035 - Why You Should Do More Of What You Love (Like How Tim Pursues Investing)

We've talked about knowing yourself so you can align with your investing strategy and spending plan. But if you struggle with determining what type of person you are, that can make things kinda hard when it comes to finances and goal setting. 

It might be easier to start with listing out the things you love. Really put some thought into this exercise. Then spend more time, energy and money on the things you love and start removing or hiring out the things you don't care about. 

Notice how happy you feel when you start living this way. Yup, that's why we revamped out lives so they could be jam packed with awesomeness.  

Our list includes Tim's love for investing, which is why he dropped so many nuggets during this episode.  

• Publications he gets corroborate the picks he's been toting
• Commercial REITs are on the decline
• Interest rates will be lowered sometime this year
• Walmart is doing a 3 to 1 stock split
• Open a Roth IRA before they change the rules
• Housing market & Crypto to pop off this year

And good stocks that are undervalued right now.

• NEE and sister NEP
• MMM
• VZ
• T
• OGN
• PFE
• BMY
• IIPR
• NUE
• IBM 
• ABR
• Even MPW and IEP are turning around

Let us know if you prioritize the things you love and how one way or the other affects your mood.

Drop your comments or questions for this episode on one of our posts.  

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**DISCLAIMER**
Ticker metrics change as markets and companies change, so always do your own research. The content in this podcast is based on personal experience and is for educational purposes, not financial advice. See full disclaimer here.

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Transcript

Welcome to Roaming Returns, a podcast about generating a passive income through investing so that you don't have to wait till retirement to live your passions. And speaking of passions, today's episode is going to be all about pursuing the things that you love, which makes things a lot more obvious and easy. And it just so happens that one of Tim's greatest loves is investing.
And he got on a roll, which hijacked the whole episode. But to be honest, it helps you guys out. So we're going to roll with it.
Hope you enjoy. Hey, guys. So this one's not going to be too serious.
It's like a Valentine's Day one because, you know, love is in the air. I think it's a serious topic. This is something everybody should do with any aspect of their life.
OK. You don't think so? I always have. So I don't know.
You're asking the wrong person. Because in my opinion, if you're wasting time focusing on stuff that you don't really care about, you end up achieving things in areas that don't matter. Yeah, well, like if you looked back at the investor profile one and you'd actually felt like look at the questionnaire.
This is like a continuance of that. That's something that I created. Just typing up an email.
But we ask people this question all the time. And I can't even tell you how many people just give us deer in the headlights. Well, what you should do if you've actually filled out the questionnaire for the insider profile, you should actually then create a list of the things that you love in life.
Like it could be anything. You want to go over your top ten or your easy ten? Mine is Carmela, the van, the cats, dividend stocks, Bobelo or seltzer water, same difference, my bike, basketball and my num nums. So like mine's a pretty simple list, like the things that I really love, like what I should be doing is I should be playing basketball or biking while living in the van with Carmela and the cats.
Like that's what that list kind of, if you looked at it, you'd be like, oh, okay. So Tim's a pretty simple person, so it's really easy for him to basically cultivate a life around everything that he loves and justify spending money in the things he loves. Whereas a lot of other people just, like I got caught up in doing all the things I thought I was supposed to be doing, but then now I'm in a phase of my life where I realized almost everything that I've built and strived towards is stuff I really don't care about and now it's a huge pain in the butt to unravel everything that I spent so much time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, money putting into, which sucks.
So that's why like if you create a list and you have it written down, you can actually like then make goals, I guess, if you're a person that needs to make goals or make an outline or something like that so that you can get from current situation to the map of love that you have. And I think it makes like a spending situation easier to like, people talk about budgeting and I've been thinking about the whole budgeting thing because I don't even like the word budgeting. A lot of people have a negative connotation and it's the same thing when it comes to dieting.
When you focus on taking things out, you tend to self-sabotage because your brain focuses on the things that you have to give up or that you have had taken away. And that study with the monkeys where if you gave a monkey one banana, it was content. But if you gave it two bananas and took a banana away, it was still left with one banana, but it freaked out because something got taken away from it.
It's like having that thing taken away. So when it comes to intentional spending on the things that you really love and care about, then it's a lot easier and relaxing and actually enjoyment focused. Well, I keep going back to if you write it down, you have a plan because then you can, whenever you start socking money away into Worthy and you start putting stuff into Yield Street and you start putting stuff into the dividend stocks or in the portfolio, you can start to then create a map to get to what you have written down.
If you don't write it down, you're kind of just freestyling and some people can do that. But I have found it easier that if I have goals written down, they get embedded in my brain. And then when I'm investing in Hercules and Main Street Capital, and I see that I'm getting these good dividends, like Main Street's every month, so I'm getting dividends every month from them.
So I can then budget money towards that list that I have written down and also in my head. So I find it easier to actually do it that way. It hits the point home.
Yeah. Writing things down is definitely helpful. Oh, and a quick sidebar, I was researching Valentine's Day earlier.
Oh, this is hilarious. Valentine's Day is just for giggles, just for poos and giggles, right? And Valentine's Day is actually the remnants of a pagan festival that lasted from the 13th to the 15th, where the dudes would like whip the women. They just beat the women with like leaves and stuff.
And then that was like supposed to make them fertile, like a whip by the leaves. And then like the ones that weren't like attached, they actually put their names in like a cauldron or a vat or something like that. And they would draw the names and like the boys and the girls would get together and they'd have a, you know, a bump chicka womp womp night.
What happened after that, I don't know, like a century or two after that. Did you say pagan? You said pagan, right? It was a pagan thing. So the Christian, then an emperor put to death two men named Valentine on February 14th, I think a couple of years apart.
So they became known as Valentine's Day because Valentine's were put to death and the Catholic Church actually is saying to them. So then the Catholic Church took over the pagan holiday or the pagan, I forget. Celebration festival.
It was based on the moon. You know how all the pagan stuff was. So the Catholic Church then took that over and Valentine's Day is actually a remnants of a pagan holiday and the Catholic Church taking over after two men named Valentine were killed.
It's quite hilarious. I think it's really funny because I'm one of those chicks that doesn't really care about it at all. So we just sit back and watch all the materialism.
So it's interesting. Consumption go down. And then when Tim found that, I was like, well, that's really, really fascinating.
It's like Christmas. Christmas is a pagan holiday. I think Halloween's a pagan holiday.
Like the pagans had everything based on the moon and the calendar, like the moon calendar. And then the churches all took it over and made it. Well, we could sidebar this into if you were celebrating a holiday and you don't know why it kind of goes in line with the whole thing.
If you're spending money on something and you don't know why you're spending money on it, it's not really bringing you joy. It's just going through the motions. So basically Valentine's Day is a fertility dance.
A fertility dance with leaf whipping. With whipping and abuse. Yeah.
And somehow that. And somehow that kind of turns into like giving women chocolate flowers and feet dining. Yeah, cards.
That's hilarious. Flowers and chocolates. But yeah.
So that's my sidebar. I thought that was interesting. But like going back to what we were actually talking about, like one of the first, whenever people actually come to me for help, the first thing that I always ask them after I say your money should always be making money for you, which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned previously in this, is if money is not an option, what would you be doing? You mean an obstacle? Okay.
Obstacle. Whatever. If money wasn't a problem, what would you be doing with your life? That right.
If you can actually sit down and actually think about that and then come up with an answer, that is probably what you should be pursuing. And if you have absolutely no idea, you really should sit down and figure out. What you love.
What you love. I think actually putting it in through the lens of what you love is an easier way of self-discovery than actually trying to do your own self-discovery. Because I think that forces you to introspect on yourself.
Whereas if you just focus on what you love, I think we have a lot better idea of the things we care about as opposed to it from that perspective. So I thought that was really interesting because I was thinking about what I care about. And I like, Tim, obviously, el gatos, these big fat fuzzy things and crafting projects like artisan things.
I love reading and researching and it's like if I don't have these things around my life, I get fidgety antsy. I get very irritable if I don't read enough. You get pissy.
I get very pissy actually if I don't have enough time to actually engage in my little dilettante plethora projects. Luckily for you guys, one of the things I actually love is like compounding money. Yeah.
So I think that was funny that Tim actually put investing in dividend investing. And it's funny because like one of mine is reading and researching and like most people don't like to read. Most people don't like to research and I freaking love it.
And I just subscribed to another publication this week just to see if you are an avid follower of the email and the podcast. It was a publication. It was $74.99 or something like that for the year.
I subscribed to it and there are 10 retirement stocks. I've mentioned eight of them and we hold seven of them. So like you're actually getting quality recommendations on this and in the emails if you- How long has that publication been out? Years.
Since like 2001. Yeah. Okay.
I get an email from them probably twice a week and one of the ones they're pimping right now is NEP. Like if you've been around, you know that I said NEP back in October. But we did just bring that up in the utilities episode and what did you say? You just found out that it's the largest- NEE is the largest electrical plant in the world.
So the sister company is the largest electrical plant in the world. That's pretty awesome. So I got one for NEP and I got one for NEE.
I got one, another email for MMM, Verizon, like all the ones that we've literally been discussing I'm getting emails for now. So that means we were well ahead of the institutional investors if you've listened and took some recommendations and put money into each of the things that we recommended. And we're not sure if that's because they have higher qualifications where they have to be more confident before they express it to the public.
They can't put down you should buy this until they're 100% certain that if more people buy it then it'll help their numbers because they do that thing where like they have a 96% winning rate and stuff like that. That's how they get their things. And you just operate on- Feel man.
Intuition. No, like I put everything that I've recommended, I've put through like the price to earnings versus the peers, the revenue, I look at the debt and make sure that that's coming down. They go through a pretty extensive metric analysis before I even like look at the dividend and the yield and all that fun stuff.
So every time I get an idea or I get an email that says, oh, I didn't think of that, I'll actually like, I found that I got one about a gold company that pays like 6% dividends. I have to look into that one. But one that I just got that I have to like look at more before I can recommend it is FLNG.
It's a liquid gas transporter or something like that. Like propane? Liquid gas? Natural gas. Natural gas.
Okay. It's a natural gas and it has like an 8% yield. So I have to look at it and make sure it's okay.
Did it really say propane when you said liquid? I don't know why my brain went there. We actually got the propane one in your mom's portfolio, SPH. That's like a, it's been raising its dividend for about 20 years and it's pretty good.
It only trades at like $20 a share. Oh, what was the other one that you said you just talked about that had 51 consecutive quarters of increases? That's NEP. Oh, it was NEP? Yeah, that's pretty crazy too.
You didn't realize it was actually that many quarters consecutively. So the email I got had extra information. NEP was a part of NEE and the NEE just said, okay, you have too much debt or something like that.
So they spun NEP off into its own business. And that was in, I want to say 2008 or 2011, something like that. It was, it was a good while ago.
But every quarter since NEP has been its own standalone business. It's raised its dividend and it just raised its dividend for this upcoming quarter. I think next week or the week after to 88 cents a share.
That's a really good stock, y'all. And I got another email from another publication, the Contrarian one saying it's at 12% dividend. It's a steal because it's undervalued by like 40%.
I was going to ask, is it still undervalued? Because I think during the utilities episode, we were talking about how it's not as undervalued as it was when we first started talking about it. But it's still undervalued. But it's still undervalued versus the PE versus peers.
Yeah. So like that's, that's a really good. 40% though? Yep.
Dang. All utilities are about 15 to 25% undervalued right now because they all got slammed. You should probably bring up to that whole commercial properties.
What were you saying? You said something about commercial properties. Commercial property rates are like getting slammed because commercial properties are having a very difficult time paying back their rents and everything. So if you have any commercial REITs, you should probably sell them or be prepared to take quite a significant loss for the upcoming probably two or three years.
For whatever reason, they're actually not cooperating like the other REITs are. I think it makes sense because a lot of people are teleworking. They're shutting down more commercial businesses unless it's industrial storage.
Yeah. So it's an interesting thing. Climate? Well, yeah, but like what I was trying to say and I didn't know how to actually say it is we know the interest rates are going down this year, we just don't know when they're going down.
Exactly. And we know that some of our holdings are going to react quite positively when the interest rates finally come down. So we're actually accumulating like a couple shares here and there with like our Tesla yield max and things like that.
So we'll buy a couple shares and then we're reinvesting our dividends every time we get a dividend from these REITs and BDCs that are just getting hammered because of interest rates. And when the interest rates go down, these things are going to skyrocket. And then we're going to have a whole other conundrum of when do we sell? Because what's going to happen? They're going to shoot up that much.
That's a good problem to have though. Yeah. Like I was just contemplating this week, what am I going to do with Hercules Capital? Because it's up 40% in the last three years, or since we got it, I think two years, 40% in two years.
So like we're sitting, it's now over 6% of the portfolio and I don't like to have more than 5%. So I'm like, do I take the profits or do I let it run? Because it's such a good company and it's well ran and it's undervalued still according to the metrics. Yeah.
And I brought it up that if we do think it is going to be a bull run for the year, that it probably makes sense to leave it run, even though it is above our normal 6% holding threshold or maybe sell less than you would. So if you listened to that one and you got that one, you're up quite a bit in that one too. And if you listened and got into JEPQ and we mentioned that a little while ago, you're up like, if you listened and got into some of these things after doing your research, you're up quite well in the technology ones and the BDC ones and some of the REIT ones, you're up pretty good in.
You can tell you love this. I do. I love it.
I know. You can tell you love it. It's patterns.
It's math. I don't like the investments that everybody invests in. I like finding like SPH.
I don't know very many people that know about SPH. It's literally a propane company that's awesome, that's been raising this dividend, it has a really good balance sheet. It only trades for $20 a share.
It's undervalued by about 25% and we got into that a couple of months back. Is that a small cap? It's a mid cap. Mid cap? Are most of the ones that are the outliers like you talk about, are they more not large cap? Or does it just depend? It depends.
It's like there's not one way or the other. I was just curious about that because I know you tend to- No, I know a small cap that nobody knows about that I mentioned. I'm pretty sure I mentioned a while back that it will be really good in the bull market is KRP.
KRP. I do remember you saying something about KRP. It's a small cap oil one.
I think we talked about that in the utilities episode. Was it two episodes ago? I've talked about it a couple of times now. Yeah.
Pretty sure it's in there. It yields about 12% and it's a small cap. The advantage that you have getting into small caps is it doesn't have the ebb and flow that the ones were like the large institutional investors get into because when a publication comes out and says, oh my God, this company is garbage, sell it.
They tell all their 100,000 and the 200,000 subscribers to sell it, chaos breaks loose. But they don't ... Majority of the time, publications don't get into small caps because they know if they said buy it, it would drive the price from like 20 to 40 and it wouldn't be a buy at that point. And the same things happens with the hedge funds and stuff.
They can't buy. I don't think I ever actually clarified that before why I look at small caps before anything and that's because as an individual investor and I guess we have what, six or seven fans that listen pretty consistently. So we have eight people together.
Eight people is not going to change the price one way or one way or the other so we can actually get into these companies at a lower price and then just wait for everyone else to catch on. Wait for everybody else to catch on. That's exactly what we're doing.
Like a good one that I never mentioned and I feel bad about it is OGN. I got her mom into that at $8.90 and it's up to like 17 and it has like a 12% dividend and it was in a publication saying it's probably one of the top five pharmaceutical stocks to buy for 2024. So that one I think is going to be pretty good.
But I do know that Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Square, BMY are both buys. If you're interested in getting into pharmaceuticals, they're really undervalued and they have decent – Pfizer is like 6%, BMY is like 5% yield. Triple M is a really good one if you haven't gotten to that one yet because it just went through like – I love Triple M products.
It just went through some shit. So it's down to like $92. A good REIT to get into is IIPR.
It just pulled back down to like $90 a share. And both of those are at 6%, 7%, 8% yield. So those are really good.
They're good companies with conservative yields with a good payout ratio. So if you got those as like one of your pillars of your portfolio and then you kind of branched out and say picked up a AGNC that yields 16% or something like that, you're mitigating your risk because you have one of your four pillars is a really good company. Did we talk about how Tesla did a big pullback? Was it Tesla? Yeah, Tesla shit the bed.
I think we were actually talking about how you're putting yourself at higher risk getting into these growth stocks when the PE numbers get high. We mentioned that a few times now. It was so interesting right after we talked about that, that I was in Greece and that's why this probably hasn't come up before then because we had prerecorded episodes.
But what basically happened was right after Tim said that, he was telling me, he's like, oh, Tesla really, really, really fell or whatever happened. They had an earnings report. Oh, that's what it was.
And the earnings report was bad. And then they were saying they don't know about their 2024 guidance because of competition and battery issue. And then the clientele doesn't have as much money.
So they issued a soft forecast for 2024 and they got hammered. It went from like 216 down to 170. And I was actually surprised when that announcement went out, or I guess everybody was panicking in the news about their batteries not working.
And anybody who's in the van travel knows about how lithium ion batteries don't hold charges and don't charge properly and don't retain charges when weather's really cold. And it was leaving people sitting all over the place. I thought the stock would have corrected a lot more then, but it didn't happen.
And then I guess when earnings happened is when. Now, an interesting play that just came out, not last week, but the week before last is Walmart's doing a three for one stock split. So if you have 100 shares of Walmart stock, you're going to get 300 shares additionally.
So obviously, the pool is going to be diluted by the three to one stock split. But generally, the companies that do these stock splits, when they're at, I think Walmart was at 196, it's up above 200 now, I think. When they do the stock split, it's going to obviously cut that by 75%, so that'll take it down to $50.
But generally speaking, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Meta, they've all done stock splits, and they generally get back to the same price even with the diluted share pool. So if you got into Walmart before they did the stock split, I think next week or the week after, and you held it for a few years, because it does yield 3% or around 3%. I was going to ask what the dividend is.
Now, does that 3% stay when they do the stock split per share, or do they dilute the dividend as well? The 3% will stay. What they'll do is like right now, because there's only, let's say a million shares, they have 3% of that. When they have 4 million, they'll actually still pay 3%, but it won't be the same amount.
Does that make sense? So it'll actually get cut just like per share? Yeah, the dividend will be cut. So it'll get cut in a third? Cut down to where it's still at 3%. So it'll probably be 1% per share if they're cutting it into the third, three for one, something like that? It'll still be a 3% yield.
It just won't pay it. Right now, it pays $0.88, and it'll pay $0.22. It'll still be 3%, but $0.22. Oh, okay, okay. I see what you're saying.
I forgot about the price decline when they do splits. So that's an interesting play. If you're interested in Walmart stock, and I would pick it up before, because I did that.
I think three years ago, Apple did a stock split, and I picked up 100 shares just for SMGs, and it shot up. Obviously, the price went down after the stock split, but within two months, it shot up. We made 30-some percent on Apple, and I despise Apple stock.
That doesn't stop us from investing in it. It's all about making that passive money so that I can do what I love to do, which is play basketball right now. I was just going to say, Tim just got injured, so he can't, since this episode is supposed to be about the things that we love.
Tim just got injured playing basketball, and then my dad needed help with a tree job. So I think he exacerbated the problem that we weren't really aware was as big of a problem. Yeah, I think I got bruised ribs and torn cartilage and all sorts of fun shit going on right now.
He has been super grumpy. Oh, you get like me when I can't do what I love to do. Yes, I do.
I don't like being crippled. I don't like being annoyed when I'm researching. So, but basketball, I'm going to try again this week.
We'll see. I doubt it's going to happen, but we'll see. I think you need to take it easy so that you don't have a longer recoup period.
I'm aware. You can do whatever you want. Just don't complain about it when you're sitting up in bed and you're like, I can't move.
My rib hurts. It does hurt. Like if I'm laying down, like I sleep in my stomach for whatever reason during the night.
Beach seal. Like last night I rolled over onto my stomach and like the pain just like just radiated from my shoulder down to my heel. I was like, oh, I shouldn't have done that.
And that woke me up. So that was a bad, bad time. I was sleeping like a rock.
Didn't even notice. So back to what this is all about, because we got sidetracked with like tickers. But that's because you love talking about stocks.
So let it fly, man. If you create a list of things that you love, you create a plan to start doing the things that you love. Do more of them.
You incorporate your income investing to actually pay for the things that you love or actually pay for everything in your lifestyle currently that then you don't need to work. Like that's like the goal, the dream. Like you don't have to work.
So you can just like if you like to paint and but you have, you know, $100,000 invested and you're getting $2,000, $3,000 a month and it's paying all your bills. Well, you can paint all day if you want. And that is unfortunately something that took me a few years in this investing thing to figure out that like they holding stocks can actually pay me and I don't have to sell them.
I know we've touched on that previously. That was a bad time learning that, but I'm glad I learned it because now I can teach other people that. The best time to start is yesterday, but the second best time to start is today.
So the sooner you start, the more things compound, the sooner you really can. I would be interested to like I wish I would have known about this whole writing down what you love in your life. And I would like to compare it like for my 20s and my 30s and my 40s and then what's going on in my 50s and my 60s is to see like because obviously your loves change.
They do change and they should change as you change. But I'm pretty convinced that travel and biking and basketball and there's going to be some stuff that would have been there since I was like eight. But you forgot how much you love basketball.
I did like I didn't play basketball. I played in college and then I got a job right out of college and then I went to grad school and so I didn't have time for basketball. So I just stopped playing.
I didn't play for like 20 years and then we got a membership for the Y so I could stay in reasonable shape for the spring whenever we start biking and everything when we're in the van. And I just picked up a basketball. I was shooting around one day and like these yo who said, hey, you want to you want to really want to run? And I was like, all right, I guess I can run.
And I started playing. I was like, I forgot how much I love this. Just banging people out of the way.
Get out of my way. Little boy. I'm not big.
I'm like 5'10 and 175 pounds, but I have humongous legs so I can like move people with my legs. It's fascinating. Yeah, they're all like so amazed at how strong he is.
And he's like, it's just leverage. He's like, it's just like low center of gravity. It's physics, man.
Physics. Science. And we were discussing science the other day and trying to ascertain exactly how old the Earth is using like what they use.
They use like radio radio waves to figure out how old everything is. So the Earth's for over 14 billion years old and humans have been on Earth for a hundred thousand years. So do what you love because I think they said the average lifespan of every mammal that's ever been recorded is one million years.
So we were already a fifth of the way through our about a fifth of the way through our lifespan as humans. You mean our species lifespan? It was fascinating. It was Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's like, he's like, yeah, mammals usually live like a one million years and then they die off and new mammals replace them. And humans been around for 150 to 200,000 years.
So but we're the only mammals that have ever actually created a means to destroy ourselves too. So it might not even be a million years. Yeah, that's a good point.
We might be halfway through it at this juncture. But whatever your beliefs are, I mean, I did touch on it last week that the probability of you being here is slim to none. So why waste that doing stuff that literally means nothing? I can't even tell you how many years I've lost playing somebody else or striving for somebody else's goals and expectations.
And if you like what you do, if you like your job, that's awesome. I'm not. This isn't for you, but it's for the people.
I know so many people that they dread like getting up on Monday because I have to go to work for five days. No, it's dreading even going to bed on Sunday night because you just don't even want to wake up on Monday. Like it's a blink of an eye when you fall asleep.
So like I like Sundays were full of dread. Monday sucked butt. And then Tuesday you're like, oh my God, this is terrible.
Then it's like Thursday. You're like, oh my gosh, I can't wait for the week to be over. I mean, when you're wishing for your days to be over faster, like there's a problem.
That's bad. Yeah, that's a problem because time is the only thing you cannot get back. You get numbered days.
So you should never be wishing for him to go fast. Yeah, for sure. You should be wishing for him to take 48 hours instead of 24.
And I've noticed when we were, when we'd go balls of the wall travel, I feel like time slows down for us, which is really interesting. I've said that before. Yeah, it does feel like time slows down.
Like if we're doing what we're doing, we're on the road. It feels a day feels like it's 36, 48, 52. It's that they feel so long because we cram so much into a day, even though it's what we love every minute, but it's nothing spectacular.
It's like hiking and it's like cooking food and it's like letting the cats play in the dirt. It's like going for a bike ride. It's nothing spectacular, but they just makes the day take so long.
And that's how it should be. If you, I figured if you're doing what you love, like when I play basketball, I mean, he's gone for hours. Sometimes it feels like a, like 12 hours.
I look at the clock. It's only been two hours. I'm like, damn, man, that's nice.
But he still has gone for hours, but he loves it. And I, he comes home and he's excited and he said he feels better. And it's like, if you freaking love that, even though I'm over here playing with the condo by myself and I'm frustrated, like, I don't want to take that away from him.
I haven't seen him this happy in so long. Well, good. Cause it's not, it's not changing.
You're lucky. You're lucky to have me. This is your condo.
It's not mine. I know. I just mean, I let you do what you want.
You created this mess. I know. But I let you do so much of what you want.
We sold my house. I know. Super jelly.
So yeah. I was like, I know we touched on that previously too. Like when we, when I sold my house, like once I, like all that crap was gone and I was just, I was, it was like so relaxing, so refreshing, like, like a huge weight of my shoulders had been lifted.
Well, you can even expand this whole, uh, what doing what you love, but having what you love. Tim had a whole house full of stuff that he didn't even remember that he had until he had to deal with it. And he's like, why do I even have this stuff? And then after he got rid of it, he's like, I feel so light.
I feel so free. Like I literally like, like if you went through the condo right now, you find maybe 2% of this stuff. Here's mine.
Maybe if that, like I have some clothes. I'm still having trouble downsizing too. I have some clothes.
I have a computer, a tablet. He gets so possessive of his computer. I have some shoes.
I don't have much, but I don't need much to do what I love to do. And that if once you actually create the outline and the plan to do what you want to do, what you think, I don't know. I'm not saying what you were meant to do, but like, it's almost like what you were meant to do. Once you start doing that, you'll be amazed at how little you actually need to accomplish that. And how much happier you are.
I mean, that's the unfortunate part that like if we if we were taught about finances and financial independence and like budgeting or not budgeting. I was watching. Intentional money spending.
Oh, I'm sorry. Go finish. Can you wait? Can you wait? You sure? But if we were taught all this at a younger age, we really would have our finances dialed in pretty much as soon as we hit 18.
And then we'd be able to live a much more intentional, happy, joyful existence. I was on the exercise bike last week. I knew you couldn't wait.
And I was riding the bike and these two high school girls came in and they were sitting there in the bikes like two rows ahead of me. And they were talking really loud because, you know, that's what young girls do. But they were talking about school.
And the one girl said, I have a financial independence paper due. So apparently Cumberland Valley actually has a financial independence. That's really cool.
I didn't have that when I went there. So that's a new thing. And like she said, like they're like she was learning like where to park her money to get like.
Did you poke your face in? Why not? Because they were really interested in some guys down the way. And I didn't want to I don't want to like step on their their mammary glands. Their mammary glands.
I didn't want to boob block them. I think you missed an opportunity there. But like just like so like they're actually starting to teach the youngins.
See, I'd be curious to know what they're actually teaching, though, like what she bought from what they were like. They were talking like it was not worthy, but like a worthy thing, like their extra money they were putting into like a high yield savings for like four or five percent that they could take out. It's still way, way, way better than they were actually regular trying to teach them how to they were doing paper trading and brokerage accounts on index funds.
So like the pieces are there. Yeah. The question is, are they actually going to implement the full strategy or are they given them? They've given them like the window treatment because I was reading an article about index funds and like the one guy.
So this is why would you paper trade index funds? This is what this guy said. A paper to have a trade index. This guy's this guy said this is the laziest way you could ever retire ever.
He said you put you to get you take three funds. One is an S&P fund kind of thing or it's a U.S. United States. Stock company fund, a bond fund.
One's a bond fund and one's an international fund. And that's all you just keep putting money in those three different funds. And like based on past returns, you should be up like a hundred and some percent within like 15 years.
And you just keep doing that and you'll be a millionaire by the time you retire by not doing any of the work that we do in this. Yep, exactly. Which I find that boring.
Well, you can do it again. You can do that if you really do have an extended period of time. Like if you're in your 20s, that's what I would be doing because I don't have the attention span, wouldn't have the attention span.
And I would be so engrossed in what I was doing that I wouldn't even be paying attention when it was dropping 60, 50 percent during bear market years. I know it. You've seen it with other stuff that I've done like, oh, I didn't even know we were down 60 percent.
I was like, my bad. I probably would be doing the same thing, but I would have a not as good understanding like the P.E. and stuff like that. The reason that we don't necessarily recommend that approach for everybody is if you have a much shorter time horizon for retirement or when you want to be withdrawing the money or using the money.
Well, the retirement target audience is nomads and people that want to travel. Yes, I understand that. So that's why we don't pimp the index fund investing, because you really can't travel with index fund where they pay like 1.5 percent if that.
But if you know you got 30 years and you really want to be super busy. But if you if you have your stock, if you have your brokerage account set up where you're getting what you need to travel and you have extra money left over each month where you then can put that in an IRA and just literally park it in an index fund. I was thinking about even trial and erroring that.
Because they are like they're currently in the works. I don't know if it'll probably it'll probably be in 2025. They're going to actually change the way IRAs are structured.
So like as long as your grandfather is in with an older IRA, you keep getting the tax reset, but they're actually going to somehow start taxing the IRAs. So you guys need to open up an account ASAP, like ASAP, ASAP, people. They were just talking about that.
We were talking about before that they might actually take that because that is seriously one of the best ways to get around paying excessive amounts of tax. Because once you pay, you're talking about Roth or IRAs in general. Tax refunds or whatever that is, Roth.
The Roths? OK, so the Roths are the ones that you pay your tax dollars up front and you never have to pay taxes on any gains when you withdraw for the rest of your life, basically. Yeah. And it's in the works to actually start taxing them.
Considering taxes consistently go up, inflation consistently goes up. Like that is the best tax advantage situation you could ever hope for. And that's the reason that the contribution threshold is so low.
I think this year they probably bumped it up. But 2023 I think was $6,500. $6,500 last year and $7,000 this year.
So it's $7,000 this year. So that's like the threshold. Whereas 401ks are like $13,000, $14,000.
They might even be up to $16,000 right now for all I know. I'm not eligible for that anymore. Not having an employer.
So it's like half the amount. I don't know. I know I was watching that interview and I said, OK, that's where we're going with this.
And if you make so much money a year, you're not even eligible for a Roth account. That's the crazy part. So that's in the works.
Another thing that's in the works is they're going to start taxing your crypto. So you have to. Well, we knew that was coming.
They've been trying to allow you to self-disclose. And that's not good either because that's going to cause a headache. So that's going to take.
But that'll take longer. Like the Roth, the IRA. I'd be more worried about the Roth situation right now.
Which doesn't make any sense, though, because if I can only put cash that I have. Actually, it's already passed through my paycheck and put it into my bank account. I take it from my bank account and I put it into my Roth.
Why then would they tax my Roth when it's already been taxed to go in my bank account? That's being double taxed. Yeah. That's going to cause a massive uproar for newcomers, because then you might have to revert back to the traditional retirement account with pre-tax.
That's something I was like, I forget. I believe it was on CNBC, but I don't I can't. It was on one of those news things.
We've taken so much information, it's hard to pinpoint the sources. But that was one time I said, oh, well, that seems important. I should remember that.
Yeah, that's you didn't tell me about this till just now. I'm a little annoyed with you because I still need to open mine out. I have my regular IRA.
And what we have going on, what we have going on in the Roth or my Roth. Whoo. Oh, man.
Tim finally just opened one and he is just like. Just throwing money at flyers left and right. Oh, my God.
But I got into SoFi before SoFi took off. I got into Planeteer (PLTR) before Planeteer took off. I got into Soxiny or something like that.
He's doing the exact opposite of what everybody else does with their retirement account that he can't touch for 30 years. He's picking more flyers than he is like a long term strategy plan, which I think is hilarious. Well, let's keep doing you because apparently it works for you.
I'm putting in growth stocks because the growth stocks, they're not being taxed. So like if they triple or quadruple or like a thousand X, well. You win.
Voila. You win the lottery. And I'll just like take profits here and there and turn that and put that into.
I mean, I have a couple dividend stocks. I have ABR. Like ABR has had a really shit month.
So you should pick some more shares up of ABR. It's a really good. It's a really real well ran.
We talked about ABR in. But it went down this last week. It's like.
BDC episode? It's a REIT. Okay. REIT episode.
I don't know why I get those confused. It's but it's like a 12, like around $12 right now. I'm like, so it's like 40% under value on sale.
It yields like 13% now because of the share price. It's not going anywhere and their dividends not going anywhere. So just pick it up.
And how I know it's a good one is because every time it drops below $12, the people that are in the company by the stock, the insiders by the stock, because they know it's on and they know it's on sale once it's below $12. Heck yeah. So that's something that I've never mentioned before.
If you have free time and you like to do this, subscribe to publications that like do just tell you the insider trading. I never even thought about that. They have those? Yeah.
I thought that was illegal. Not insider trading like you're thinking like, but like insiders like the president or the CEO or whatever. Anytime they buy stocks, they have to report it to the SEC or the SEC.
Oh, yeah. Then it goes to the news and they actually tabulate that. They'll say, well, such and such from NVIDIA bought a million dollars worth of shares.
Like they don't buy the shares unless they're undervalued and they expect the shares to go up. Or they're trying to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy about the company. Whereas the exact opposite happens.
Like if you're part of those subscriptions and you see like, I say a company's CEO is selling like millions of dollars of the stock. Well, that's the red flag. Yeah.
Big red flag. So that's why if you, like I said, if you have free time, just Google that, subscribe to a couple of those. They'll tell you who, what insiders are buying what.
I would imagine you could find that too through just random. You can, but it's so much easier. Like that's one of the ones I actually would.
Pay for somebody else. I would farm out to someone else. Who specializes in it.
And to give me the data. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Just like paying for a health expert to give you their wisdom. And then our problem child, there was an article about our problem child and they think that NPW is going to be fine. So just keep holding.
If you bought it or you have it, just keep holding. What about IEP? That one's actually up to $20 now. Oh, that one bounced back up.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's just one of those things.
Like we didn't panic sell. We didn't have any limit orders in or stop losses. Excuse me.
Well, I wasn't going to do it with IEP because IEP was paying $2 at the time. Now it's $1, but it's still 22% dividend. Yeah.
That's still a big dividend. So they're paying me 20% to hold their stock. And like I said, I really do like the way the guy that owns it.
Well, I do like what he does. I like what they have. I like their diversification.
I like all that. And every company occasionally goes through some growing pains. Expanding or whatever they're doing.
But there are a couple really blue chips out there on sale. If you're interested, IBM's one. IBM.
IBM. Anything else? Triple M's another one. I love Triple M. T's another one that's on sale.
I was just looking at these. I've heard so many people that are just like love AT&T. Now one that most people don't know about is NUE.
I haven't gotten to that one yet. I want to. It's undervalued.
I'm just waiting for some money to free up so I can get some shares of that in your mom's account. My mom is so sad. Well, that's what I said.
I spent the money to get this new. It's like a retirement dividend investing type of publication. Finally pulled through.
I was like, F it. I'll just buy it. So I bought it.
I'm looking at it. And they said the top 10 stocks that you should have. Every person should have in their retirement account.
She has seven of them. And I was like, well, did I just waste my money? But then they list like 800 stocks from A to F based on the sector and everything. And like going through her portfolio, we might actually have to post her portfolio at some point.
We did post that. Going through her portfolio. Every one of her stocks is an A or B rated, except for like icons of C. It was like, holy shit.
Dang. So I said, like, I don't know. I told you I said just like from what I've seen in all the publications and their portfolios and then like the people that follow them, they write in with like what they have in their portfolio.
She has the absolute best retirement portfolio I've ever seen in seven years. I mean, I haven't been doing this 30 years yet, but in seven years, she has the best one I've ever seen. Well, you're going to get really good at it because I can tell you got mad passion.
Back to the love comment. Love. That is kind of what like hijacked this whole episode.
We're talking about love. But it makes sense. It fits.
Ironically, in 1933 or 31, I forget, the Valentine's Day massacre happened. That's when the gangster Bugsy, I think it was Bugsy's gang, gunned down a bunch of people or something like that, or Al Capone's gang, someone someone's gang. So somebody else killed somebody again on Valentine's Day? So it is more about massacres.
Valentine's Day actually has a quite bloodied and violent history. And it does seem like actually. So it makes sense why there's a lot of fights on Valentine's Day.
Oh, you didn't get me that because the fights actually go they go hand in hand with like the nonsense that's occurred throughout time on Valentine's Day. Well, you're off the hook because I give two shits about Valentine's Day. That's good because I don't care either.
I don't care at all. I tell you, I love you all the time. I don't need to spend.
I just don't like holidays that obligate you to something. If you're not already thinking about the person throughout the year, that shows that something's wrong. If the only time you can think about the person you care about is on a day that's holiday that is directly.
As investors, you probably should be invested in Hallmark by now. I was going to say, but you know, the general public does this. Take advantage of the masses because like people got to eat.
They go to the movie theater. I'm just like, I don't want to go out and be around any of that crazy nonsense. Like we're just standing home.
So Hallmark should be a good buy like in December. Does that one have a dividend? I doubt it, but still it has to have a good. Yeah, usually run ups.
And I think they talk about this with like Etsy selling trends. Run ups end up like 60 to 90 days before the actual holiday of whatever marketing specials. And if you listen to the crypto podcast, I hope you picked up some of those altcoins because they're starting to they're starting to pop off.
They're popping, pop it up. And it's only going to get better. I can't wait to see what happens in April.
Through April, May, yeah. So I haven't put any money into the ETFs yet for the Bitcoin because if I want Bitcoin, I'm just going to buy Bitcoin. I'm not going to buy it through an ETF.
Well, and we said they're going to have to test themselves out for several, several months. The other thing I might want to, we might want to address in this episode. So you guys know that we're rehabbing the condo and interest rates are supposed to go up this year or down this year.
So we were even considering potentially pushing back the sell month, just a couple months to take advantage of a mass flurry of buyers because of interest rate reductions. So we're considering that. Again, we don't know exactly when that's going to happen.
They're saying May. People are guessing May. So I'm going to shoot to have this thing done end of March, beginning of April.
But if you look, if you look back historically, if you're thinking about buying a house, don't buy it in June. Yeah. I think it's from April to April, May and June.
Spring months. But June's like the months with the most. The highest price points.
Highest price, most closings. June's bad. If you want to buy a house, buy it in December because December is by far the lowest you can haggle with the sell.
That was the reason we actually decided to extend things because we were looking over stuff and I was like, it just doesn't make sense to kill. I literally just looked at this report, like the average hold time for a house sold in December is like 60 days where the average hold time for a house sold in June is like four. So I'm just saying if you want to buy a house, buy a house in December.
If you want to sell a house, sell a house in May or June. Yeah. So that's what we're going to shoot for.
Even if we're like, I know that has nothing to do with stocks, but that's a life lesson that has been playing out for like the last 20 years. But I mean, even that principle in general runs all through the stock world. It's like you buy when things are depressed and you sell when things are overappreciated.
You do, but then at the same time, so you actually, if you're thinking of selling your house, you want to sell your house in June. If you're thinking about doing growth stocks, you want to start buying up shares in the home building, like the really good home building companies like Toll Brothers and there's another one I'm thinking of because there's such a shortage in houses. They've actually ramped up their new construction so that they can actually have them out in the end of spring and beginning of summer.
And I would think that that's actually going to go up too. So that'll drive their prices up, even though the interest rate price, even though interest rates are up and the cost of goods is up, the price of these companies is going to go up because they're going to be selling houses left and right. So that's a. To meet demand.
Yeah. So I mean, there's a tidbit that you never would have got because I don't care. They don't really have dividends, but.
Yeah, but it's still because people talk about real estate. And again, if you're people who you want to actually have physical real estate, whether you're buying it to then rent it or whatever you're doing, you know, buy it at your best. I would never take those house slippers.
I know. I know. In this environment, they're insane.
I know. We talked about this in the first episode. I was going back and because where I started editing videos to put them on YouTube.
Oh, we'll let you know when that launches. I know Tim said he goes, I will never be on. I will never do YouTube.
So you're going to be on YouTube. She does that without me knowing. I'm still not on YouTube.
In your mind. In my mind. Well, that's that.
I hope you guys enjoy your Valentine's Day. There's a lot of tickers in this. I'm sure she'll list them.
Yeah, I'll have them down in the show notes as always. And even though this was kind of like a rogue roundabout episode, it really is rooted in, you know, follow your passions, do what you love, focus on what you love, put more time and energy into what you love. And Tim clearly loves stocks, investing and let it all out during this episode.
Love the math, the numbers. The next episode. Oh, yeah, we have to.
We have an outline here for. Brokerage accounts checking. Oh, the brokerage accounts.
I got an email about brokerage accounts. So we'll probably do that next. Yeah.
So next week we're going to talk about the actual brokerage accounts. And I know I've gotten several people asking questions about which brokerage accounts to set up, which ones to start. So we will actually do a dedicated episode on that one next time.
It's fascinating. They actually, what they did just quick, they actually sent out a survey to a bunch of investors. I think it was 2,700 of them.
And they just like ranked the brokerage accounts on like customer service, on research ability, on ease of trades and all like all these different factors. And they actually came up with the best brokerage accounts and the worst brokerage accounts. So we will let you know.
It's very, very cool. So we'll focus on that. I mean, spoiler, the one we use is awesome.
So there's the spoiler. And if you've listened to the past episode, you'll know what that is. But if you haven't, tune in to next week's episode.
We'll see you guys then.