July 24, 2025

Episode 367: AMA #8 + Insurance Needs Analysis with Louai Bibi

July 24, 2025

What if early RRSP withdrawals aren’t always the tax-smart move they’re made out to be? In this special AMA edition of the Rational Reminder podcast, Ben and Cameron are joined by PWL Financial Planner Louai Bibi for a wide-ranging discussion on RRSP decumulation strategies, insurance planning, and the practical complexities that real clients face when theory meets reality. Ben walks through a listener’s case study and shares insights from colleague Melissa on why early RRSP withdrawals (a.k.a. “meltdown” strategies) are not always beneficial—especially when viewed through a present-value lens. Louai contributes in-the-trenches experience, highlighting how client goals (estate vs. living net worth) and asset allocation can significantly influence what makes sense. In the second half, Louai delivers a comprehensive walkthrough of how PWL approaches life, disability, and critical illness insurance planning—not as salespeople, but as fiduciaries. You’ll hear why the right coverage isn’t one-size-fits-all, how survivor models are used to project financial impacts, and why the smallest, cheapest policy can still make a life-changing difference.

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:00:04) Introduction and full-circle moment: Louai Bibi joins the show.

(0:01:48) Reflections on the first PWL employee summit and One Digital integration.

(0:06:30) Upcoming Rational Reminder meetups in Victoria and Vancouver.

(0:07:40) Steve’s question: Should he be melting down his growing RRSP?

(0:09:15) Ben outlines a detailed client case where early withdrawals had minimal benefit.

(0:12:10) Key takeaway: Present value of taxes matters more than total lifetime taxes.

(0:13:50) Melissa’s advice: Model your specific situation, not just follow YouTube tips.

(0:15:56) Louai adds: The impact on future investment growth and taxable account drag.

(0:17:28) Systematically reviewing RRSP strategies annually in November.

(0:21:12) Taxes and portfolio construction: Home country bias, withholding tax, and more.

(0:22:11) The importance of tax diversification—lessons from the capital gains inclusion saga.

(0:23:11) RESP withdrawals and CRA’s definition of “reasonable” expenses.

(0:25:41) Fiduciary standards in Canada: Why sweeping change is unlikely.

(0:26:29) Most influential ideas from 300+ episodes: Market beliefs, information overload, and Die With Zero.

(0:34:36) Time, meaning, and memories: A shift in life perspective through the podcast.

(0:38:47) Louai’s top 3 lessons: Unified philosophy, consumption smoothing, and homeownership myths.

(0:42:21) Deep dive: How PWL approaches life, disability, and critical illness insurance.

(0:45:00) Life insurance: Survivor modeling, planning trade-offs, and permanent vs. term.

(0:51:32) Disability insurance: Hidden risks in group coverage and income replacement importance.

(0:56:36) Critical illness insurance: A real story about an inexpensive policy that changed a life.

(1:00:07) Ben’s experience with testicular cancer and hindsight on CI coverage.

(1:01:45) Teaser: A new disclaimer for reading podcast reviews.

(1:02:08) After-show: MobLand, The Sopranos, and the nostalgia of Animal Kingdom.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from three Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, CIO, Cameron Passmore, CEO, and today, Louai Bibi, Financial Planner at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to episode 367, an AMA episode with a bit of a twist. We have Louai joining us, which is very exciting. Great to see you, as I said, Lou, and we're going to talk today about how we approach and how you approach life, disability, and critical illness insurance for clients.

Louai Bibi: This will be fun, and this is like a full circle moment for me because, Cameron, you know that I reached out to you on LinkedIn a couple of years ago because I listened to the podcast, and I was just so convinced by what everyone here was doing. Ben, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. I don't know if you know this.

You did an informational interview with me, I want to say six years ago. You scared the crap out of me. That's actually why I reached out to Cameron on LinkedIn afterwards.

So this podcast is like full circle for me. It's very cool.

Ben Felix: Wait, what do you mean? How did I scare you?

Louai Bibi: Well, I was fresh out of university. I had just started at the bank, and I wanted some advice. I'd already been listening to the podcast, just in terms of, do I keep going down the bank route? Is the grass potentially greener here? And you were very straight-faced. That really shook me a little bit.

I remember getting off that call, my heart was racing, and I was like, wow. When I reach out to PWL in the future, let me try Cameron. He's the other podcast host, and that's what I did.

Ben Felix: Oh, man, I'm sorry. I didn't realize. I did not know that.

Louai Bibi: It worked out. No, you didn't. No, you didn't.

Ben Felix: Six years later, I apologize.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, we're glad you reached out. You're an amazing member of the team. Speaking of team, Ben?

Ben Felix: I do want to mention, I don't know if this is interesting for listeners or not, but last week, we had our first ever employee summit. We've had Christmas parties and get-togethers and stuff like that before, but this was our first all-company meetup that combined speakers, employee speakers from the team, speaker panels, where we had multiple people from different departments on panels, combined that stuff, business information sharing type stuff, with social activities. We called it a summit.

It was pretty cool, but I can say, after being here for nearly 12 years, it was unlike anything we've ever pulled off. Cameron, you've been here longer. I don't know, I think you'd probably agree.

It's unlike anything that's ever been pulled off by this company. The energy was just, it was incredible. The content was also incredible.

Learned a ton. We had leaders from One Digital and Dimensional there as well, who also spoke and gave some great talks. It was something to be a part of.

The energy was just nuts. Like you said on LinkedIn recently, Cameron, we've got one investment philosophy, one planning philosophy, one national team united by mission, not just by brand. Witnessing that live in person, being part of that live in person, seeing that in action, it was just energizing like nothing I've experienced professionally before.

It was pretty cool.

Cameron Passmore: It's interesting after having joined One Digital six months ago to see in a room the energy. I look forward to your feedback here, Louai, but to see that many people. I'm sure I've spoken to well over a hundred advisors so far this year at other firms.

Even though I can't prove this, I have yet to meet a single team, single purpose, mission driven, one team, one set of clients that's larger than ours. I suspect they're out there. I just don't know about them, but it's amazing to see the kind of energy when you bring.

We had 90 people in that room last week and it was unreal. Louai, what did you think?

Louai Bibi: I was blown away working with Brady in the office. I've just become such an in-person guy where seeing everybody in one room that I could go talk to anybody was awesome. For me as somebody who works in the business and not necessarily on it, and I hope it's okay for me to say stuff like this, but I hadn't met any of the folks from One Digital because it was very like status quo.

I got a chance on the Friday to have breakfast with Andrew for a little bit, who heads up the wealth division for One Digital. It was just so refreshing to hear him say, we'll acquire practices and partner with them. Then they'll come to us and say, what do we do now?

Andrew's response was, you tell us. We acquired you, we partnered with you for a reason, you tell us how to lead this ship. I needed to hear it from them a little bit that they wanted us to do not a single thing differently.

That really hit home and that was the theme of my few days there.

Ben Felix: You and I, Cameron, we spent a lot of time with the folks at One Digital. I think we saw this when we talked about this on the podcast for the first time too, is that we felt so comfortable with the decision and what we were doing because we had gotten to know those folks so well. We had a lot of conviction in them as a partner, but other people had not met them and don't know them and didn't have the same conviction that we do.

That was true for our podcast audience. It was also true, I think, for our team. Getting the team in front of those folks, I think, was really valuable.

I think people came away with the same impression that we had initially, that they're just a great fit for us.

Cameron Passmore: We spent the last six months making sure the trust battery is good and full. I don't think we would have had the same outcome necessarily, even if the same things were said, if we had done it right away after the announcement. Having six months under our belt and lots of experiences and proof points, I think that was, in hindsight, a pretty wise decision on our part to wait.

Ben Felix: Yep.

Cameron Passmore: Speaking of community and team, Ben, you and I are taking a bit of a show on the road in September. We're going to be having Rational Reminder meetups in Victoria on September 15th and then on Wednesday, the 17th in Vancouver.

Very excited to finally get out. I'm getting lots of messages on LinkedIn because we posted some stuff there about the events. Whether you're a listener, an advisor, you want to meet up, drop us a note by email here or go to info at rationalreminder.ca. You, of course, can find us on LinkedIn. It's easy to get a spot. Then once you reserve, we'll let you know exactly the time and place. We're going back to your home province, Ben.

Ben Felix: That's right. Back to Vancouver Island, where I grew up.

Cameron Passmore: Will be an amazing trip, amazing few days.

Love to meet lots of people. Anything else before we jump into the main meat of the episode?

Ben Felix: Let's go to the meat.

Cameron Passmore: AMA number eight.

Ben Felix: Crazy, right?

Cameron Passmore: Crazy.

Ben Felix: Yes. We have a bit of a shortened AMA.

We chopped off a few questions. We've got less than usual. Then Louai is going to finish up the episode with his talk on insurance, which will be great.

For now, let's jump into the AMA questions. I can read the first one. It is a very long question because they gave us a mini case study.

This is from Steve. Steve says, I retired at the end of June 2023 with a USD RRSP of $904,744.78. I understand the concept of RRSP meltdown. What he's referring to there, there are a couple of different definitions of RRSP meltdown.

What he's referring to there is, I believe, doing early RRSP withdrawals before it is required for him to do so in an effort to save tax in the future. Back to the question. Since retiring, I have withdrawn $218,207.63 from the RRSP to pay for home renos, a new vehicle, 2025 Subaru Forester. Not that it matters, but it does. I've got one of those too. It's great.

Cameron Passmore: Suby bunny going on here.

Ben Felix: Vacation travel to help out my only child with a down payment on her condo. Insert rent versus buy arguments here.

That's from the question. Now here we are at the end of November and the RRSP, well, the question was from November. Sorry, it took us nine months to answer you, Steve.

The RRSP has a value of $1,145,249.64. Granted, by the time you're reading this, the market value may have undergone a steep correction. It did, but then it came back. It's probably up above where it was previously, or may have increased substantially yet again, or remain relatively stable.

I'm aiming to have enough of that in cash or cash equivalents to a two to three year downturn. My wife is collecting both CPP and OAS, which given income splitting this year is going to be clawed back. Most big ticket items have been taken care of.

Shouldn't require a lot of money withdrawn for lifestyle expenses. I don't plan on taking CPP or OAS until I'm 70. I'm currently 66 and she's 70.

We're in Alberta. My spouse and I have almost all of our TFSA room available. Interesting detail there for this discussion.

There was no such thing as a TFSA when I started and there seemed to be no point making further RRSP contributions for the last 10 or so years. I'll be withdrawing some money for travel, toys, et cetera. Okay, so that's the context.

Feeling free to ignore all of the above, which we did not. We read it all. The generic question is what decumulation strategy should be used for an RRSP that is growing in value at a rate faster than the money is being withdrawn?

I'll share my thoughts and then Louai, I think you have some comments too. We've run this for many different clients. I'm trying to convince Melissa, who I'll talk about in a minute, to do a white paper with me on this topic so we can look at a whole bunch of cases and consolidate them in one place.

I think it'd be a cool paper. We found that optimal RRSP withdrawal strategies are very case by case, depending on the details of the situation, which I think is why I make a cool paper because we could do a whole array of cases. Anyway, the big question is really whether it makes sense to make early RRSP withdrawals, even if they're not needed for consumption.

That's Steve's question. I don't need to spend any more, but should I take more money out? You'd be doing those withdrawals to either fund a taxable investment account because the money has to go somewhere if you're not spending it, or if you have the room, a TFSA.

It can make a lot of sense to do those early withdrawals, particularly when there are low taxable income years that are expected to be followed by high taxable income years later on due to things like CPP and OAS and RRIF minimums kicking in. Especially it can make sense if there is TFSA room available to move the funds into because if you're pulling money out of an RRSP and investing it in a taxable account and you have a higher tax rate or even a moderate tax rate, the after-tax growth rate is going to be quite a bit lower. Over a long horizon, that can really hurt.

We did have one interesting client case recently on this topic that Melissa sent me. She gave me her notes, which I generalized from the client case. Melissa is a financial planner at PWL.

It's worth mentioning just because it's so cool. Melissa tied for second place when she wrote the October 2024 CFP exam and she tied with Eric who is also at PWL. Kind of awesome.

This client came in, they'd been convinced that early RRSP withdrawals or the RRSP meltdown made sense for them because they'd watched a bunch of content on YouTube about it and they wanted us to implement the strategy. They came really like, hey, I want to do this thing because I saw a video on it or a bunch of videos on it and I think it makes sense. They thought it was especially true for their objective of leaving a larger after-tax estate and also for reducing taxes paid throughout their life.

We modeled this scenario, well, Melissa modeled it in Conquest, which is our financial planning software. We actually found that in this case, there was a very little benefit to the early withdrawal strategy. The main reasons in that case, in that client case were that the client had sufficient sources of income outside of the RRSP to fund their lifestyle and their TFSA contributions.

The client was already able to split income with their spouse. They were both already able to take advantage of the pension credit, which is sometimes it can make sense to convert before you have to convert a portion of your RRSP to a RRIF to take advantage of the pension tax credit. In this case, they already had that.

In their case, any RRSP withdrawals would have been going into a taxable account because the TFSAs were already being maxed out. Another thing that was interesting in this case is that at death, the RRSP slash RRIF accounts made up a relatively small portion of their overall net worth. It didn't make a huge, huge difference either way.

The modeling though did show a small benefit in after-tax estate value with some modest RRSP withdrawals every year up to age 70. It's not like super aggressively trying to melt down the entire RRSP really quickly. It was just little modest withdrawals.

Up until age 70 when other sources of income started to kick in. When we looked at the numbers, not in absolute value terms, but in present value, the difference between the strategies was negligible. Another interesting point here is that the absolute amount of taxes paid throughout life, the client's life and on death, it would have been lower with the early RRSP withdrawals, but in present value terms, the total taxes paid were almost identical.

Another interesting lens to kind of in conquest, you can flip back and forth between different views. You can show like, hey, look at this RRSP meltdown strategy. You're going to pay way less tax over your life, which is true, but if you look at the present value of the taxes that you paid, because in the RRSP meltdown case, you're paying the taxes much earlier in life, it's actually not advantageous, which is one of the reasons in this case, it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Melissa told me that she thinks a lot of the content that she's seen on this topic misses that. They show, look how much less lifetime tax you're going to pay, but they don't account for the time value of when those taxes were paid. Pretty interesting point.

All that to say, there are cases where early RRSP withdrawals can be beneficial, but there are also cases where it is not beneficial or has minimal benefit, like the one that we just talked through. Melissa says that people should be careful to model out the strategy for their specific situation, not just use rules of thumb, which is again, why I think a paper would be really interesting, because if we can do a whole bunch of cases, while it's not a rule of thumb, people can identify with a general set of assumptions and then make a decision from there if they don't have access to an actual financial plan. Another interesting point here is the client came in focused on reducing taxes paid on death, but when Melissa dug into what the real objective was, they found that it was really to leave a larger after-tax estate to the kids. You could end up paying more tax because you have more wealth.

Minimizing tax is not necessarily the right objective if the objective is to maximize the after-tax estate. Then I sent Melissa this question, the AMA question, and she didn't run the analysis because she didn't have enough information, but she said that based on the information that the listener provided, there's probably much more benefit to using an RRSP meltdown strategy in their case than in the case that I just went through. The reason she gave that they have TFSA room, they have to be mindful of OAS clawback based on the details that we have.

Without any modeling, this is just her intuition, if they can draw down a good portion of the RRSP before starting CPP and OAS, and that reduces OAS clawback, that could be beneficial. She also said that she thinks that this case really highlights how important it is to have a financial plan because in this listener's case, there could be a lot of value added from doing this versus that scenario. She also said that without the full details of this client situation, it's tough to say exactly what the optimal strategy would be, but she basically just said that in a case like that where you're struggling with that type of decision and a decision like this, it can be really impactful.

It can also not be impactful at all like the case we went through first, but her suggestion is maybe at least go to a V-only planner and just get the numbers run properly for your situation. The other tricky thing is that the client that we just talked through, they're now on a variable RRSP withdrawal strategy where based on what their taxable income is each year, some amount will come out of the RRSP and optimizing that amount is not a one-time, we'll do this once and you're good. Louai?

Louai Bibi: I'm with everything that you said, Ben. My thing reading this question from Steve was, are we looking to maximize the living net worth or the estate net worth?

You touched on that there because if you're taking extra money out of your RRSP, you're drawing down your portfolio, you're prepaying tax and not only is the portfolio shrinking on that front, but you're also giving up the future potential returns that that money that you prepaid tax on could participate in. We're looking at this very regularly. We've got a project every November with our clients where we simulate tax returns, we look at Conquest, our planning software, and we figure out which clients does this make sense for versus who does it not make sense for.

I think asset allocation is interesting as well because we do RRSP meltdown strategies for clients who are maximizing their TFSAs and now they're saving in a non-registered environment. From the work that we've done, that seems to be making sense for them long-term, but it's interesting with interest rates having been on the higher end and still slightly a little bit higher than maybe where it was five years ago. If you are a fixed income heavy investor and we're pulling money out of your RRSP where those interest income earnings were tax sheltered and now we're putting them in a taxable environment, are we almost making you worse off?

That's something that we are checking out very regularly, but I do think that asset allocation adds a little bit of a wrinkle in there as well.

Ben Felix: You're saying that we're systematically looking at the meltdown idea for clients?

Louai Bibi: Totally. Every November for as long as I've been here and it's one of my favorite times of the year because I'm nerdier and I love being in front of clients, but I also like being able to put my hoodie on, go through a nice spreadsheet, have my coffee, and not talk to a single person for a few hours. Yes, we are systematically looking.

Ben Felix: You're definitely a Rational Reminder listener. I can tell. All right, next question.

Francois says, can you explain the impact of taxes on your investment strategy? Any tips for EU listeners? Should our financial planning somehow model the risk of increased capital gain taxes?

I don't have any EU specific tips since we're not in the EU and don't have expertise there. I wouldn't want to say something ridiculous. I know how nuanced Canadian tax and tax with portfolio management relationships are, so I won't even try.

For the EU, more generally though, tax definitely affects investment strategy. It's after-tax returns that matter to funding future consumption, which makes tax considerations a really important part of designing any portfolio. One example is actively managed funds.

They've struggled even more on an after-tax basis than on a pre-tax one because active portfolios tend to have more turnover, leading to more taxable distributions. That could make a taxable investor even less likely to pursue active management than a non-taxable or another way of saying that is that if you were going to pursue active management, I don't think you should, but if you're going to, you might want to do it in a non-taxable account if you can. That's one example.

Another example is the justification for home country bias, at least as we talk about it in Canada. I can't speak for the details in other countries. I know there are other countries that have similar taxation setups to what I'm about to describe for Canada.

Canadian investors get credit for corporate taxes paid by Canadian corporations through this complicated system of a dividend gross up and tax credit. The result though is that that makes owning Canadian stocks a bit more tax efficient, all else equal for Canadians than owning foreign stocks. Again, there's a tax interaction with portfolio management that may lead to, and in our case does lead to a home country bias.

There's other stuff too, like there's foreign withholding tax that can affect the total cost of owning a security or a fund. You can look at a Canadian listed and a U.S. listed ETF of say international stocks, and you might look at the U.S. one and say, oh, it's got a lower fee. It's cheaper to own.

If you're in Canada and you account for foreign withholding tax, unrecoverable foreign withholding tax in a tax-free savings account or a taxable account, not in an RRSP though, then the U.S. listed fund may actually be more expensive to own. That's just another example. Tax is super important, a super important consideration in designing a portfolio.

On the tax rate uncertainty question, that's a tough one. We already model uncertainty when we do financial planning. We model the uncertainty of returns.

We can think about uncertainty of inflation, but adding in more and more uncertainty variables to a financial plan, I don't know if it's going to make it a higher quality plan. I think it's just going to make your assumptions more conservative. At a certain point, you have to make a decision about how aggressive you really want to save to address all possible uncertainties or how conservatively you really want to spend to address all possible uncertainties.

I do think for specific decisions like pre versus after tax savings accounts, whether you should use your RRSP or your TFSA in Canada, whether you should attempt asset location strategies, whether tax loss harvesting makes sense. Those are all things where I think it can make sense to think about future tax rate uncertainty because a change in future tax rates can completely blow up those strategies. Those strategies are most sensitive to that variable, so it can make sense there.

You guys have any thoughts on that one?

Louai Bibi: The only thing that I'll add, and this is something, it's a theme that comes up with client conversations a lot, is just the concept of tax diversification. Just as an example, we've got a lot of clients who come to us where they are paying themselves only dividends, so they're not building RRSP room or paying into CPP, and they're saving pretty much exclusively in their corporations. And then last, I think it was like last June, when the tax legislation changed and capital gains inclusion rates went up, that was kind of a scary and stressful time for a lot of clients.

And there's no way to predict future tax legislation and how things are going to shake out on that front. But just the concept of tax diversification, no different than the portfolio front, saving different buckets with different tax treatments, try to diversify yourself away from having one of those panic moments that a lot of investors and corporate professionals had a couple of years ago. That's one thing that we, that was a lesson for us where we've just honed in on that and made sure that we're talking about that all the time.

Ben Felix: Yeah, that inclusion rate thing was such a debacle. We spent so much time on that and then poof, it became nothing. It's like, man, come on guys.

Cameron Passmore: The entire tax advisory community, imagine the thousands of hours of wasted time.

Ben Felix: Yeah, crazy stuff. I'm glad we were very conservative on that. We ran the numbers and it basically showed that unless a client was going to sell an asset soon anyway, it didn't make sense to realize gains.

I'm sure there are people out there that were more aggressive with that type of planning. You should realize a lot of gains now, then the inclusion rate didn't go through and it's like, phew, glad we didn't do that. Okay, next question.

Do you want to read this one, Louai?

Louai Bibi: This is from Angela and she says, in your episode about RESPs, it was brought up that a full-time student could use some of the funds to invest in a TFSA tax-free savings account. Can you expand on this a little? I was of the understanding that withdrawals could only be made to support post-secondary school expenses.

Thank you. It was very polite.

Ben Felix: This is an interesting one. Amounts contributed to the RESP, those can fund a TFSA, no problem. Those are contributions, they belong to the subscriber to the RESP account.

There's no restrictions on their use. EAPs, Educational Assistance Payments, those are the ones that are consisting of grants and growth inside the account. They have to be reasonable.

It gets a little complex, I think. CRA does have a position on what is reasonable. They published guidance, I think, in 2024.

Maybe it existed before, but I know they published some guidance on this in 2024 that had a whole list of reasonable expenses. There is also a dollar threshold for reasonableness. That's $28,881 in 2025.

Below that amount, promoters, so that's like national bank or I guess sort of PWL slash national bank if we hold the RESP account. Promoters are not expected to assess the reasonableness of each expense item as long as the total amount of the EAP withdrawal in a year is below $28,881. If the total amount exceeds that threshold, the promoter is required to determine the reasonableness of the expenses.

As long as you're below the $28,881 level, nobody's going to say, hey, you can't do that. You have to use that money for this or that. You could use it for whatever if you wanted to.

I've never seen this happen, but it is worth noting that in that same bulletin that I mentioned a minute ago from CRA, they do note that they can technically audit any EAP regardless of the amount. Using EAP funds for expenses other than what CRA considers reasonable does introduce maybe some risk. I've never seen it actually happen.

I've never seen that type of audit happen, but it's there.

Louai Bibi: You'd hope the CRA would have maybe a bigger fish to fry, getting their TFSA room showing up in the portal again and not cracking down on EAP withdrawals for our ESPs.

Ben Felix: I did ask a bunch of financial planners I know about that. They basically said, never seen it be an issue. They also made the point that money's fungible.

You could cover an expense with dollars that are called EAP funds and invest other money into the student's TFSA account without having an issue. Two different types of withdrawals. One type, no issue.

One type, I don't know if I'd call it a gray area because CRA is pretty clear about it, but in terms of actual enforcement, maybe a gray area. You want to read this one, Cameron?

Cameron Passmore: From Anonymous, do you think Canadian regulators will ever accept a fiduciary standard for all professionals that provide financial advice?

Ben Felix: I think that seems pretty unlikely. Our regulatory system here in Canada is heavily influenced by large, powerful financial institutions, a small handful of them. Certain registration categories like portfolio managers are held to that higher standard.

I don't know. Would it be good if we had that for everybody? I have seen that there's one paper that looks at, I think it's the annuity market in the US that shows that having a fiduciary standard led to lower cost product recommendations.

Great for consumers, not so great for financial firms. It's that not so great for financial firms that makes me skeptical that we'll see that type of sweeping reform in Canada.

Cameron Passmore: I agree. Well put. The next one from Andrew K. After more than 300 episodes, you've explored incredible topics and informed countless listeners. What are the top three ideas or concepts that have not only changed your view of finance, but also influenced other areas of your life?

You and I have been chatting about this earlier and this is a tough question. Do you want to go first?

Ben Felix: Sure, I'll go first. I think I wrote four things.

Cameron Passmore: So did I. I guess it wasn't that tough.

Ben Felix: I don't know if I like this question because I've been asked a few times and I think my answer changes every time. There's just so much content.

I don't know. Anyway, I'll say what I wrote down this time. I think my conviction in or against any investment strategy has gotten weaker, not stronger over time after all the people we've talked to and all the research we've done.

For every strong conviction that exists, there is an equal and opposite strong conviction from someone equally intelligent and qualified, which just makes it hard to like, oh, everyone agrees that this makes sense. That doesn't exist in finance.

Cameron Passmore: But isn't that the backbone of why the philosophy we espouse makes sense? Because my first response to that question was my conviction in our philosophy has actually increased over time. However, my desire to convince others has decreased.

Ben Felix: A lot more people agree on something like just own the market than they do on something like trend following, but there's still very strong convictions that you should not be indexing. You know what I mean?

Cameron Passmore: Sure. The people that we've spoken to, but if you look at the marketplace, the marketplace, particularly in Canada, has not embraced that.

Ben Felix: No. I mean, if you look at the dollars invested in funds, absolutely not. Not even close.

We get the question about trend following so much. Like trend following has come up in AMAs more than I think any other question. It's like, you think trend following makes sense. Great. Good for you. Awesome. Enjoy.

Cameron Passmore: That's what I mean, but you're not trying to convince people. You put the information out, you interview the people that you found, but you don't have this burning desire to change the world necessarily. To change people's minds.

Help inform is one thing. To help people form their beliefs. Once people's beliefs have been formed, it's tough to change.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Same thing for gold. You want to invest in gold, I'm happy for you.

You want to have factor tilts in your portfolio? Great. I do too.

You want to have really aggressive factor tilts? Awesome. I understand what you're getting into, but hey, have fun.

You want to market cap weight? Nice. That's great too.

You want to be 100% in stocks after you heard Scott Sederberg? Hey, I'm 100% in stocks. Awesome.

You want to be 60-40? I mean, great. I don't know.

I just think that nobody knows. There's a lot of wisdom in what David Booth says, that you have to have an investment strategy that you can stick with. Nobody knows what the ex-ante, before the fact.

Nobody knows before the fact what the optimal portfolio looks like. I think that what we do at PWL, I do the exact same thing in my personal portfolio that we do for our clients. Just maybe not the same asset allocation as all of our clients, but the same portfolio strategy, the same investment products.

I think that makes a lot of sense. It's low cost, it's broadly diversified. It does have some factor tilts, which I think makes sense, but I can't claim that it's ex-ante optimal.

I can't say that portfolio that I use and that we use is going to be the best performing portfolio for the next 20 or 50 or whatever years. Then I'm also highly skeptical of anyone claiming that they know what the ex-ante optimal portfolio looks like. My convictions in anything have gotten weaker.

My convictions for and against anything. Nobody can predict the future.

Cameron Passmore: It's interesting you mentioned the bond question. You listen to Scott Cederberg, you'd go all equity. Listen to Bob Merton, you wouldn't.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Edward McQuarrie has a paper looking further back in time than Scott. Bonds look a lot better over a lot of that period.

There's so many questions there. Do we need to look back that far in time? At what point do the data stop being relevant?

Scott made a pretty good case for why data going back to 1890 are still relevant for today, but what about going back to 1790 or whatever McQuarrie's paper goes to? There's so much good research and so many smart people with strong opinions. It's what David Booth says.

You have to have an investment strategy that you can stick with and you have to stick with it. That's one. Are we alternating or should I just go through all mine?

Cameron Passmore: Keep going. I may jump in and interrupt you again.

Ben Felix: Okay. Market efficiency doesn't really matter. I think market efficiency has become this ridiculous straw man target where people will point to specific events and say like, ah, I knew it, markets are not efficient. That couldn't possibly happen in an efficient market.

Marco Sammon talked about this the first time he was on his podcast. This is a quote from Marco. I actually think measuring price efficiency, whatever that means, is really hard.

One of the reasons it's really hard is that it kind of assumes you have some way to know what a stock is worth at any given point in time. End of quote. What really matters to investors is whether they can consistently outperform by identifying market inefficiencies, whatever those are, whatever that means.

The answer to that question continues to be no most of the time. We used to talk a lot about market efficiency. I don't even think it matters.

It's too hard to define. It's too hard to measure. That doesn't mean everyone can beat the market though.

That's kind of my point. Even if markets aren't efficient, markets are inefficient. Look, look, okay.

Who's beating the market?

Cameron Passmore: Wasn't it Ken Francis says it may not be efficient, but why not invest like they are efficient?

Ben Felix: Right. Which makes sense. Market efficiency is just a model, but that doesn't mean that you can beat the market.

Cameron Passmore: Models aren't reality.

Ben Felix: Models aren't reality and the reality is that you can't beat the market.

Most people can. Mean variance optimization is respectfully to anyone using it because I know a lot of financial professionals do, completely useless.

Cameron Passmore: Respectfully.

Louai Bibi: Don't get me started CP.

Ben Felix: This has come up implicitly and explicitly in different ways across past episodes, but it's still very common in the industry to see people whipping out the sharp ratios of a product or a strategy or whatever. Scott Cederberg and Hank Bessembinder both talked about how the normality assumption in the sharp ratio fails at long horizons due to skewness, which really limits its usefulness for a long-term investors. It's a single period model over a single monthly maybe period.

The distributions of returns do tend to be pretty normal, but over longer horizons, which are more relevant to most people, returns do not tend to be normally distributed. That alone just kind of kills the usefulness of the sharp ratio for unless your time horizon is a month. John Cochrane stuff on multi-factor asset pricing suggests that the optimal portfolio for most people is multi-factor efficient, not mean variance efficient.

Mean variance efficiency is kind of what you're looking for when you're looking for the highest sharp ratio. This means that the portfolio may not be mean variance efficient, which you might say, oh, that's not good. It doesn't have the highest sharp ratio, but it's that way because it hedges some other non-portfolio risk that is relevant to you as an individual.

That's not going to show up in a sharp ratio. That doesn't mean it's a bad portfolio if it's hedging something that matters to you. Paul Coluso talked about his research on complex instruments in mutual funds and how complex instruments like options can transform some of your standard deviation risk into skew or kurtosis risks, which are not captured in the sharp ratio.

That results in an artificially inflated risk return trade-off. He talked about that because in their paper evaluating the use of complex instruments in mutual funds, they use something called the manipulation proof performance measure to get around that problem with the sharp ratio. You take all that stuff together, I don't even mention illiquidity.

Don't even get me started on volatility laundering through illiquid assets and how that affects sharp ratios. If someone says, look how high my sharp ratio is, I don't have a whole lot of time for that. My fourth one, I've got to give a mention to the non-financial stuff too.

We've talked so much about, it's been a while actually, I guess, but all the stuff on time versus money, experience versus things, time use, goal setting. Cassie Holmes talking about counting the times left of doing stuff in your life. I went swimming at the river with my kids last night.

I didn't count the times left, but if I did, there's not that many times left where I've got all four of my kids swimming at the river together.

Cameron Passmore: Commitment devices.

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Commitment device is true. I don't know if I think about it every day, but it's bits and pieces of that definitely have filtered into my everyday life and thinking.

Cameron Passmore: I should talk about that. It's not a commitment device, but the habit with a client at the gym yesterday morning, he said, I forget who the guest was at all. Instead of deciding which days of the week to go to the gym, just decided to go every day.

Therefore, you never have to mentally juggle, okay, if I go on Monday, I can skip Tuesday, go on Wednesday, but I'm out Thursday. You just go every day. You go every day and it's just so much easier.

Kind of like Joe Biden wore the same suit every day. There's no decision to be made, right? You just do it, right?

Just easier. All right, so mine, I gave my first one. Number two, I thought the industry would change in Canada towards indexing much quicker, much like in the US, and that has not been the case.

When I first heard the merits of indexing back in 1997, yes, 1997, Lou, it just seemed so sensible even without doing all of the learnings we've done over the past eight to 10 years or so, it just made sense. But this week alone, I've spoken to three people at three different brokerages in Canada. Not only is the usage or belief in the power of markets work type philosophy not there and not being used, but the awareness of it is not there, which is just staggering to me.

It's one thing to be aware and choose not to, but to largely, this is what I was told, sample of three, but the awareness is not there. There's so much data, so much research that you've done, Ben, that so many people just aren't aware of. Another thing I thought was worth mentioning is I have a much greater appreciation just for questioning assumptions.

Our industry is so loaded with throwaway terms and rules of thumb and stuff that's just sad enough just becomes true. That's just not the case. I know this is how you operate, Ben, with your engineering mind and thought process, but question everything, challenge everything, dig into the details and try to get to the bottom of ideas that are out there.

There's so much academic research. SSRN is so full of unbelievable information, right? In the investment world where you've got this mass amount of information, asymmetry, the clients perceiving that advisors know so much more, which they don't necessarily do no more, that's just fertile ground for evidence like that to not come to light and to have a status quo in, let alone the economic drivers to not change how people are advised.

I thought the great democratization of information would lead to better planning and better investment outcomes. The information on Google, the internet, just in general, the books, the publications, the podcasts, and then let alone social media, which I think has just made a complete disastrous storm for many people trying to get a handle on their finances and what's important to them, what do they want to save for, where do they get the information, the focus on consumption, this ad-based, algorithm-based force feeding information that so many people are completely addicted to. I just think that's a nightmare environment to try to figure out A, what's important to you long-term, B, how do you manage it, your finances in the near term so that you can do systematic things day in, day out to reach the ability to have the kind of life you want down the road. I just think it's a complete shame that all this information is being completely polluted in a social media-driven world.

Ben Felix: That's a good one. There's a lot of subpar advice online.

Cameron Passmore: That can get accelerated if people pick up on or discuss something catchy, right? There's not that quality filter, let alone the drive for consumption. You have an ad-based – I think it was Scott Galloway talked about that, saying the fundamental flaw of the internet and search is that it's ad-based as opposed to pay-to-play-based, which right now, I guess you could say the AI world is more pay-to-play-based as opposed to ad-based.

Ben Felix: I think Canada just did a bit of a – I don't know if it was a crackdown. Canadian regulators started voicing concerns about how online influencers may be affecting people. I think they were looking at doing some kind of regulatory intervention. Lou, what's yours?

Louai Bibi: I've got three and the themes are actually pretty similar to what both of you have mentioned. The first one is the one investment philosophy approach.

That was transformative for me coming from the bank where passive index market cap factor tilted, you name it. That is not what they're doing. Being able to understand why it makes sense for clients, share that message with clients, and then actually realize how much time as a client-facing planner that frees up for me to go do more meaningful things for clients, that blew my mind the first time that I really learned that there's a better way to invest.

Just to add to that, I've very much become kind of similar to both of you where if a client asks about market cap weighted, fantastic. If a client asks about gold, sure. If somebody asks about whole life insurance and I get a bunch of questions on whole life, I've historically been of the mind where I'm going to send you the white paper that PWL has on why whole life insurance is not an optimal investment for long-term money.

And then, you know what, like after a handful of conversations, I was like, you know what, if this is the thing that doesn't disrupt any of our clients' financial objectives and it keeps them in their seat and maybe there's like a social aspect to it that I'm clearly missing, so be it. They're going to be fine. That's kind of number one for me.

Number two is the idea of smoothing out your consumption over time. And for those that are on video, I've got this book behind me, Die With Zero, and I'm still reading it, but it's totally transformed my view just in terms of conversations with clients on creating memories with their families while they can. And that includes spending money relative to just saving every single penny that they can so that they can retire sooner or whatever this looks like.

I'm thinking of one client in specific who's an awesome guy and we built his financial plan and it was like we were looking at all the numbers and he wanted to hard stop, retire at age 50. And then time went on and his family was growing and he was doing more stuff with his family and his spending was going up. And he was like, Louai, do you think we were too aggressive with the planning projections, me being able to shut off my income at age 50?

And it was like, you know what, maybe. But what I will tell you is that you are just going to build the most fantastic life, spending more time with your family, even if that means spending more money and maybe working an extra couple years or whatever that looks like. I will tell you right now that you won't regret it.

And when Mark retired, I sent him the link to the LinkedIn posts and I was like, this is what I'm talking about. This is what it's about, spending time with your family. I hope that he didn't interpret that email as me telling him to retire today because that was not the intention, but it's about smoothing out your spending for sure.

And the last one, this is a short one for me. You do not need to be a homeowner to be able to build meaningful wealth and live a good life. And I say this as a renter myself, there's so many other variables to homeownership versus renting a place that just makes such a difference on your life.

Flexibility, cashflow, mental overhead, you name it. Homeownership is not the only way to build wealth. So that's my third and final.

Ben Felix: We'll go to your insurance talk in a second. So there was an international crackdown on unlawful finfluencers from June 2nd to 6th that a bunch of Canadian regulatory bodies participated in. All right, should we go to Louai on life disability and critical illness insurance?

Louai Bibi: Let's do it. I wanted to come on here, guys, and chat a little bit about how we think about insurance planning for our clients by prefacing first that we do not sell insurance. So this is us just doing the thinking and the solving for clients to help them ultimately make decisions about how much insurance to get, what kinds to get and why.

I'm going to cover life insurance, disability and critical illness. And I'm going to give a few examples of cases where we've worked on them recently, but it's kind of changed my perspective a little bit just in terms of how to approach this with clients. And there are a ton of rules of thumb out there where this is the right way to do insurance.

This is the wrong way. And I also want to kind of add to that by saying that I don't think that there is necessarily a right or a super wrong way. I think the way we do it is awesome because we do it in the context of our clients financial plans.

And I don't want to gatekeep that. So if there's other people out there like insurance advisors who can take something from this and apply it to their clients, or conversely, somebody thinks they've got a better way that they can show me how to do it, this is all about improving client experience, right? I would love to hear from them.

That's a dual offer there. And my final remark before I get started is that we firmly believe that financial planning is a process and not a finished product. So this isn't one of those things where you look at insurance, you solve the problem, and then you never look at it ever again.

Because ultimately, we build a financial plan for somebody based on a set of assumptions about their lives today. Tomorrow, something changes and that plan is no longer effective. Same concept applies to insurance.

So I will start with life insurance. And this is one that really stands out to me just given this kind of shift and specialization that we've really built at least with the couple of colleagues that I'm with in terms of working with incorporated professionals and doctors and dentists and you name it, and they are like the prime target for insurance pitches. So I've had a number of these conversations.

And for those who are less familiar with how life insurance works, in simplest form, it's basically an agreement between an insurance company and some other party where if you pass away during maybe a period of time or sometime over your life, that insurance company will pay a lump sum benefit to you or your beneficiary, whatever that looks like, in exchange for these monthly costs or annual costs. And it could be as cheap as like 10 bucks a month, and it could be as expensive as tens of thousands a month.

So this is why it's just so important to get this right from the get go. And there's also going to be, I've kind of simplified what insurance might look like. But there's all these little nuances, like should I get temporary?

Should I get permanent? Should I get insurance with an investment component? How does that change how much it costs me?

I'm just going to start by focusing on kind of these four key steps that we follow for every one of our clients. And step one is to build that initial financial plan that looks at all of their objectives, all their values, all their goals, and it really just maps it out for them. This is like the best case version of their plan where if there's two spouses, they live long lives and they're in good health and they can do everything they want to do.

So once we've done that, this is kind of grim to say, but we build survivorship models where each of those spouses aren't around anymore, and their portion of income that was going towards saving goes away, and CPP gets reduced, and an old age security disappears. It's dark to talk about, and it's not a fun conversation, but it's important. And I'll give an example of this blended family that we work with, where we just went through this process for them, and they've got kids from previous relationships.

So just in terms of how their estates are set up, the kids inherit the investments, and the spouse is where we're working on solving a different approach to that. So what we did is we checked out what can that surviving spouse sustainably afford to spend if they do nothing, whether maybe they have life insurance or they decide not to get any because they don't. What does that look like?

And from there, we step three, have a conversation with the client. Does this look right to you? Do you think your spending would change dramatically?

Another example that really stood out to me was this family dynamic where there's a high-income earning spouse, there is a stay-at-home parent, and there's young kids. So we chatted with those clients, and like conventional wisdom might tell you to really focus on ensuring the high-income earning spouse and worry less about replacing the income of the lower-income spouse or the no-income spouse. But that is so wrong because we went through that conversation, and we started to chat a little bit about that, and he was like, whoa, hang on, if my wife isn't in the picture anymore, I can't work nearly as much because I have to be present with the kids.

And not just that, but I probably need to hire a nanny. And it was baffling how expensive nannies were. So he was like, we need to make some adjustments here.

And so that's just an example of how that conversation in real time with clients and not just looking at those projections at face value makes a difference.

Ben Felix: You're really doing, it's like a full financial plan, step one, and then you're doing basically a full financial plan in the hypothetical scenario of an unexpected death.

Louai Bibi: Absolutely. We look like if your spouse passes away, do you want to still retire at the same time? Do your objectives about helping your kids change?

Do you invest differently? It's a full financial plan for every version, and we dive pretty deep. But my favorite part about doing this in the context of somebody's financial plan is it's one thing to look at insurance in isolation and say, this is how much I think you should have.

It's another to do it in somebody's plan because ultimately if a spouse passes away and there's insurance, that's a lump sum benefit that they get today, right? And they invest that money. So it would be kind of crazy to, in my opinion, to figure out or try to tell somebody how much insurance they might need without accounting for volatility if that money's invested.

So we get to stress test it in our planning software, understand how market volatility impacts your ability to support yourself with that insurance. So we're taking it one step further that like really puts the bow on this for me, just in terms of knowing that our clients have a well thought out insurance plan. Those are kind of steps one through four in terms of how do we figure out what or how much insurance you should have.

The other consideration here is do I need cheaper insurance? So that's typically temporary that expires after a period. Or do I need more expensive permanent insurance that is guaranteed to pay out at some point?

Maybe it has an investment component. Maybe it doesn't. When I think about the reasons that clients come to us to get insurance, it's usually about paying off debt.

It's about replacing somebody's income until they get to retirement. It's about making sure that if there's an expense for education, as an example, that that gets met when the time comes for that. It is so rare that somebody comes to us and says, I have an insurance problem or I have a need.

How do I solve it? And the answer is permanent life insurance. And that's not a diss against permanent life insurance by any stretch.

I actually think that it's a fantastic way to transfer wealth to the next generation, do charitable giving at death, create liquidity for an estate if there's a major tax bill to pay and you don't want to sell an asset or maybe can't. I think it's an awesome approach to some types of planning, but it's not really the planning that like 99% of Canadians need. So that's life insurance for me.

Ben Felix: That's a great way for permanent life insurance. I think you're right that there's in that 1%, there are some really great use cases and it's specific tax properties and legal properties make it a really interesting tool, but it is in like 1%, maybe even less of cases where it does make sense. It's probably sold in 80% of cases or something.

Louai Bibi: I can't even begin to tell you how many clients we work with who bought insurance, permanent whole life insurance before they came to PWL. And they're like, how do I get rid of this thing? This is destroying my cashflow.

The investment returns aren't as they're marketed. How do I get rid of it? And it's kind of tough once you've started to pay for it for a while, when you realize that not all that money went to the investment component and you're not leaving money on the table, but you had coverage and you paid for it.

But it's a tough thing to stomach after a certain point.

Ben Felix: It's really cool to hear. I've been out of the frontline financial planning team at PWL for years now. So it's cool to hear how you guys are doing insurance needs.

Cameron Passmore: I've always believed that. I know you're talking about disability next Lou, but cost when I used to sell disability insurance ages ago, cost would always often come up. It's one of those things where the more it costs, the more you need it, right?

Like you can't afford it. You can't afford not to have it definitionally, right? That's especially true with disability insurance.

Louai Bibi: It's so true. And it's such an important coverage that I find so simpler to think about when to get it, how much you need and why. But it's just one of those hurdles because it costs sometimes where it doesn't always shake out the way that we'd love to see it happen.

But just kind of a quick summary on disability insurance. This is different than life where you get a lump sum payout. This is in the scenario where you become disabled.

There's a monthly benefit that gets paid to you from the insurance company. If you're lucky, it goes to age 65, depending on the terms and conditions. Most employers now offer it in their benefit packages, which is great.

Sometimes you'll see different definitions for what disabled means to a certain insurance company. And that could mean your coverage being turned off pretty abruptly. And with this kind of coverage, I am less focused on what is the amount that you can get from an insurance company because it's pretty standardized in Canada.

It's usually most insurance companies will replace two thirds of your income and not more than that. What we're really looking at are the terms and conditions of these kinds of policies. And one scenario that we came up with or came across pretty recently was this client who works in high tech, young guy, really successful.

He's got disability insurance through work and he sent us over the policy statements and we looked it through and the coverage looked great at face value. And then when we kind of took a look under the hood a little bit, we found that his insurance would cover his own occupation if you were to become disabled for the first two years. And then after that two year period lapses, there's like this reassessment where if he can go like serve coffee at Tim Hortons for minimum wage, that benefit shuts off.

I talked about reviewing insurance in the context of somebody's financial plan. Well, it's like, okay, let's go back to your plan and let's look at what happens if your income changes like that. Can you afford to save the same way?

Can you afford to maintain your lifestyle? Do you have to change the goalpost for retirement or financial independence? It's shocking how such a minor detail changes the picture completely.

The final piece on disability insurance that really stands out to me is because there's a monthly benefit component to this coverage, sometimes we'll have clients, I'll use a nice round number, will suggest that maybe they check out like 10,000 a month of disability coverage because that's two thirds of their income. And they'll come to us and they'll say, you know, that's a lot higher than what I actually spend today. And if I'm disabled, I'm probably going to spend even less.

And I think that's a valid comment. But disability insurance in my mind is not just needed to replace the portion of your income that goes towards your spending. It's also there to replace the portion of your income that goes towards what you could have otherwise saved.

Think about that best case scenario where that disability policy pays out until you're age 65 and you've gotten just enough to cover your needs and that's it because was cheap and convenient. What do you do after 65 when that policy goes away? Maybe CPP starts, but if you haven't been working potentially and paying into it, it doesn't move the needle.

I don't want to see it. That's just not a scenario that I can experience with any of the clients that I work with. As you get to 65, that policy turns off and you don't have enough in savings because you can't do that over.

That's one of those really important ones for me.

Ben Felix: How do clients respond in the case of their own occupation, the two-year own occupation coverage? When you take that to them and say, explain it and say, we think you should take this $100 a month or whatever it is, additional private coverage, are they receptive to it?

Louai Bibi: Always. It might be one thing if it was just one person and there was no dependence, right? They're like, if something happens to me, I'll figure it out.

I don't agree with that train of thought, but that might happen. A lot of the clients that we work with, they've got dependence, they've got kids, they've got spouses that rely on them. When you paint the picture of, here's what your financial plan looks like in the absence of your income, it just, I think, shines a bit of a different light when they see how vulnerable of a position, not just them, but their family ends up being in.

Ben Felix: Oh, man. I don't know if I picked that up from what you're saying just now. You'll do the same thing as you do with life insurance, where you'll do a hypothetical plan in the case of disability.

Louai Bibi: Sometimes, not always. I know some of our colleagues do a little bit of a deeper dive into building another plan. I have always been of the mind that you just go and get as much disability insurance as you can.

I might catch a little bit of flack from the insurance community, but you just go and you max out that disability coverage. You get those terms right and you go protect your family. It's that simple for me.

Ben Felix: Yeah, I did that. Early on in my time at PWL, I bought additional disability coverage that increases over time. I can't remember what it's called.

Louai Bibi: Depot. It's the future earnings protection option, I think.

Ben Felix: That's right. Yeah. I've been exercising that option ever since, every year.

Louai Bibi: Good man. Last concept on insurance today is critical illness. This is also a different kind of coverage that pays out a lump sum if you are diagnosed with a critical illness of some kind that is on an insurance company's predetermined list of health conditions. You think of cancer, heart attack, stroke, the main ones really.

This isn't a coverage that, from my point of view, has been an absolute need for our clients because the list is pretty restrictive. It's not as expensive. That's less of the concern from my point of view, but it's also one of those things where the clients that approach us and look to work with us have also amassed a pretty considerable amount of wealth where if they were diagnosed with a critical illness and they needed access to capital, they've got their investments, they've got other assets that they could draw on, and there's lots of ideas about what you could do with critical illness when you go through insurance training, especially on this front. I've heard stuff like the investment protector.

It's the insurance that protects your investments so you don't have to touch them if you get sick. I've heard that you can make sure that your spouse can take a year or two off work if you get diagnosed. I have heard somebody tell me that you should go take your kids to Disney.

With your critical illness benefit, if you're diagnosed with an illness like that, I don't buy those too much. Or at least, historically, I haven't. I thought those are kind of interesting reasons to consider that kind of coverage relative to maybe other more appropriate ones.

But I did want to share a really interesting story that I got to be a part of a couple months back. In my past life, prior to joining PWL, I was insurance licensed. I was at another local firm in Ottawa.

The financial planner that I used to work for reached out to me a couple months ago and he said, hey, Louai, can you give me a call? So I did. I gave him a call within 30 seconds because I was terrified of what potentially he wanted to chat about.

But what he mentioned was not what I was expecting at all. He said, you helped this family get a suite of insurance coverages when they first joined our practice. You helped them get life.

You helped them get disability. And then you helped them get critical illness. And it wasn't like hundreds of thousands of critical illness.

It was, from my perspective, and I don't remember off the top of my head, it was probably one of those scenarios where if you were buying term life insurance, the insurance company was going to throw you a nice deal to buy really cheap critical illness. And it was kind of like, it's there, might as well, if it's like eight bucks a month kind of thing. But what really caught me off guard was the planner then said, yeah, that client was diagnosed with cancer.

And that policy is in the process of being paid out. And I called to tell you that that benefit just like completely changed their lives during such an emotional and difficult time for them as a family and blew my mind a little bit. Who cares about taking your kids to Disney or like any of that, that policy, one that I will admit I have never been very bullish on actually made like a serious impact on somebody's life, a life's plural, excuse me.

From my perspective, if that kind of peace of mind resonates with any of the people that are listening here and you want to go by critical illness as a result, go by the super cheap stuff. You do not need the big fancy critical illness policy or the big fancy whole life insurance policy with all the bells and whistles to have a lasting impact on your family. It's kind of my spiel on insurance today.

Ben Felix: That was awesome.

Cameron Passmore: Good summary.

Ben Felix: I canceled my critical illness policy probably 10 years ago.

And then I had testicular cancer. It's not clear to me if I'd have to look at the specific policy, but in many cases, like really early stage, the thing that I had basically, it's not necessarily always going to be covered. Brutal.

Like that's based on the tumor size and the stage and stuff like that. So I was kicking myself for a bit like, man, I should have kept that policy. But I actually don't know if it would have been covered. I'd have to go and dig it up.

Louai Bibi: That's so intense, right? You're in this new unknown world where you've got testicular cancer and it's like, I've got to figure out the size of the tumor. What? Just pay me out or why did I even buy this? It's crazy.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Well, I didn't have to worry about it because I canceled it years ago. I decided it didn't make sense for my situation.

Cameron Passmore: That's one of the hot topics for the after show today.

Ben Felix: We didn't have any reviews. We do have a new disclaimer for when we read reviews. I won't spoil it now though, because we don't have any reviews to share.

Cameron Passmore: A little bit of a teaser.

Ben Felix: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our One Digital compliance friends, similar to adding the disclaimer to the end of the show, which listeners have been raving about.

Cameron Passmore: It was a real crowd favorite.

Ben Felix: They gave us a disclaimer for when we read reviews that addresses some SEC regulations.

Honestly, I kind of like it. It's like super, super transparent about the content of the review and what we know about who's made the review. They were like, I hope you guys don't mind doing this.

I was like, you know what? I actually kind of like this disclaimer. We should have been doing this all along.

Anyway, I won't spoil it now, but hopefully people give us some reviews between now and the next time we record so that we can read the shiny new disclaimer out.

Cameron Passmore: So you're watching any crazy great shows lately, Louai?

Louai Bibi: Well, what am I watching right now? My girlfriend and I are hooked on this reality TV show and I know I'm going to get a lot of judgment. It's called The Challenge, where a bunch of people, pretty self-explanatory, go do challenges for money.

That's been kind of interesting. And then I am watching The Sopranos for the first time and that is just fascinating. That is an interesting show.

Ben Felix: That's a great show. I watched that beginning to end many years ago. I'm watching Narcos Mexico right now.

Louai Bibi: Good show.

Ben Felix: Never watched it before.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, we started watching that. We should go back to that. It's good.

Ben Felix: It's good.

Cameron Passmore: We're waiting for more MobLand to come out.

Louai Bibi: Is that like The Sopranos at all? Like I kind of got on this mob theme and I love it.

Cameron Passmore: Oh yeah. Yeah. If you like mob and a lot of wax, it's quite something. Yeah. And the accents, Pierce Brosnan's in it and Helen Mirren's. It's, oh, she's so evil. We like it a lot. I like it a lot. I love shows like that.

Louai Bibi: That's your thing. I'm five episodes from finishing The Sopranos. I'll check on MobLand next.

Cameron Passmore: MobLand is really good. Or Animal Kingdom. I know, Ben, you watch that too. Animal Kingdom, Lou.

Ben Felix: Oh, so good.

Cameron Passmore: If you haven't watched that yet, watch that next. That is so good.

Louai Bibi: I think I got through three seasons, I don't know what it was. I was also watching it with my girlfriend and we just, we did not finish it.

Ben Felix: Oh yeah. We couldn't stop. When we were watching that show, it was good.

First time we watched that show was when Shanna, our youngest, was like just born. And so we'd have the fricking, she had this little whatever bassinet thing that rocks for the baby and it plays music. So that'd be gone.

And then we'd have Animal Kingdom on, on a really low volume. I always associate the sound of that little bass nut with the show.

Cameron Passmore: Oh, no kidding. Anything else on your minds today?

Ben Felix: No, I think that's good. It was great to have Louai on. I thought that was good to have someone that's on the ground in front of clients, both for the AMA, but also to cover off how we're doing insurance.

I hope we can do this more often. And I hope the listeners like it, they can let us know.

Cameron Passmore: It'd be great to have more advisors on. Phil's going to be on in a couple of weeks, which would be great too. Yep.

Ben Felix: We're pretty far out of the game, Cameron.

Cameron Passmore: Well, I mean, Lou talked earlier on, working in the business versus on the business. I am so out of the game.

Thank God people like Lou are here.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I'm always blown away talking to our team of financial planners and portfolio managers, the stuff that they're working on, the stuff that they're learning just through going through client situations. It's a level of knowledge and experience that's hard to replicate when you're just reading about stuff.

Louai Bibi: I think I'm going to call out some advisors or just the folks on the advice team for not doing this, because this has been an open offer from you guys for forever. I think that from my perspective, we've got tons of folks who reach out through the website and through the podcast and they show up and they're like, we want Ben. And then they get sweet Lou and they're not as excited.

So I just think being able to be on the podcast and some people get to hear my thoughts and how we think about planning, I think there's value there.

Ben Felix: Yeah. We got to get more people on. I mean, it's like Jordan still hears from new clients that he's meeting about his appearance on the podcast.

Phil, same thing. Phil, I think, ultimately reached out to us because he heard Jordan on the podcast. The first time he heard Jordan on the podcast, it was like, that's what kicked him to reach out to us.

So anyway, yeah. Totally agree. Getting more of our team on is good in my opinion.

Cameron Passmore: People should be calling us to want to work with you, sweet Lou. That's without a doubt.

Louai Bibi: That's high praise. Thank you, CP.

Cameron Passmore: All right, guys. You're good for this week?

Ben Felix: Yep. Thanks everyone for listening.

Disclosure:

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