and Financial Tortoise? And for those that like to get some financial advice, tell us about your coaching. Yeah, so I have a YouTube channel, Financial Tortoise. So if you want to consume my content, you can go there. I also have a website where I, you can sign up for my newsletter. So that’s a way to stay in touch with me.
37:59
I send out a weekly newsletter. But I also provide a money coaching service. So it’s not financial, that’s not official financial advice, but it’s a money coaching service where if you want to sit down with, I think it’s more, it’s really beneficial if you just want to get some unbiased feedback on your money situation, whether that could be portfolio or your budget or your spending plan.
38:28
Um, I mean, I, and you know, I am just a regular guy who made a lot of money mistakes in his life, and I learned tons through those money mistakes. And one of the big motivation for starting the channel was wanting to, um, pass on that information so that people can avoid making those same mistakes that I have done. So if you want to talk to someone that can provide unbiased feedback,
38:58
that’s not attached to the financial industry. You can learn more about my coaching service on my website, financialtortist.com, and then connect with me that way. You’re so humble. It’s just listening to you and how you describe yourself. You’re very talented at what you do, and with that, with humility, it’s very endearing. So Tay, thank you so much for being on our show again, and thank you everybody that’s listening. And of course,
39:27
course, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, get your episodes as they are released, share with your friends and until next time, go out there and be an All Star.
