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In a world of noise and distraction, there is a trend in “Bringing Simplicity Back To Investing.” RICK FERRI and I talk about why it’s important for investments and why it’s important for individuals. You’re going to leave here understanding a new framework for looking at your investment portfolio and hopefully bring some peace of mind as you go forward.
Rick Ferri has been a good friend to the podcast. He shares his insights on simple investing, emphasizing the importance of clarity, discipline, and understanding the core principles of investing. He discusses the pitfalls of complexity, the value of index funds, and how to maintain a disciplined approach amidst market noise.
Keywords
investing, index funds, simplicity, portfolio management, financial planning, discipline, asset allocation, tax efficiency, global growth, investment philosophy
Key topics
The philosophy of simple investing
The stages of investor learning: darkness, enlightenment, and simplicity
The importance of cash flow and intrinsic value in investments
Asset allocation based on liabilities and time horizon
Tax-efficient investing strategies for taxable and retirement accounts
Risks of alternative investments and private equity in retirement plans
Discipline and automation in maintaining investment strategies
Chapters of “Bringing Simplicity Back to Investing”
00:00 The Philosophy of Simple Investing
07:03 Stages of Investment Understanding
11:19 Financial Planning and Purpose
17:57 Implementing a Simple Portfolio
23:01 Discipline in Investing
30:46 Navigating Complexity in Wealth Management
Resources
Rick Ferri’s Website – https://rickferri.com
Bogleheads.org – https://bogleheads.org
Index Fund Book by Rick Ferri – https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Rick+Ferri&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
Website – https://rickferri.com
Twitter – https://twitter.com/RickFerri
Outline: “Bringing Simplicity Back To Investing”
Introduction: Three parts to simple investing: Philosophy, Strategy, Discipline
Part 1: Philosophy: Overview: Embrace Simplicity – the Education of an Index Investor – 4 stages
1: Born in Darkness (who you ask, chasing returns, naive research)
2: Finding Enlightenment (measure, compare, enlightened)
3: Complexity Traps (slice’n dice, factors, the fallacy of perfection)
4: Embrace Simplicity (global equity, specific fixed-income as needed)
Part 2: Portfolio Strategy Overview: Making the Philosophy Work for You
5: Setting Goals (family – culture, career – taxes, risk tolerance)
6: Managing Risk (three ways to allocate assets: required return, risk avoidance, cash-flow)
7: Tax Management (three account types, asset class tax, tax avoidance)
8: Investment Selection (ETF vs fund, balanced funds & TDFs)
Part 3: Discipline: Overview: Implement, automate, stay the course
9: Implement fully (consolidate, tax issues, lump sum vs DCA)
10: Maintain regulatory (automate new, rollovers, TLH)
11: Adjust as goals change (accumulation vs distribution, tax situations, legacy)
12: Stay the Course (recommit occasionally, continue ed., conferences)
Transcript of “Bringing Simplicity Back to Investing”
Frazer Rice (00:00.962)
Welcome aboard, Rick.
Rick Ferri (00:02.3)
Well, thank you for having me.
Frazer Rice (00:04.258)
Well, thank you. First of all, want to thank you for a kindness you showed me way back in time and having me on the Boggleheads podcast. It was probably worth at least 25 % of my book sales and it was a lot of fun to do and never forgot it. So it took a while, but here we are back on my podcast. And what I want to do is go through a little bit about really the three parts to simple investing, which I think is something, especially now with the proliferation of alternatives, a lot of noise with crypto.
That sometimes we kind of lose sort of the forest for the trees as far as what’s the right things to be thinking about in terms of an overall investing philosophy sort of embrace. And so maybe let’s start with that. How do you think about the parts to a good investing thesis and what is your overall worldview on that?
Rick Ferri (00:55.804)
So I’ve been in the investment advisory industry now for 40 years. And what I have learned is that the simpler you can make investing and the simpler you can make the portfolio, the better for you, the better for your family, the better for those who will inherit your portfolio. Don’t make it complicated.
Complexity is just job security for those people who are selling you things and trying to manage your money. And in the end, you don’t benefit from that. They do in the form of fees. And if you just had a simple portfolio of a few good index funds and maybe some individual securities, you’ll be much better off and your family will be better off in the long term. And that’s the philosophy of simple investing.
Frazer Rice (01:50.947)
Mm-hmm.
Rick Ferri (01:53.208)
The second part is a strategy. How do you go about doing this, particularly if you’ve had a complex portfolio? And the third thing is discipline, which is how do you stick with simplicity as an investment philosophy?
Frazer Rice (02:06.318)
Sure. and without the second two, it’s great to have high-minded thoughts and so on, but if you can’t do it, it’s all for naught, and then if you can’t stick with it, then the best laid plans just kind of go asunder here. So let’s go back to the philosophy for a second here, and as you think about, it’s almost like the life cycle of discovery and learning about how these things work. How do you think about that from an ARC perspective?
Rick Ferri (02:12.561)
Ha ha.
Rick Ferri (02:36.05)
So generally when you’re new to investing, you’re going to ask other people for advice. I where you get that from, might be a friend or family member, maybe a professional advisor, might be coworkers, maybe you’ll just get on the internet and start searching. I don’t know, but 99.9 % of the time you’re gonna run into advice that is not very good. And the advice will be, you should put your money here, you should put your money there.
Use these 10 different funds. It’s just a lot of confusion, quite frankly. I call this stage darkness because you don’t, you you’re just investing in the dark. You don’t know. And a lot of the advice is going to be very short based upon short-term performance. So recency biased people are going to be recommending, but you know, growth stocks because the Magnificent Seven has done well in the past.
Or buy crypto because crypto went up a lot in the past and so therefore you should buy it now. And so most of the advice you’ll get in darkness is going to be recent based upon recent performance and rather than looking at it over say how should you be investing over 10, 20, 30 years and that will end up being quite different. So darkness is where we all begin.
And most people stay in darkness. They never get out of darkness because they don’t put the brain cells to work to look at how am I doing? I mean, how has that done for me? What seems to be happening in my portfolio? Really? Do I really know what’s going on? And then the ones who are very fortunate start asking questions about, what if I just
Frazer Rice (04:06.125)
You
Rick Ferri (04:31.334)
bought the market and bought an index fund and just got the return of say the US stock market or the international stock market and that’s all I ever did. Would I be better off? And the answer to that 98 % of the time is yes, you would be better off if that’s all that you did. And if you come to this realization, I call it the second stage, which is enlightenment, where you now realize that, okay, all the stuff I’ve been doing may have been okay.
I’ve been moving in and out of things, but now I need to start looking at just buying the market and holding it for the longterm. And that’s enlightenment. But for some people, it doesn’t stop there. And they start to dig into this idea of indexing. When you start doing that, it’s good that you’re learning, but you’ll start running into a whole lot of noise.
That is alternative indexes, enhanced indexes uh… explore strategies all of these things that you’re going to take this nice simple concept called indexing and make it complicated again.
So you start adding all these things to your portfolio because it has the word index in it or maybe the word passive in it and uh… advisors are notorious for doing this it’s called complexity for job security
Frazer Rice (05:39.148)
Right.
Rick Ferri (05:54.066)
Basically, are, you know, you take the idea of indexing and you just add a lot of things all around the edges of it and you make a simple portfolio complicated. So the third stage of this process of simplicity is complexity. In other words, you’ve made something simple complex. Okay, so the last stage is
Frazer Rice (05:54.221)
You
Rick Ferri (06:18.544)
Simplicity. That is that you realize this is going on. You realize that all the stuff that you’re adding to your portfolio is just making it all complicated again. And that the people who are benefiting from this are not you, but the people that are selling you all this stuff. And you say, that’s it, I’m done. I’m going back to my second epiphany, if you will, which is simplicity. I’m just going to go back to a simple portfolio of a few broad index funds, US stock market index fund.
An international stock market index fund that covers the whole market and a couple of bond funds, municipal bond fund and maybe corporate bond funds or treasury bond funds. And you could use index funds for those as well. And it’s a really low cost, very tax efficient and very simple.
Frazer Rice (07:05.953)
A couple of quick asides here. The first one is for people who are coming into this in and they’re in the darkness, but they are informed maybe from the TikTok world or Robin Hood or Kal-She or these or these betting orientations and distinguishing between betting and investing.
How do you think about that and kick people over to the positive side of the force so that their emergence from the darkness into the enlightenment and simplicity doesn’t take them in a place where they really touch the stove in a bad way and have a bad experience that’s simple but bad.
Rick Ferri (07:32.988)
Right, okay.
Rick Ferri (07:51.484)
So there’s a concept called intrinsic value. You may have heard Warren Buffett speak about this. Well, you want to buy things that have cashflow. Bonds, for example, have cashflow. They pay interest. Stocks have cashflow. You have companies that are going concerns. They earn earnings and pay dividends. They buy back stock and they reinvest money. So you can value these things based upon these cashflows.
Real estate has cash flow, it pays rent, or maybe you own timberland that you can cut the wood or you own a farm where you can harvest or lease it out. mean, these are cash flows. So the first thing that I have for cut in investing is cash flow. How do my investments generate cash or will generate cash later on down the road?
That’s different than say buying gold or Bitcoin or currencies or commodities. Those things don’t have a way of generating a cashflow. One bar of gold put in a safe is one bar of gold a thousand years from now. It doesn’t become two bars of gold. doesn’t get little bars of gold. It doesn’t pay interest and so forth. mean, so unless you’re good at
Frazer Rice (09:12.994)
Right.
Rick Ferri (09:16.966)
Buying low and selling high, you can’t really expect to make anything other than maybe the inflation rate. And with commodities, you actually earn less than the inflation rate. Gold has earned a little bit more than the inflation rate. Where Bitcoin is going to end up, I have no idea. But the speculative assets are the ones that usually don’t have any intrinsic value. People are just betting on price because that’s all you have. I
f price is going up, let’s buy it. Because the price went up. I don’t know where it’s going, but the price went up, so let’s buy it. And maybe someone dumber than us will buy it at a higher price from us, and then we can make money. But I mean, you have to trade these things. And what information do you have? None, really. It’s very difficult to come up with information that the market doesn’t already have. And you’re not a professional trader. So you might get lucky. I mean, people do get lucky. You you can flip a coin.
And pick heads 10 times and if it comes up head 10 times it doesn’t mean you’re a good coin flipper you’re just lucky and so you can get lucky and you can make money doing this but it’s not a long-term investment strategy to do that it’s best to buy things that have cash flows or will have cash flows in the future.
Frazer Rice (10:30.175)
As I like to tell people, you not only have to be right, you have to be right twice, and then you have to be systematically right twice in order to make a living out of it. even professional traders struggle at that. And to think that you’re going to be better equipped than a lot of those folks is folly. And so I try to talk people out of that whenever I can, because I think…
Rick Ferri (10:35.42)
Correct.
Frazer Rice (10:58.101)
It’s just very difficult to play in that space and have that turn out to be a success. Okay, so we kind of have some ideas here around the philosophy and sort of the idea of, you know, sort of garnering luck versus skill and those types of components in that portfolio strategy, that second phase, maybe take us through that a little bit and how you take a good philosophy of simplicity and make it work for you.
Rick Ferri (11:22.18)
Right. So this gets into a little financial planning at the beginning of it because you can’t invest without a purpose. I you have to have a reason why you’re investing. It might be to pay future liabilities such as college for your children or retirement, or maybe you want to leave a legacy or maybe just trying to build wealth for the family, whatever it is. I mean, you have to have a purpose. And so what is the purpose? What are you trying to do?
And you have to look at your life and you have to say, are my liabilities? What are my short-term liabilities? Do I want to buy a house? Or do I want to send my kids to Ivy League school? Do I want to retire early? And what are my liabilities? And sometimes it involves other family members. Maybe you have parents who need your help or siblings who need your help.
So that’s a liability. The first thing you have to do is look at what are my liabilities? And included in that is how much you want to leave to your children. I often ask people, okay, you’ve got $10 million. How much do you want to leave to each of your three children? And they don’t have any idea. I said, do you want to leave more than 10 million or you want to leave less than 10 million? And a lot of people would say, well, they’ll get what’s left. Well, that changes the whole concept of investing if they’ll get what’s left.
Frazer Rice (12:43.318)
Sure.
Rick Ferri (12:43.634)
Versus, yes, I want to leave each of my child five million dollars when I die and I’m starting with ten. Okay, well that changes how you invest your money. So these are the liabilities. So that’s where you start with. And then you start looking at well, what are the short-term liabilities and what are the long-term liabilities? And long-term liabilities can be funded with equity. Meaning things that are ten years or longer out. I usually I tell people anything you’re to be spending your money on between say,
Now and 10 years from now probably shouldn’t be in equity. You’ll be getting dividends and interest from your portfolio, which is fine. You could just spend that money. But in addition to that, I big chunks of money that you might be spending to buy a vacation home or whatever it is really should probably not be in equity. But the money that’s going to be not used for 10 years or longer, 20 years or maybe ever in your life, that can be in equity. don’t differentiate that first.
A lot of times asset allocation, that’s what we’re talking about, starts with, well, what do you want between stocks and bonds? What do you want your portfolio to look like? What percentage in stocks and what percentage in bonds? I don’t think you really get to that number until you know when you’re going to be needing the money. If you’re going to be needing the money 10 years out, fine, that money can be in stock. So that would allocate a portion of that long-term money to stock and that might be a percentage. Okay, so that’s what we start with.
A real basic look at who you are and what do you need and when are you going to need it and what are you trying to do for your heirs. And then that leads to an asset allocation between stocks and fixed income. The stocks again, I’m not investing in any stock money in liabilities that I have in the next say 10 years. So it’s long term. Okay.
Now we have to look at the stock side. That’s the easy stocks. Stock investing is easy. I quite quite frankly, I’m working on a book right now about this, but stock investing is very simple. It’s much easier than fixed income and bond investing. Stock investing is simply we buy the global equity market. We’re just trying to buy the growth of global economic growth, global GDP growth. We’re trying to capture that, which has been going on.
Rick Ferri (15:08.594)
Fairly steady for about the last 250 years and continues to be that way as more and more countries shift more towards capitalism and away from fascism and communism and so forth and realizing that capitalism is the way if you want to take care of your people and you want to increase standards of living all around the world, it’s done through capitalism. much a fact of life. Capitalism works. Well, I’m well.
Frazer Rice (15:31.185)
I think many can agree with that, although it might not be popular here in New York.
Rick Ferri (15:37.425)
The reason New York existed was because it was a port for capitalism at first. So I mean, is the financial capital of the US still is New York. So you could disagree with it because you live in New York, but you’d be in a minority and you’d be outside of reality and history as well. But the idea is that it’s all I’m trying to capture this global growth of…
Frazer Rice (15:41.686)
That’s right.
Frazer Rice (15:55.648)
Exactly.
Rick Ferri (16:03.026)
Global economic growth, which is about 2 % per year in real terms. So if I get from equity, if I get the inflation rate and I get 2 % real growth and then I get about a 3 % dividend yield and that comes from both cash dividends and then buybacks, we’re looking at about a 7.5 % expected return from global equity. And that’s good enough. I mean, that’s all I need on my equity side. I’ll be outperforming inflation by about 5%.
I’ll have to pay some taxes, but I’ll still have an actual real after-tax return of about 3%, which is good. Okay. The rest of it then goes into fixed income. And what type of fixed income? Well, that depends on what type of account that you have and what your taxes are. So if it’s in a taxable account, it could be municipal bond income, because it’s probably your best bet if you’re in anything other than a 22 % tax bracket.
Or if it’s in your retirement account, could be corporate bonds. And depending what state you live in, it could be treasury bonds. But you don’t expect the treasuries or the corporate bonds or the municipal bonds really to give you much of a return over taxes and inflation. If you could pick up 1 % over taxes and inflation over 20 years or so by being in fixed income, I mean, you’re actually doing well.
So that is more of a stabilizer, meaning you don’t want to be all in stock because you can’t handle the volatility of the stock market. It goes up and down too much, even though the asset allocation would say, well, you should have an awful lot of your money in stock because you have a lot of money that you’re not going to be needing in the next 10 years. But a lot of people can’t handle having a lot of money in stock. So you have fixed income that at least keeps up with taxes and inflation over the long term. And that becomes part of your asset allocation as well. So it’s kind of how you
This is what you do first before you go out and pick any index funds. You have to go through this process.
Frazer Rice (18:00.116)
And then as part of that, I spend a lot of time basically all day, every day thinking about the tax management side of things and helping people understand their appetite for volatility and how that impacts their long-term goals and things like that. The creation of these buckets to understand where you are in your tax situation and where you’re going to be, that can have a pretty significant impact on how things do.
And from your perspective, I that’s really just, that’s a function of projecting out the purposes that you described before with your current situation and then the vehicles with which to invest in.
Rick Ferri (18:38.226)
Right. And you’re not trying to hit the ball over the fence here. I mean, you’re just trying to get your fair share of the returns that are available to everybody. And through index funds, and this is where index funds come in, you can get exactly that. I mean, you could buy a global equity index fund, a global equity, covers the entire globe for a few basis points, 0.05 % per year fee. It’s very tax efficient. And that wasn’t the case.
30 years ago, 40 years ago, but it is now. that’s the way you should do this. You don’t want to leave out all these ideas that you’re going to go out and hire people who are going to outperform that because they don’t. A vast majority of them don’t.
Frazer Rice (19:21.963)
And so the machinery to implement these portfolios, ETFs are sort of standard tax-efficient ways to do things. Mutual funds distribute gains at the end, which is sometimes a nasty surprise for people who are learning about this. Maybe take us through your analysis on how to implement this index investing in a way that stays simple and tax-efficient and at the same time helps you take advantage of what’s out there.
Rick Ferri (19:52.883)
So we have to divide up the world between your taxable money. Again, you already have a portfolio. So you have all these legacy assets in a portfolio, in your taxable portfolio. Then you have your retirement portfolio, 401k, 403b, 457 IRA, rollover, Roth IRAs, tax-free portfolio. So you have to look at taxes first.
To implement a…simple portfolio say in a 401k if you have access to a target date index retirement fund like a Vanguard or an iShare or a State Street very low cost Fidelity has one too but very low cost index target date retirement fund this does it all for you you don’t have to do anything you just have to buy one fund based upon what the asset allocation is underneath the hood of that particular fund.
How much in stock, how much in bond. That’s all you need to do in a 401k. You could roll your own in a 401k by buying individual index funds like a US stock market index fund, an international index fund, and say a bond index fund. So you could do your own allocation if you wish. But a target date fund works really well there.
In a Roth account, you probably just want to have equity because there’s no tax in a Roth account. So you want to get maximum growth out of that account. So I would you look at the Roth account and I’d say, well, I’ll just buy the global equity index fund and my Roth account. And that’s it. All I have. So you’ve got your retirement accounts, which are target date fund. Very simple. You’ve got your Roth accounts, which are just a global equity index fund. And the only thing you need to worry about is your taxable account.
Taxable accounts always have issues because people will come in and they will have this list of stuff that they already own and guess what there’s a lot of embedded long-term capital gains in there and if you just sell it and go to a index portfolio you may not be doing the clients a good service because they’ll pay a tremendous amount of taxes and if they’re over 65 they’ll have to pay more for medicare ermor they’re going to lose their over 65 deduct i mean lots of bad things happen when you just sell out of a taxable account
Rick Ferri (22:04.722)
So there you’re going to be a little bit more tactical. know, you’re going to wait. The market will give us some opportunities to trade out of some stocks or some investments that may have losses. So you can then take those losses. You could sell other things to that have some gains to offset the losses. And I mean, you may never get out of everything that you’ve got in a taxable account. But the idea is to have this portfolio out there of say, a US total stock market index fund and a municipal bond fund.
That you want to move towards. So as you’re selling these things off, you’re just putting the money in a US total stock market fund. And the reason I say US total stock market in a taxable account is because they’re so tax efficient. The dividend yield is down about 1.2%. They don’t distribute capital gains in an ETF. And that’s a great fund for a taxable portfolio. But you just can’t sell everything and buy it. You’ve got to crawl your way out of what you currently have.
Frazer Rice (23:05.715)
No, you have to do it thoughtfully or else you create hits that are unnecessary. So as we segue to the discipline portion here, one thing that’s popping up is the, I think the discipline to stay simple. The world out there, the US in particular, is making retirement accounts safe for alternative investments like private credit and private equity.
Rick Ferri (23:10.256)
Right.
Frazer Rice (23:31.211)
I just bristle and shudder because I think there’s a level of complexity and illiquidity that is misunderstood and it is going to be difficult, nay impossible, to properly educate people on where those things sit in the asset spectrum to the point where they justify their fees or anything like that. Maybe take us through what you think on that as we get to the discipline portion of how you sort of stay the course with this mindset.
Rick Ferri (24:00.924)
Well 401ks are allowing these private equity investments and private debt investments in, but I personally have not seen any of my clients and I have a lot of clients and I charge an hourly fee. So I’m not trying to sell anything or manage anybody’s money, but nobody’s asking for these things. where, where are they getting the idea that they should own them? Well, they’re getting from the people that were selling them, right?
The people who are making fees from them. I haven’t seen any useful data that says that these things actually enhance your return. Alpha goes to the manager. I say that over and over again. If these things actually produced a higher rate of return than say just a corporate bond index fund, you’re not going to get it.
It’s going to go to the advisor, it’s going to go to the manager, and all you’re going to do is take the risk. You’re going to take the risk and they’re going to get the excess return in the long term through fees. They don’t make any sense. You don’t do it. It’s just the rehash of active management and mutual funds, which has already been dismissed as not producing anything for you, the investor. It only generates fees for the people in the investment industry.
This is just another iteration of that and we’ve already seen some cracks. Isn’t that what Jamie Dimon said? What are they cockroaches? I think is the word that he used in the private equity market. And yeah, I mean, this is not new. This is just a repackaging of ideas just that now they’ve been allowed to go into the 401k market. But you have to ask yourself why haven’t they been allowed to go into the 401k market for the last 40 years if they’ve been so great? It’s because the SEC
Frazer Rice (25:31.978)
Right.
Rick Ferri (25:58.703)
The Department of Labor said, no, we’re not going to allow these things in there. you give people enough rope to hang themselves. They’re not going to hang themselves, by the way. Somebody else is going to put the noose around their neck. And that’s the advisors who are doing that.
Frazer Rice (25:59.499)
Department of Labor and right.
Frazer Rice (26:19.066)
And I mean, a different podcast probably, but it’s something where the liability really is going to shift to the planned sponsors. I don’t care what happens and you know, they’re going to present these things and something’s going to blow up. And it’s like, know, you may you gave me the option and they’ve already those lawsuits already already proliferate. OK, so back to discipline a little bit here. What should people be doing in order to make sure they can carry carry out the.
Rick Ferri (26:39.367)
Yeah.
Frazer Rice (26:47.147)
What they’re doing in a systematic way and keep themselves safe from being distracted by all this noise.
Rick Ferri (26:52.86)
So again, that’s why we start out with the philosophy. You have to believe in the philosophy of simplicity and simple indexing. You can’t just jump to it because some TikTok video said buy index funds, okay? If you’re just jumping to it that way, then you’re not gonna have the discipline to stick with it because it’s just another phase or fad or whatever in your mind. You don’t really truly understand.
Frazer Rice (27:14.346)
Mm-hmm.
Rick Ferri (27:22.32)
Why you’re doing it this way. So it gets back to the philosophy. Really got to understand the philosophy and why this works better than 98 % of everything else out there over your lifetime. And then you create the strategy for yourself and now you’re working towards completing that. Again, in the retirement account it’s done quickly, but in your taxable account it could take a while.
The discipline is while you’re getting your portfolio in line, the first thing you need to do from a discipline standpoint is actually do it. Actually go to your 401k and change what you’re investing in. Because so many people will do the strategy, but it never gets actually implemented. Or maybe it gets 50 % implemented. It never gets old.
It doesn’t, I don’t want to say never, because I have a lot of clients who do fully implement it, but I also have clients that I’ve given them the plan and three years later or five years later they come back and they haven’t done anything. Okay. And so I say, you need to implement the plan. Nothing has changed. So you got to, the plan first off has to be implemented fully. And then once it gets implemented fully, it’s a lot easier to maintain it.
But if it never gets implemented fully, then of course you can’t maintain it. So implementation of the plan fully is the first discipline, the first part of discipline. And then once that’s done, maintaining it. In other words, not being drawn off course. Yeah, it’s fine to say, the price of oil is gonna shoot through the roof because what’s going on in the Middle East, so I’m gonna buy an energy index fund. That sounds like something I should do.
No, it’s something you could think about. Something might be interesting, but it’s not something you should do. So discipline transcends the urge to do things. In other words, like John Bogle said, don’t just do something, stand there. And that takes more going back and remembering why you have this philosophy, going back and looking at the data.
Rick Ferri (29:46.151)
going to the right place to find information. And I’ll mention the bogeyheads.org website to go back and remind yourself why you’re doing this. If you’re gonna stick with it and these things help you stick with it. The more you automate things too, the better it is. Like we’re in a 401k just automatically invest in the target date fund and don’t do anything else. So automation helps you as well.
Frazer Rice (30:05.736)
Hey, hey.
Frazer Rice (30:14.109)
No question, if you can take these things out of your own hands in many ways and delegate it out and it happens automatically, just a chance of success on that front. And then if life intervenes and things need to be adjusted, you deal with it at that point and not have CNBC or the world news whipsaw your viewpoint on these different things.
So as we wind down here, just talk a little bit about the service that you provide, sort of these larger family office clients, because I think in a lot of times they gravitate toward complexity, they gravitate toward FOMO investing and how you help to center that back to this worldview so that they get where they’re going at scale at sort of that ultra high net worth world and remind them of you how they got there and how to not be how to not leave by by getting cast aside into these different whirlpools that are out there
Rick Ferri (31:13.778)
That’s a great question. So you got to pick your advisors well. So some of my clients have a net worth over a billion dollars. I have several clients that have several hundreds of millions of dollars and believe me,
They have simple portfolios, total stock market, total international municipal bonds. It’s all they have. And it may seem strange, but they don’t have these limited partnerships that you can’t get out of or syndicated deals that may sound good. I say to them, you don’t have enough money to own those, meaning that if you’ve only got $100 million, you’re just chump change to the Goldman Sachs of the world or the Morgan Stanley’s.
When it comes to who’s going to get the good deal on a the next private equity deal or venture capital fund. You’re the person they sell the leftovers to. I know it’s hard to people to accept this. They think they have a lot of money if they have a hundred million. But the fact is they don’t. I mean, if you’re not sitting on five, ten billion dollars, you’re not going to get preferential treatment. You’re going to get you might get lucky.
Just like everything else, the coin flip idea, but most of the time you’re not going to end up coming out ahead. That’s not the way they make you feel when they sell you these things. They make you, even if you had a million dollars and your Wells Fargo broker is trying to sell you some limited partnership, they’re going to make it feel like you’re very special and that this is a very special deal that is just for you.
Frazer Rice (32:46.505)
You
Rick Ferri (32:50.322)
And that’s how it’s going to be sold to you. But in the end, when you look at your performance and you say, I want to get out of this thing and you can’t, you realize at that point that maybe you shouldn’t have done it to begin with. And I’ve had experience going back 30 years working with some of the very largest families in the country, some magnificent seven IPO families, and they all want to get back to simplicity.
They want to get rid of all of the stuff that they had gotten. And it’s true. And it’s better for estate planning as well because you need to transfer these things eventually to somebody else’s name.
Frazer Rice (33:35.785)
you’ve triggered me. I’m dealing with this on multiple levels, on multiple different things, and I’ve had to be trustee on some of the complexity and sort of sit Indian style and try to own your way through it. It’s brutal. So.
Rick Ferri (33:53.81)
Wouldn’t it be so much nicer just to have, let’s say, a single total stock market ETF to have to deal with rather than all that other stuff?
Frazer Rice (34:01.807)
No question. OK, so as we wind down here, how do listeners and watchers find you?
Rick Ferri (34:09.478)
Well, they can find me at Rickferri.com. I’m not currently and I won’t be taking on any new clients. I’m sorry for that, but I have a set clientele and that’s all that I am working with and I won’t be expanding my clientele. But there are other people that do this that believe in what I do. And you can go to Rickferry.com and you could find their names there. But me personally, you can find me on Rickferry.com. I’ve written several books about this. I’m writing another one.
And but I apologize that I’m not off the market as far as hiring me personally.
Frazer Rice (34:45.645)
I love it. But at the same time, your books and your other ways that get out there, they are on RickFerri.com. So we’ll have that in the show notes. In the meantime, Rick, thanks for being on.
Rick Ferri (34:52.07)
Yes, exactly. Thank you.