In this episode, we begin with our first client story, featuring Dr. Simon Bérubé, an interventional cardiologist and professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. Simon shares how listening to Rational Reminder helped him approach personal finance with the same evidence-based mindset he brings to medicine. He discusses why financial planning extends far beyond investing, what led him to work with PWL Capital, and how expertise, integration, and oversight can become increasingly valuable as family finances grow more complex. He also reflects on the importance of transparency, intellectual honesty, and using money as a tool to support a meaningful life.
Then, Ben Felix and Dan Bortolotti take a personal turn, discussing how they came to their investment philosophies and how they invest their own money. They trace their paths into evidence-based investing, explore how childhood experiences and research on happiness have shaped their views about wealth, and explain the reasoning behind their personal portfolios. From global equities and fixed income to private company ownership, homeownership, and cash reserves, they discuss the trade-offs behind decisions that may not be theoretically optimal but can still make sense for an individual. The conversation is a reminder that a good financial plan is about more than building the perfect portfolio—it is about understanding risk, opportunity cost, and what matters most in life.
Key Points From This Episode:
(0:33:00) First Rational Reminder client story: Why people hire financial advisors.
(2:38:00) Meet Dr. Simon Bérubé, interventional cardiologist and longtime listener.
(4:28:00) Applying evidence-based medicine principles to personal finance.
(5:30:00) Financial planning is broader than investing alone.
(7:43:00) Building an investment philosophy around diversification and low costs.
(12:20:00) Focus on processes, not outcomes.
(15:04:00) Similarities between health planning and financial planning.
(15:49:00) PWL's transparency and intellectual honesty as a client.
(17:04:00) Why Simon still uses an advisor despite financial knowledge.
(18:15:00) Coordinating investments, insurance, corporations, and retirement planning.
(20:14:00) Sharing his story out of gratitude and a desire to help others.
(22:23:00) Success defined by relationships, purpose, and impact.
(24:00:00) Main topic: How Ben and Dan invest their own money.
(26:41:00) Ben's exposure to wealthy families shaped his views on money and happiness.
(30:04:00) Research on affluent children and well-being.
(32:39:00) Income, happiness, and the concept of income satiation.
(36:32:00) Dan's early lessons about saving, debt, and family.
(39:24:00) Ben's early career selling insurance and mutual funds.
(40:38:00) The article that pushed Ben to question active management.
(43:35:00) Evidence on active funds and market underperformance.
(44:53:00) Dan discovers passive investing through MoneySense and Norbert Schlenker.
(47:35:00) Fama-French, Dimensional, and evidence-based investing.
(49:30:00) How Ben's connection with Dimensional led him to PWL.
(51:03:00) Dan's journey from financial journalism to financial planning.
(55:56:00) PWL's foundation: financial planning plus low-cost portfolio management.
(56:45:00) Using money to support family, health, experiences, and time.
(59:39:00) Ben's portfolio: globally diversified equity with factor tilts.
(1:00:55) Dan's simple ETF portfolio and "benign neglect" approach.
(1:03:13) Ben's 100% equity allocation versus Dan's 70/30 portfolio.
(1:06:17) The lasting impact of experiencing the 2008 financial crisis.
(1:07:55) Choose an asset allocation you can stick with.
(1:09:47) Ben's ownership stake in PWL became his best investment.
(1:16:00) Homeownership as a poor financial investment but excellent lifestyle choice.
(1:21:53) Cash reserves can provide peace of mind despite lower returns.
(1:24:08) "Suboptimal" financial decisions can still be rational.
Read The Transcript:
Ben Felix: Not all my financial decisions are made with the sole intent of maximizing wealth.
Simon Bérubé: With time, error and mistakes also compound.
Dan Bortolotti: From a financial point of view, it was the dumbest thing we've ever done, but from a quality of life point of view, I don't regret it at all.
Ben Felix: Welcome to episode 434 of the Rational Reminder Podcast. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer at PWL Capital and Dan Bortolotti, Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital.
Dan Bortolotti: Good to be back.
Ben Felix: Good to be back. In this episode, I'm looking forward to this because Dan, I have not read your notes and I'm very curious to hear parts of your story, but Dan and I are going to tell you, the audience, how we personally invest, but also a lot of background and context for how we arrived at that investment approach and how we think about money and all that kind of stuff. We'll get into that in a second.
Before we get into that, we do have our first ever client story. These are segments with PWL Capital clients where we learn about why they've decided to work with an advisor, why they chose PWL specifically and how they think about the value that they get from the relationship. These are not meant to be a sales pitch.
We've actually heard from a lot of listeners that they want to hear from our clients. Some clients have been kind enough to agree to share their stories on the podcast. We did not offer any payment or other incentive or consideration for these clients to come on the podcast and we actually talked with them in the ones we've recorded so far about their motivation for coming on.
I was personally genuinely curious because there was no incentive. The clients we've spoken with had phenomenal answers to that question about why they wanted to come on the podcast in the first place. In a moment, you're going to hear from Brady Plunkett, who's a PWL portfolio manager and Dr. Simon Bérubé. Brady Plunkett, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.
Brady Plunkett: Ben, it is such a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ben Felix: Very excited to have you here. Brady, this is our first client conversation, which is an idea that our team had and that actually our community, our podcast community has wanted to hear these conversations. We're pretty excited to kick this off and I think that we have a phenomenal first conversation to share with our audience.
Brady Plunkett: Well, I'm very much arm candy. Our guest, once you start listening to the episode, is highly intelligent, high performing, and we were lucky enough to have him on to speak about his experience of working directly with PWL and his perspectives on evidence and how it relates to financial decision-making. It was a fascinating conversation.
Ben Felix: It really is. I think people are going to enjoy it. Just for context, before we jump in the conversation, you're going to hear a conversation with Dr. Simon Bérubé. He's an interventional cardiologist at Santé Québec Estrie – CHUS, University Hospital in Sherbrooke. He's practiced there since 2006. He's also a full professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Université de Sherbrooke.
He serves as medical director of the interventional cardiology department and coronary care unit, specializing in coronary interventions and aortic valve therapies. That's probably enough of an intro. He's actively involved in clinical research, medical education.
You hear that come through the way that he speaks. As you said, Brady, highly intelligent, highly educated, highly specialized professional. As I say during our conversation with Simon, it's really fascinating for me personally to hear him reflecting back things that he has learned listening to our content.
It's gratifying, but it's also so interesting to hear his highly intelligent, highly motivated mind take things we've said and turn them into his own thoughts and reflect them back to us. You hear some of that and lots of other interesting points throughout this conversation.
Brady Plunkett: He's the real deal. As you're rhyming off his accolades, there was one video where Tiger Woods, famous golfer, is getting announced on the tee box and they're announcing all of the championships he's won. Somebody just cut him off and said, okay, enough.
We've got to play. I had that feeling as you were reading this, but he's an impressive, impressive practitioner. I think everybody will enjoy the conversation.
Simon Bérubé: Thanks, Ben. Pleasure to be here.
Brady Plunkett: Simon, great to have you on here.
Simon Bérubé: Thanks, Brady.
Brady Plunkett: You were a pretty hardcore Rational Reminder listener for many years before we got introduced to each other through PWL. Can you share with us some of the ideas or maybe episodes or findings from the podcast that really stuck with you and changed the way that you think about money?
Simon Bérubé: The big aha moments for first the Rational Reminder and then my PWL experience is I got to understand that personal finance decisions can be approached through an evidence-based process, which is something I can relate to because that's how we work in medicine. What I do in my daily practice is we rarely know what will happen with an individual patient. So we go through a process on which we rely on the best available evidence, meaning that we go through rigorous academic research, scientific guidelines are written by our society, and we apply that evidence to a sound decision-making process to try to maximize the probability of a favorable outcome.
So I realized through the Rational Reminder that this process, those data exist in financial planning. So that was the big aha moment for me. I did understand too that rather than relying on intuition, market timing, narratives, expert opinion, which you can find at every party or on TV, that you can ground decisions in high quality evidence and build a discipline process, which does the same as in clinical practice to try to maximize the probability of a favorable outcome.
That would be my biggest shift listening to the Rational Reminder. I had not realized that financial life is also an evidence-based process that should be used to maximize the probability of a good long-term outcome. And the other thing that I got to and that I realized through the podcast is that financial planning is a lot more than investing.
Ben always says investing has been solved, a big part of it is solved. And I do agree. If it was only for investing, a lot of things I could have done myself, but the complexity of financial planning is way more than that.
So those are the two things that I came around with my exposure to the Rational Reminder that I had not fully grasped prior to that, that got me to get in touch with you three or four years down the road after my first meeting with Ben in December 2020 on the podcast. I met him, he didn't meet me.
Brady Plunkett: I have to ask just to give everybody a visual. When we first got in touch, you shared that you listen every Thursday morning when the podcast is released.
First thing in the morning on your bike at home, I think in kind of like your basement gym kind of thing. Do you still have that process?
Simon Bérubé: Yeah, I've been doing that for 10 years. I have four kids, three at home. The only moment left is the early morning.
So for 10 years prior to the Rational Reminder, I used to do my training every morning at five. Since 2020, Rational Reminder is a big part of that. I'm still up to date. I'm midway through the last episode as it's registered is the one after Owen Zidar.
Ben Felix: Victor?
Simon Bérubé: Victor, exactly. Still on track.
Brady Plunkett: So you talk about evidence and an evidence-based financial planning. In your own words, can you define your own investment philosophy and what role the Rational Reminder community has played in maybe impacting or maintaining that philosophy?
Simon Bérubé: Well, I already had prior to coming to the Rational Reminder, because of a slight exposition to the Loonie Doctor, which we might talk a bit later, Mark Soth, which Ben is related to. I had a philosophy that was already largely based on diversified, low-cost index investing. Although I had a problem then trying to get someone to support me in this jump, probably because of analysis paralysis.
So I would say that the podcast did not fundamentally change the way I reflect upon investing. What it did is deepen my understanding, why that philosophy makes sense. It helped me understand the evidence around issues such as market timing, factor tilt, relationship between economy and market returns, which is in itself, when I heard that, was kind of a big surprise.
Because at first, it doesn't make sense. But when you understand that, it gave me a much stronger framework for understanding what I should and should not try to control. I cannot predict markets, economic cycles, short-term returns.
But like I said, I can control the quality of the process, which is very important, the structure of the portfolio, the cost and my own behavior. So I'd say that it didn't change my philosophy coming into the Rational Reminder podcast, but it strengthened its foundation. Now I know a bit more of why the things I believe in make sense.
Ben Felix: Wow. It is so fascinating for me to hear things that I've said in the past on the podcast reflected back to me from someone who's highly intelligent, but not necessarily an expert in the field. Hearing things that I've said filtered through your brain coming back to me in your own words is absolutely fascinating.
Simon Bérubé: You did a good job, Ben.
Ben Felix: So did you.
Simon Bérubé: And Cameron.
Brady Plunkett: In terms of other fascinating items, you talk about the Loonie Doctor, Dr. Mark Soth, and your familiarity with his content over the years. So when Money Scope was introduced, and you saw your Rational Reminder, call it part of your life, colliding with Money Scope, can you tell us about how fascinating that was to you?
Simon Bérubé: Well, I thought about my feeling then, and this will probably betray my age. And I'm not sure both of you can relate to that. But I thought of Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux on the same line on Team Canada in 1987 against Russia.
Brady Plunkett: Okay, wait, who's Mario and who's Wayne? No, don't answer that.
Simon Bérubé: Two outstanding experts in the field with two different approaches, but with extraordinary depth of financial knowledge, genuine commitment to sharing that openly, transparently, and without any obvious self-interest, which is kind of rare in those kinds of discussions. Own style, own way, sharing the same fundamental evidence-based approach made in a very practical and coherent way. So if someone wants to have a, I won't say a complete understanding, but a better understanding of the mechanics of personal finance in Canada, I think that's, I would say, a must read.
It's a must look at. It's a very well-constructed curriculum. And it gets back to one of the episodes I liked in the first part is the one about meaning and happiness, because we always talk about money.
Money is a way to get somewhere else. And I think that the goal of life is to be happy and have the people around us happy. And there was an episode which you've made Ben prior to that in the Rational Reminder, but having that in that curriculum, which is well-constructed and with a very pedagogic, it's a well-constructed way to learn about things.
I'd say that it's not an easy listen. Sometimes at the end, it gets a bit deeper, but I'd say it's a must listen. So I enjoyed it a lot.
Brady Plunkett: I find that pretty fascinating. That curriculum, when you ask a lot of, I guess, individuals, is known for the deep corporate tax and notional accounts and how they integrate with things like optimal compensation. For you to say one of the big takeaways was living a great life and what does happiness look like for you to develop a plan is pretty cool.
Simon Bérubé: The thing is that it should be discussed more often. It is not. It's presented at the start of the curriculum, setting the table, not to undermine the other, I don't know, 14 or 15 episodes that are in that curriculum, but that one at the start of it is a very enlightening one.
Ben Felix: We were very intentional about doing it that way for the reason that you said, it sets up everything else. When you're thinking through all that technical stuff and how you can use it. Use it for what, is the question we were trying to answer in those first couple of episodes. So I'm glad that resonated. I can't wait to tell Mark Soth the Lemieux and Gretzky comparison.
Simon Bérubé: Choose which is who, but I won't get into that.
Brady Plunkett: Simon, in every conversation we've had, one term, as I reflect, always comes up and that's evidence, including this conversation too. What does the evidence look like? And that leads into whatever topic we're chatting about.
Can you talk about any parallels between evidence-based personal finance and evidence-based medicine from your point of view?
Simon Bérubé: Yeah, like I said, I touched that in the introduction, but I think that the best chances you have to have a good outcome is through a good process. And sometimes you can have a bad process and a good outcome; it doesn't make the thing more valuable. I think that when you have a long-term perspective, whether it's a medical career or it's a financial planning down the road for 25, 30 years, what you want to do is to use the best process possible to obtain in the long run.
If you look at every decision, every patient care, it doesn't give the whole picture. And I think that the way to have the best process is to rely on what we know. And by knowing, I don't mean about expert opinion.
I mean about things that were studied, looked at, and are understood at the deeper level. And we have a ton of that in medicine. I'm doing cardiology and cardiology is probably one of the more evidence-based spaces because there is a lot of cardiac problems.
It's easier to have a lot of big numbers studied. I'm using that every day to make my process the best possible. When I realized that those data were available in the financial planning world, it was self-evident for me that this was the way to go, knowing that it's not a home run error, it's not the lottery ticket way of doing things.
Probably there's lottery winners somewhere and they exist, but I'm not sure that's the way you should plan the care of a patient or my financial planning. I do feel that I can translate the value of a good process from my medical practice to the financial. So yeah, that's why I'm always asking you really when we meet, where is that? What do we know about that? Why are we doing this? What is it based on?
There's a clear relationship. I'm a health doctor, you're a wealth doctor. The same principles do apply and compounding also exists in both cases.
If you take care of your health sooner, you have benefit later. So there's a lot of similarity between health and wealth. I think that the process through gathering or making decisions through evidence-based process is very important.
That would be the parallel that I would make between the two worlds, my daily practice and the way I see my financial planning with you.
Brady Plunkett: Can you repeat that famous quote? You're a health doctor, we're wealth doctors. Is that what it was?
Simon Bérubé: Yeah, we do the same things. We're using evidence-based process to have the best chance of a good outcome down the road.
And it's exactly what medicine is all about. I'd say prevention is about that. Sometimes we come at the end of that, but I'd say that we can make some pretty clear analogies between health planning and wealth planning.
The sooner the better, but it's never sooner than today. So if you haven't started yet, start today.
Brady Plunkett: Can you talk a little bit about, I mean, you have the inside scoop of what working with PWL is like, Simon. I'm curious, can you talk a little bit about, you've met the team, you've experienced our services. Can you talk about your experience as a podcast listener and how that compares to the realities that you've seen firsthand of working with PWL?
Simon Bérubé: Yeah, I've been a listener now for six years. I've been with you for almost three years. I'd say, and Ben, you related to that in that three or four episodes from now.
You said it's exactly as it sounds on the podcast. You get in and you see the same intellectual honesty, the evidence-based thinking, which is, like I said, very important to me. Transparency that you hear as a Rational Reminder listener, you experience as a client.
So there is no disconnect between the public voice and the private experience. The public voice of Rational Reminder and the private experience that we experience as a family with PWL. And I'd say that the other thing that is very important to me, and I was kind of surprised when I learned that this was not meant for marketing in your view.
And having that, not as a slogan, but practiced, seeing that in coming in, seeing that it's not the slogan, it's not the compliance performance, it's present in the way the recommendations are discussed, trade-offs are explained. The conversation always and consistently comes back to what it actually means for me and my family. So I was not surprised, but I was hoping that and I got in PWL, the feeling, the relationship, the expectation that I got through Rational Reminder.
Ben Felix: Simon, I would love to hear your thoughts on hearing you speak about this stuff. You understand it as well as anybody. You're a dedicated podcast listener.
You've listened to Money Scope. You could do this stuff yourself if you wanted to, I think. Can you talk about why you choose to work with a firm like PWL as opposed to doing yourself?
Simon Bérubé: Well, like I said, investing, if you want to put the time in it and if you're willing to educate yourself, I think that this is something that you can get a good grasp of. And I think that this would be manageable. But as the financial reality of a growing family, as we move through our career, there comes to be a lot more moving pieces, insurance, family consideration, corporation for some, retirement planning, multiple accounts, multiple entities.
So I think, like I said, financial planning, and that was one of my big understandings coming through Rational Reminder is that financial planning is way more than just investing. And we have all those moving pieces. You want to make sure that they move together and that you don't make a decision, not having in mind the big picture of all that.
And with time, error and mistakes also compound. So sometimes you do some things without realizing something else. And this compounds over time and those mistakes could be costly.
So I don't feel like I would have the time and the interest to put my mind to all those outside pieces with growing complexity. I feel that having someone to manage that with me is very important. It really is not replacing my understanding or involvement in my financial decision.
Brady can tell of that. I'm always questioning, trying to understand, but it provides expertise, integration, and oversight that in my daily life with family, job, and lack of interest, to be honest, regarding certain aspects of it. Insurance doesn't interest me.
There's other parts. So the increasing difficulty, increasing complexity comes with increasing risk. That's the part I feel PWL is providing me with a sound process regarding all those moving pieces.
That's why I'm not a DIYer. Although DIY, like you say many times on the podcast, depending on where you are, if you're single, if you have a regular account, knowing which to fill out first and if you can fill them both, I think that DIY makes sense. But there comes a moment where complexity increases and the risk of mistakes becomes higher. So not sure if it answered perfectly your question, but that's why I'm not doing all that by myself.
Ben Felix: Yeah, no, it answers it perfectly. One thing you said really stuck out and I think it's a very concise way to explain it, expertise, integration, and oversight. It's a very clean way to say what I think we provide for a lot of people.
One of the questions I have Simon for you is we had to do some pretty serious disclosures from a compliance perspective to make sure that we were giving you no incentive to come on the podcast to talk about this. So we know contractually we've all signed off that you have no incentive to come on the podcast to talk about this. So I'd love to know what's your motivation to be here to talk about your experience.
Simon Bérubé: One of the things I value most is we're talking about happiness and you always ask about what makes a successful living and happy. I think purpose is a very powerful driver of happiness. Part of my purpose is try to make the life of others I get around a bit better.
I think it's part of that. I have no compensation being here. It was never talked about and never expected from knowing the way you guys work and I would probably not have accepted any.
But my self-education started in 2010 with Millionaire Teacher and I've read many things since then and it took me 10 years, more than 10, 13 years to find support that matched my philosophy. I was in good hands prior to that. I was well coached or well directed but not exactly as I would have liked and I've expressed that in the past, but I couldn't find that and it took me too long to get in touch with you.
So if my story can motivate or initiate a reflection regarding the support that I wish I would have had 10 years ago but better now than later, that's my only motivation. If someone can relate to my story and say well that's related to my philosophy and at first seeing you guys, Rational Reminder, not knowing what your business was exactly and being in Ottawa, I'm in Eastern Townships in Quebec, I felt many things and I'd say well that's probably not for me, but I should have reached out earlier. So that's my only motivation.
It's a story maybe someone else can relate to. I feel that where I am, where my family is, I feel like the level of support you're offering and the value behind that would have been better if it was 10 years earlier but like I said, that's my only motivation here is that it's out of, in French we say gratitude, it's a gratefulness.
Brady Plunkett: Speaking of gratitude Simon, we're super grateful that you came on with us today. Is there anything that we haven't asked you yet in terms of your experiences with PWL that we should have asked you by now?
Simon Bérubé: No I think you've covered most of it. I can't think out of my head of something that we should talk about.
Ben Felix: I gotta ask, Simon, since you brought it up, how do you define success in your life?
Simon Bérubé: I've heard that one like a hundred times. It's still very difficult to picture but like Brady knows I'm a father of four. I think that two things, relationship and purpose and for relationship, family is very, very important and as a parent, you can only be as happy as your least happy child.
So I think that it starts there. I think that having a strong relationship, loving relationship with my family, trying to make the life of those people that matter to me a bit better because I'm there, and the other thing is purpose. To wake up in the morning having something that you find meaningful that stimulates you, learning through that is awesome.
So success is not so much about what I've achieved, which I would probably have said 20 years ago starting in my career, but now I'd say it's more about the relationships I've nurtured and the sense of purpose I've maintained and the positive impact I have on the people around me and for a lot of people, it starts with family but also at work and everybody I meet. So like I said also enjoying all that along the way. So I'd say that would be the two main parts of my definition of success trying to maintain that and achieve that every day. Small things I think.
Brady Plunkett: Great answer.
Ben Felix: That's great. All right Simon that's all we have. Really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your story and I think your explanation for why you wanted to do it speaks volumes about who you are as a person.
Simon Bérubé: Thanks, was a pleasure. For a Rational Reminder fan it was an honor to be here.
Brady Plunkett: Merci, Simon.
Simon Bérubé: Merci à vous deux.
Ben Felix: Well it's cool to hear from a client Dan and hear their story and why they've chosen to work with PWL.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah it's always interesting to kind of hear what brought clients to PWL. I remember we used to joke that we used to think that all clients came to us for better portfolios, lower fees and those are all really important and then I find that's an easy problem to address and then within six months you've fixed the portfolio, you've lowered their fees, well now you got to have another reason to engage the client on an ongoing basis and that varies from case to case. So always good to hear those individual stories.
Ben Felix: For sure. So we'll have more of those in the future. Curious on feedback from our audience about how that conversation landed with them.
All right Dan let's get into our main topic for the episode. Where this idea came from is that my friend Brian Portnoy has now released the second volume of a book titled How I Invest My Money and this book is a collection of essays from people in personal finance media about how they handle their own money. So I was invited to write a chapter for this volume of the book and parts of what I'm going to share in the episode come from that chapter.
We'll put a link to order the book if people are interested. I have no financial stake in the book but it was pretty cool to be asked to contribute to it with lots of other very interesting financial media folks. The way that we're going to do this is I have notes written from the book and I'm going to go through those. Dan you're going to jump in, we'll kind of try and tell our stories in parallel.
Dan Bortolotti: Okay sounds good.
Ben Felix: So people probably won't be surprised to learn that my portfolio is pretty boring for the most part at least.
I own one public equity fund, one private equity holding, the house that I live in and I do have a bit more cash than I probably technically need to have. A couple of those might surprise folks because I've been pretty vocally skeptical of private market investments. We have spent, you and I included Dan, many hours talking about why renting a home is a perfectly fine way to pay for housing.
I'll acknowledge up front that personal finances are personal. I will explain my thoughts on each one in a bit.
Dan Bortolotti: It's true Ben. I don't think anyone's going to be surprised to hear you own your own home. You've talked about that before nor do I think anybody should infer, as I think a few people have in the comments, that your research on renting versus buying favors renting with an unqualified recommendation.
Clearly that's not the case. I think that both of our investing strategies will turn out to be quite boring but boring in different ways.
Ben Felix: Before I go into detail about how I invest, I do think that my upbringing, education and early career provides some important context for how I think about investing but also about money more generally. I grew up on the campuses of what I would call elite boarding schools in Canada. When I was a kid and until much later too, but when I was growing up, my dad was a teacher and the house master of a boys dorm at Shawnigan Lake School in British Columbia, Canada.
If anyone's been there, you'd know it's an absolutely astonishing campus. I mean, it looks like Hogwarts or something like that. Incredible.
We lived there. We lived right on the campus which was a very cool way to grow up. Now my family was not wealthy by any means but we were middle class.
I have nothing to complain about but the interesting thing about growing up on the campus of that school was that most of the students coming through the school were from very, very affluent families. I think the tuition to go to Shawnigan Lake School now is around $100,000 a year for a boarding student, for high school. The folks sending their kids there for high school are wealthy enough to afford that.
My family was not. My dad, like I said, was a teacher. When I was in ninth grade, my dad took a job at Brentwood College School.
These are two boarding schools that are, they're about 30 minutes away from each other, maybe a little bit less on Vancouver Island, BC. My dad took a job there.
This was kind of neat for him to get a job there. But again, our family moved into the same kind of situation where we're living on this elite boarding school campus. I was, again, surrounded by quite wealthy peers and looking back on that time of my life, I think it did teach me a lot about money because some of my peers, again, from very high income families had great families and stable lives and they were happy people.
Others had stressful family lives and they had social and psychological issues. There were a lot of kids there that were on all kinds of medications to deal with their stuff, despite being very wealthy. It just kind of showed me that money doesn't solve problems.
If I kind of reflect back on it, I think a lot of the kids at that school at that time, maybe it's different now, I don't know, were sent there to excel. Some kids were sent there to excel because they were good at something and the school was going to help them lean into that talent. But then there were a lot of kids that were sent there because their parents had money but didn't know what to do with their kids.
They get sent off to boarding school. Anyway, that kind of just taught me that having lots of money doesn't necessarily create a good life for either adults or children. I didn't know at the time, but there's actually research supporting this, which I'll talk about in a second.
Dan Bortolotti: Ben, did you come to that conclusion early on? Did you already notice, it sounds like you're saying in many cases, unhappiness of maybe people who grew up in a situation? I mean, I don't believe that kind of wealth leads to lack of happiness, but you were obviously able to determine that there are much more important things than wealth in a person's life and that it certainly doesn't solve all of the problems.
Is that something like you're looking back now and saying, I can see how that shaped me? Or were you pretty aware of it even at the time?
Ben Felix: I think there was an awareness at the time. I did become very close with lots of the kids that went to that school. I mean, they were my high school peers.
And so I would go stay with them at their houses during school breaks and stuff like that. And I got to know their families quite well. It was noticeable that some of them had really, really tough family lives, but it was also noticeable they were very, very wealthy because of the houses they lived in and the cars they drove and all that kind of stuff.
I was acutely aware at the time that there was this mismatch between what their life looked like from the outside with the big fancy houses and the really fancy, expensive cars and the fancy boarding school and their actual family dynamics and the level of happiness within the household. So I was definitely aware that I think reflecting back on it and being a little bit more of what the research says now, I think that my beliefs are more firm now. It was an observation that I had at the time for sure.
So just on that relationship between kids and money, there is a 2005 paper that found that affluent kids in the sample of the paper did show elevated rates of substance abuse, anxiety, and depression, which again, like that would be consistent with my anecdotal observations. The authors pointed to two main culprits in their research. One is excessive pressure to achieve, and the other is isolation from parents, both literal and emotional.
Family wealth does not automatically confer well-being is what the paper is showing. The authors of this paper do also caution that parents should be conscious of the risks that stem from wealth and status. Believing that Ivy League educations and lucrative careers are critical for children's long-term happiness, can have costs to their mental health and well-being, which is interesting to think about because I think a lot of wealthy, successful families do have sort of an expectation and put that expectation on their children that they're going to go to an elite school and have an elite career. That works for some people, but it can be very stressful for others.
Dan Bortolotti: The expectations are so challenging for kids in that situation, and they might well decide, you know, an Ivy League education is not for me. I want to pursue a different career or different route, but I got to feel that they're going to have family members or friends or peers perceiving that as a failure. You didn't go to that school because you wouldn't have succeeded there, not because you just chose a different path.
I have to think a lot of kids in that situation feel the pressure to go down the road that was chosen for them. That obviously is going to lead to some dissatisfaction with one's life.
Ben Felix: For sure. If two generations of your family went to an elite university, there's somewhat of an expectation that you do the same thing, but not everybody wants to do that. So that can lead to pressures. So that piece is interesting.
And then I was not aware of this research at the time, but looking back on it now, knowing about the research on income and wealth and happiness, looking back on that part of my life is even more interesting. There's the 2018 global study measuring income satiation, which the paper is measuring as the income level above which happiness stops improving. And that paper finds that in North America, life evaluation leveled off around $105,000 in the sample and about $137,000 today if we adjust for inflation.
And day-to-day happiness, so like experienced happiness as opposed to reflective happiness, that leveled off around $85,000 per year in income in today's dollars. Although it might be a little higher now. I don't know when I updated those numbers.
Dan Bortolotti: Is this personal income or household income? Do we know?
Ben Felix: That's a good question. It's for sure in the paper, but I'd have to go and check.
Dan Bortolotti: It's funny, right? I think a lot of people would think those numbers seem a little bit low, but if you look at average wages in Canada, average household income in Canada, it's lower than those numbers. So perhaps it isn't surprising to just say, as long as you're a little bit above average, you are likely to reach peak happiness.
I mean, I'm sure people will agree. What do they say? Like money makes happy people happier, but it doesn't make miserable people happier. So it all has to be taken in context.
Ben Felix: One of the other papers that I'll talk about shows exactly what you just said to a T that income does correlate with happiness above, like there's no satiation point basically. Happiness keeps rising except for the least happy group of people who do have that plateau that was observed in earlier research. So that was a 2021 study.
And there's a 2023 study that found that finding that I just mentioned, that there's a sort of distribution of satiation points or lack thereof depending on your starting point of happiness. So that was a 2023 paper where two sets of authors who had historically disagreed in their findings got together to try and kind of find what the truth was in that line of research. And they came away with what I said, that there's no plateau between happiness and income for happy people, but for unhappy people, there is.
The other thing that I think is really important is that when we're talking about income and happiness, the research is using a log scale. So that means that each step up in happiness is based on a doubling of income. So it's like if your income goes from 100,000 to $200,000, that's going to show you the slight increase in happiness.
But if it goes up $5,000, it's going to be barely anything. And then the other piece that's really important is that even with the log scale, the relationship is pretty weak. The correlation between life evaluation or experienced happiness and income is 0.09. Almost nothing.
Dan Bortolotti: Almost nothing.
Ben Felix: Very low. The gap in median happiness between household incomes of $15,000 and $250,000 is about five points on a 100 point scale.
Dan Bortolotti: Wow.
Ben Felix: For context, it's not a big difference. So I would say in short, money can help, especially if you're already really happy, but it far from guarantees a good life.
And I do think that I saw that firsthand growing up surrounded by peers from families whose wealth far exceeded my own, but still had variation in their levels of happiness and family lives. Nick did just send me that the 2018 paper uses household income, equivalized household income. Thus, the estimates here pertain to single person households only.
Okay. To obtain estimates for households with more people, one can simply multiply the satiation estimate by the square root of the household size.
Dan Bortolotti: Okay.
Ben Felix: There we go. So I do think being aware of that research now, but also growing up in the environment that I did, that did shape how I use and invest my own money today. It also shapes how I talk to my kids about money.
Basically not all my financial decisions are made with the sole intent of maximizing wealth. Dan, how do you think your childhood and upbringing affected your views on money?
Dan Bortolotti: I don't know that there was any real drama. I grew up in a very comfortable family. Certainly we were not wealthy, but we had everything we needed.
My father was a business owner, so I never knew him to have kind of a salaried position. He had a business for his entire career, a family business. I would say my parents taught me to be a saver.
And believe me, I was a spendthrift until I had my first job. I certainly was not one of those kids who socked money away, except to the extent that if I wanted to buy something, I did. I saved the cash and then I spent it immediately.
I didn't invest or anything like that. But I did kind of learn that old idea that if you want something, you got to save up for it. Don't borrow to buy it.
I just took it for granted, but I've come to value how important that was in understanding my own happiness long-term. I didn't derive really any happiness from any possessions that we had. It was really more the family upbringing that I still remember and we still cherish today to the extent that that influenced my investing. I guess that's it.
Ben Felix: Oh, it sounds like it influenced your views on money, even if it didn't necessarily affect your views on investing.
Dan Bortolotti: I think that's a better way to put it. Yeah.
Ben Felix: Following high school, I went and got a degree in mechanical engineering while on a basketball scholarship at Northeast University. I was not very good at basketball. I mean, good enough to get a scholarship, I guess, but I didn't get very much playing time in university.
After my degree, I continued both basketball and my education back in Canada. I knew I didn't want to work as an engineer, so rather than pursuing further engineering education, I did an MBA with a concentration in finance. I figured if I couldn't play, you know what, I'm going to make this joke that Nick wrote into my notes initially, but I took it out.
If I couldn't play in the NBA, an MBA was the next best thing. Nick wrote that into the notes when we did this video for YouTube and I took it out. I didn't want to imply that I ever thought I would make it into the NBA because I never thought I would.
A bunch of people in the comments pointed out that that was a missed opportunity to tell that joke. Now, two experiences during my MBA did shape how I invest and kind of shaped the rest of my life. The first was a year spent selling insurance and actively managed mutual funds, which started as an internship through my MBA program.
I was working for an advisor doing interesting analysis and things like that. It was a legitimately interesting internship. At the end of the internship, the firm was like, hey, you're great.
Do you want to keep working here? I was like, yeah, I do. It was, okay, here's how to get your licenses and now start calling people and selling products.
I was like, oh, that's, huh. I kind of assumed, like I think many people do, that financial advice is all about advice, that advisors act in the best interest of their clients, but I learned pretty quickly that many parts of the financial services industry are much more focused on selling products than giving advice, which our listeners I think are pretty familiar with that idea. Now, the problem I had personally is that I did learn eventually that high fee actively managed mutual funds are the last thing most people need in their lives and that's what I was selling, but I do have a good story on how I got there.
I was interviewed for a column in the Globe and Mail in May of 2013, the article's still up, and I talked about how I personally invested in the Fidelity Dividend Plus Fund.
Dan Bortolotti: That's a good one.
Ben Felix: I haven't looked at how that fund's performed. Maybe it's killed it, I don't know.
Dan Bortolotti: Maybe it's been amazing.
Ben Felix: I'm selling insurance and mutual funds, making a pretty low income at the time, and I was, I really was investing in the Fidelity Dividend Plus Fund. I had some savings from prior to that job and what I was making then. Now, I figured this interview would be a good way to kind of get my name out there because I was selling financial products.
I had to get in front of people, but instead of getting my name out there in a good way, I got absolutely eviscerated in the comment section. Like, man, eviscerated. I wish I saved it.
Dan Bortolotti: This kind of surprises me though, right? Because, I mean, of course, I was in the financial media at that time. Most people doing that interview would have given similar answers.
It's not like everybody was out saying they're a hundred percent passive, low cost, diversified. Like, most people were picking active funds or droning on and on about the five dividend stocks that they bought. So, I'm kind of surprised that you were singled out for criticism or maybe everyone who was interviewed for that column at the time took a beating. I don't know.
Ben Felix: I don't know. I didn't go and look at everybody else's comments. I sure read my own.
Maybe they were Canadian Couch Potato readers that were over there commenting on that.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. Maybe I commented on it. I don't know. If I did, I apologize, but it had good effects long-term.
Ben Felix: It did. They were brutal enough that I was seriously questioning what I had been taught in my brief time in the industry, which is that this active fund is good and these insurance products are good. To be clear, some insurance products are good.
Some of the time, the problem is the incentives to sell the more expensive ones, which I don't think are as often good for the end consumer. That comment section experience was really like a kick in the teeth where I was like, okay, I need to revisit this. I had a bit of a sense.
I had come from an engineering background. I didn't know much about finance. Like at this time, I hadn't even started taking the finance classes for my MBA program.
It was like the general study classes before you get into your major specific classes or stream specific classes. So, I'm early on in my MBA and my business and finance education. I'm hearing this stuff from the various active management shops and hearing the stuff that my firm was talking about.
It seemed just not as analytically rigorous as I would have expected coming from an engineering background. A lot of vibes, a lot of platitudes, a lot of obviously cherry-picked data. That's all obvious in hindsight, but at the time, as a young guy in financial services, listening to the experts at fund companies seemed sensible enough.
They had way more experience than I did. But after my comment section evisceration, I did what I probably should have done from the get-go. I went and looked for academic research on this, which is what you'd expect an engineer to do to begin with.
So, I guess that was my bad not starting there. But I found pretty quickly, as you know, Dan, and you knew back then, I should have just called you maybe.
Dan Bortolotti: I had a few years on you, but yeah, I guess I was already there at that time.
Ben Felix: Yeah, you were. You were the Canadian Couch Potato at this time. Yeah. Research on mutual fund performance goes back to 1968. That's how long academic research has been finding that actually managed mutual funds don't outperform the index. And that finding's held up unbelievably well since then.
It's one of the best documented facts, I think, in academic finance. People might debate about different ways you can sort active funds. Well, these ones outperform, but broadly speaking, that finding that most active funds underperform and that they should be expected to do so is widely accepted.
So, I eventually figured that out. Then at that point, I figured I was done with this industry. I didn't know about Canadian Couch Potato.
I didn't know about PWL at the time, but I could see once I dove into the research that what I was seeing in practice, what I was being told to sell, what I was being told was good advice, was the opposite basically of what at the time was already decades of academic literature.
Dan Bortolotti: So, remind me though, Ben, because that was early 2013, that article, and you joined PWL not too long after that.
Ben Felix: November.
Dan Bortolotti: It was sort of a road to Damascus conversion. It didn't drag out over too long.
Ben Felix: Yeah. I guess that's the next part of the story. Do you have anything else before I keep going, Dan?
Dan Bortolotti: Well, I was going to say, I mean, I had a similar sort of conversion earlier, and it was a little bit different in the sense that for me, I was of course not working in the financial industry. I was working as a journalist. I've told the story before.
My conversion to it was I was on assignment for MoneySense magazine writing about a number of families who were going through some personal financial issues. We brought them into this kind of financial bootcamp and we had a number of experts speak to them. And then as I said, I was there kind of as a reporter.
And one of the experts that we brought in was Norbert Schlenker, who people may recognize as the Norbert in Norbert's Gambit, the strategy for converting currency. And he did a talk about passive investing, which of course MoneySense magazine had been writing about for many years, using the "couch potato" term long before I co-opted it. I just remember it was sort of the opposite.
It wasn't so much I was in the industry and I had been told a lot of this. It was just being told that 90% of professional money managers can't beat an index fund or whatever the number is struck me as so perverse.
The comment I'd made in the past is it would be like if you told me 90% of PGA pros on the golf circuit couldn't shoot par. And I said, well, what does that mean? That's impossible.
And then of course, for all the reasons we know, it has nothing to do with their lack of skill. Well, it might, but there are all sorts of other obstacles. And so for me, it was more just not really understanding how that fact could possibly be true.
And that the active fund industry could still have billions of dollars in assets. If it was failing over and over and over, I just kind of came to it in a different way. When I did all my reading on it, it wasn't the academic literature.
It was more popular literature. All of the guys that have been on the podcast and that are now colleagues, really Larry Swedroe, Rick Ferri, it was mostly US guys at the time. There wasn't a whole lot about the strategy and how to implement it in Canada, which was the reason I created Canadian Couch Potato. But that was around sort of between 2008, 2010 is when all of that happened.
Ben Felix: Such a cool story.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. It was very unlikely. If you had asked me at the time around 2008, 2009, where I thought this would go, I did not expect I would end up in the industry only five years later.
Ben Felix: Crazy. I had that one breakthrough, I guess, where I got roasted in the comments. The second one that I had was during my MBA classes, when I'm finally in the finance specific courses, I was in a corporate finance lecture and we were talking about the cost of capital and we were learning about the capital asset pricing model and market beta.
But the professor said that there's this newer, I mean, this is 2013, so it's not that new at this point. There's a newer asset pricing model called the Fama-French Three-Factor Model. And Fama and French of course had found that the price of risk in the overall market did an insufficient job of explaining why different portfolios earn different average returns.
But when they added in a size factor and a value factor, trying to add in the price of risk for those specific types of stocks, they found that that explained most of the remaining difference in returns for diversified portfolios. And that paper of course went on to be foundational in modern finance. So I learned about that.
I thought that was pretty interesting. And then I was doing some Google searches, I guess, for, I don't know if I was looking for Fama and French or if I was just looking for low cost investments. Might've been low cost investments actually, because I think the title of the article that I found was A Little-Known Company That Keeps the Fees Low, the Rob Carrick article. I learned, however I found it, I learned that their research, Fama and French's research was being used to create investment products that were available as mutual funds, which mattered to me because I was only licensed to sell mutual funds in Canada. And I was like so excited because at that point I was pretty disappointed, I guess, with the options I had available to me to invest clients' money.
Because at that point I had started doing the research and was pretty comfortable with the idea that actively managed funds were not what I wanted to be recommending to people, but I was still meeting people and getting clients. And so I found Dimensional and I was like, great, this is something I can get behind. It felt at the time, it's like what my engineering education told me that an investment product should look like.
I'm like, finally, this is quantitatively sensible. It's backed by research and theory and it's empirically robust, all that kind of stuff. So I'm like, amazing.
So I called Dimensional Fund Advisors. They asked me some questions and they were like, yeah, yeah, no, you're not gonna be able to use our products. Because they're pretty particular about who they allow to distribute their funds.
That call honestly almost ended my career in financial services. I thought this was a pretty terrible industry based on my initial experience. I'd finally found something that I could get behind and felt comfortable recommending to people.
And then when they were like, yeah, you're not gonna be able to use this. I was like, okay, well, that's probably it then. So I had to finish up my MBA classes and I thought I might just move back to BC where, as I mentioned, I grew up, and maybe look for work in engineering or something like that. But Dimensional called me back within probably, I don't know if it was a couple of weeks or a couple of months. And they were like, hey, you're that weird guy that was asking about the Fama-French Three-Factor Model.
There's a guy in Ottawa that uses our products and he's looking to hire someone. His name's Cameron Passmore. Do you want to meet him?
And I was like, absolutely. So I got introduced to Cameron. That kind of started the next chapter.
Dan Bortolotti: I was really interested to hear that part of the story. I did not know that that's how you found PWL was via Dimensional, basically a cold call to them. And they were the matchmaker. I had not realized that. So it worked out pretty well for you, I would say. And for us.
Ben Felix: Pretty interesting. How did you end up getting connected with PWL?
Dan Bortolotti: I was writing for MoneySense at the time. I think it was 2011 or 2012. I was acting editor for the magazine because the full-time editor had left.
They were going to hire someone else. I didn't want to do it full-time, but I said I would step in for a number of issues. And I assigned myself a story called Renovate Your Portfolio.
And it was based on, I had had a call with Justin Bender, maybe a year or so before. He was a reader of the blog. He had said he wanted to do this do-it-yourself investing service.
And he wanted to do it for charity. And he asked me for help to promote it, like to help raise some money. So we said, okay.
And the idea was that do-it-yourself investors would speak with him and he would do a financial plan. And then the investor would then build their own portfolio with low cost ETFs. It was such a success.
I mean, I'm not sure how many clients, they had way more than they could possibly serve. So they had to choose a smaller number. And he was telling me about how clients loved it.
I said to him, well, this sounds like a good story to me. And I said, how about if you reach out to three of the clients, ask for their permission to speak with me, and we would just do their story. What the problem was, how they fixed it, what the portfolio looked like at the end.
So we profiled three different clients and the article came out. People loved the article. They got even more phone calls from people saying, hey, will you do this for me?
Justin and I went for a beer and he said, have you ever thought about maybe coming on board and we could kind of do this together? And I said, what are you crazy? Why would I want to work in the financial industry?
And then I thought it through and the rest is history. So when I came on board, I just kind of did the outreach and talked to the clients. I wasn't licensed.
I couldn't make any recommendations, but I was kind of the person who made the initial contact with people. I could do some of the basic planning, got my CFP, got licensed and all of that later. But yeah, that's how it started.
We've grown the business so much to the point where within a few years, we stopped the do-it-yourself service because we just couldn't manage the workload. And frankly, we wanted to focus on the managed business. Another interesting part about it was a number of the clients who we worked with on that DIY model came back to us a year or two years later and said, this was great.
We really liked working with you guys, but I don't know how to maintain this portfolio on my own. Will you take us on as full service clients? And to this day, a number of clients that I still work with came in a dozen years ago through that model.
So it all worked out incredibly well, but in a way we could not possibly have predicted ahead of time.
Ben Felix: That's so cool. I knew that there was a Justin connection in there. I don't know if I knew that renovate your portfolio story. That's very cool to hear.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah, that's how it started.
Ben Felix: For both of us, that was 2013, right?
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. So I came on board like January, 2013. So barely a year before you, but there was so much happening at PWL at that time.
It was a relatively small firm at the time, but it really started to grow around that time and barely recognizable today if you were to go back to 2013.
Ben Felix: Yeah. So Cameron managed around $120 million in Canadian dollars back in 2013 when I joined. PWL as a whole, I think was around $700 million.
I remember there was a big celebration when we as a firm hit a billion dollars. We now manage well over $8 billion for Canadian families, businesses, and institutions across PWL. So yeah, like you said, Dan, unrecognizable and pretty cool to have been part of that growth.
Dan Bortolotti: I think that's one of the reasons why I'm still really comfortable here, because so many of us go back to that period. Obviously the company's grown enormously, but a lot of the people who were involved when the firm was pretty small are still here and the culture has evolved, but we've stayed true to our roots. It's unrecognizable in terms of the structure and the size of the corporation, but in terms of the investment strategy, changes have been pretty subtle and have mostly evolved as better products have become available and things like that.
I don't think we've gone too far astray from the principles that we had 15 years ago or whatever it was.
Ben Felix: Yeah. Even going back longer. I mean, the firm founded in 1996. We actually had James Parkyn, who co-founded the firm. He was at our employee summit. You couldn't make it this year, Dan, but in future years, hopefully, he'll be there.
But James spoke about the founding of the firm or the founding principles and how true to that we have remained since then. I mean, the big difference from the very initial firm is that in 1996, they were not using index funds, but they adopted that approach to investing in the late 90s or early 2000s. Then that's been fundamental ever since then.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. It was pretty tough to invest in index funds in 1996. I don't even know if they existed in Canada.
Maybe barely. We had Ted Cadsby on several episodes ago. He was in right at the ground floor, but boy, they were fringe products at the time.
Ben Felix: Yeah. I think they were using some US listed products for that reason. Then they helped bring Dimensional Fund Advisors to Canada in 2003.
That was James' point at summit or one of his points at summit was how consistent the firm has been despite all the growth. To your point, Dan, the core principles, the founding principles of the firm that financial planning matters and should be paired with portfolio management. They can't exist in isolation, at least if you're doing either one of them well.
Then the philosophy, at least since around 2000 of some version of low cost, broadly diversified evidence supported portfolios. A lot of backstory there, hopefully not too much. I can now tell listeners how I invest my own money.
I will talk about my actual investment holdings, but I do want to emphasize that my family also places a high priority on investing in our lives today. That ties back to what I talked about earlier about not necessarily just focusing on maximizing wealth. I've got four kids as regular listeners know, and we do try to create memorable experiences for our family while balancing that against being responsible about our future.
It's similar to how we talk about planning with PWL clients. We talk about money being a tool for funding a good life, and a good life is about more than the size of your portfolio. We spend a ton of time talking to clients about that.
What's the best way to use your money as opposed to how can you have the most money possible? I think this does show up in my family's long-term decisions about spending versus saving. We're also very deliberate about investing in our health, which we did an episode on, and also using our money to buy time or investing in time by outsourcing stuff like the two big ones right now are cleaning and meal prep, which outsourcing those things saves us a ton of time.
It's actually so interesting because there's research showing that that can improve your relationship with your spouse, and you read that research and you're like, yeah, whatever, I guess it makes sense. Then you do it, you hire a cleaner, and I mean it really does make a difference, at least in my experience. Do you guys do anything like that?
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah, we do the same. I agree with it. Just having someone do chores like that around the house, if it's not your thing.
I get it, people love to work around the house. I have no interest in it, and I work long hours at my regular job. The last thing I want to do on a weekend is clean the house.
Luckily, I don't have a lawn to mow or anything like that, but I agree with you. I think anytime we can subcontract jobs that we don't want to do, that's a great way to spend money.
Ben Felix: Time is one of the best investments I think you can make. I don't have any of that research in my notes for this episode, but there's a ton of research showing that people who have a preference for time over money are generally happier. We definitely try and keep that in mind.
Wherever we can buy time when it's not crazy expensive, I guess there are limits to it. We don't have a chauffeur. I don't know how much time that actually saves you, I guess.
Dan Bortolotti: You have Uber.
Ben Felix: Yeah, we don't even do that. They don't service in the rural area that I live in. Best I could do is a taxi.
My actual assets, most of our liquid long-term financial assets are in one fund, the Dimensional Global Equity Portfolio. That's a fund that PWL uses for lots of clients as well. Of course, not every client is in a 100% equity portfolio.
It's just a globally diversified fund. Stocks from all over the world. There is a Canadian home country bias, which we've done episodes on that.
People can disagree with the home country bias, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Dimensional funds, as listeners know, look a lot like index funds. They're low-cost, broadly diversified total market portfolios, but Dimensional funds are not actually index funds.
They do tilt toward smaller companies, lower-priced companies, and more profitable companies. They exclude certain stocks in the small-cap segment of the market. The whole foundation of the portfolio approach is based on Fama and French's research.
Most recently, their 2015 paper, which updated their three-factor model to a five-factor model. That just improved the explanatory power even further. I'd call it the workhorse asset pricing model in academic finance. That's what the Dimensional portfolio is based on. That's my main public market holding.
Dan Bortolotti: Comes as no surprise, I don't think. I don't think people will be surprised to know I just use plain vanilla cap-weighted ETFs across all of our accounts, all of our household accounts. I don't want to talk about which fund provider because it doesn't really matter.
As advisors, we use all of the major fund providers in our client's portfolio, depending on the specific funds, but they're all asset allocation funds too, with one exception. I think maybe people are surprised by that. Only in my RRSP, which is the largest of our household accounts, do I use individual ETFs for each asset class.
In all of the other accounts, I just use asset allocation ETFs. The only reason, frankly, that I use individual ETFs in the RRSP is that's the way I set it up 15 years ago, and I'm just too lazy to change it. I make a couple of trades a year to rebalance, and that's it.
I pride myself on benign neglect when it comes to my own portfolio management. It's funny because I have been asked this. I even addressed it in my book when people might say to me, well, why do you use, for the most part, individual ETFs for each asset class with your clients?
Because it's my responsibility as a portfolio manager to squeeze out every last basis point where I can. I'm not going to say to a client, I'm just going to do it this way because it's easier for me, even if it costs you a little bit more, whereas I'm very comfortable saying that about my own portfolio. I certainly spend a lot more time managing client portfolios than I do my own because I'm more accountable to them.
In terms of strategy, it shouldn't surprise anybody. It's 100% aligned with the strategies we use for our clients, and I think that's essential as an advisor. If you're not doing that, you need to explain it.
Ben Felix: Imagine if you dropped a bomb that you only invest in Dimensional funds.
Dan Bortolotti: I have nothing against them, right? I said, but it isn't what I do for our clients. It isn't what I do for myself. If I was managing money for family members, it's got to be the same strategy.
Ben Felix: For sure. Completely agree. On asset allocation, I don't own bonds. I don't have anything against bonds. We do have lots of clients that own fixed income and have fixed income allocations in their portfolios. They just don't fit with my personal tolerance or capacity for volatility in my investments.
I have been all equity as long as I've been investing. I did get some sweet confirmation bias when Scott Cederburg's paper came out because their paper basically said, and again, this paper came out many years after Dimensional built the fund that I invest in now, which has had, since inception, the same allocation strategy. I guess the geographic weights have shifted over time as the markets have changed.
That paper showed that a globally diversified portfolio with about a third in domestic stocks is optimal over the life cycle, which is not exactly what Dimensional is doing because it does have the tilts towards small cap and value. From a broad allocation perspective, it's exactly what they've been doing. I was like, oh, that's nice.
At least nice that it's not materially different because then I'd have to think about whether I should make a change.
Dan Bortolotti: But do you plan to invest 100% equities indefinitely? I mean, it's, I guess, hard for you to know, but is your long-term expectation no fixed income?
Ben Felix: That is my hunch. We did record a second episode with Dave Chilton recently and I asked him that question because he's about to retire in a few months, but he's got in his book the line, "be an owner, not a loner, invest in stocks and not bonds." I asked him, has your view on that changed now that you're actually retiring? He said, no, it hasn't. I wonder about that. Is that going to change for me?
Am I going to feel differently about it as I get closer to actually being retired and drawing down my portfolio? I don't suspect that it will, but it's honestly hard to say to your point, Dan. It's hard to say now when I'm probably decades away from not having an income. So we'll see.
Dan Bortolotti: For the record, I'm 70, 30, 70 stocks, 30 fixed income has nothing to do with Scott Cederburg or any other theoretical. It's that I don't have the stomach for 100% equities. I just don't, especially at this stage of my life.
And more importantly, and this is kind of the discussion we have with clients is I don't need to be a hundred percent equities. I've done the plan. And I feel that to meet my spending goals in retirement, based on what we've saved, this is more than enough growth.
My motto for this decision has always been take as much risk as you need and no more. Going back to our earlier argument about at what point does happiness from wealth plateau, if my portfolio was twice as big when I'm 90 years old, am I going to be any happier? And I'm pretty confident the answer is no.
For me, I'd rather have a smoother ride than a bigger pile at the end. But again, it's a very personal decision.
Ben Felix: Probably lots of wisdom in there. Maybe one day I'll be looking at these words when my portfolio is down 60% in retirement. Like, ah, Dan was smart.
Dan Bortolotti: I will say, no, I'm not smart, I'm old. Because 2008 was a real eye opener, I think. Yes, we have had bear markets since then, but we have not had anything quite like what we experienced in 08-09. COVID was the closest because it was not only a very sharp decline, but it was also accompanied by a genuine health scare.
But 08-09 we had people, and when I say we, I was not an advisor at the time, but I was in the media at the time. And there were certainly people who thought the market could go to zero and that people could be wiped out completely. I'm not sure we have had that same kind of existential fear in the market since then.
And I also feel like that was a 50% loss in about six months, even with a globally diversified portfolio. And I feel like if you have your portfolio cut in half in six months and you can still survive and stick to the plan, good for you. But if you have never experienced that, you don't necessarily know what it feels like.
It's not that I'm trying to discourage you or anybody else. I'm just telling you that's why I don't do it.
Ben Felix: It's a real thing. There's a paper that looks at people who grew up during the Great Depression, if I remember correctly, and they tend to take much less equity risk than folks who grew up at different times throughout history for exactly the reason that you just said, because they've lived through some stuff and it affects you.
Dan Bortolotti: I've seen similar research actually for people much younger who lived through the dot-com bubble, which was six or seven years before 08. And in fact, I mean, you want to talk about a brutal period. How would you like to have been an investor between 2000 and 2009?
You started with the dot-com bubble. So you had about three years in a row of negative equity returns. Then you had a nice bull market and then you had it cut in half in 08, 09.
And you retired in 1999. And that was your first nine years of retirement. And you were a hundred percent equities.
My God, you would have been thinking about going back to work. These are the things I try to worry about because I think it's prudent to worry about them. And then come up with an asset allocation that meets your goals and then get on with it. Don't dwell on it.
Ben Felix: Just to be clear on the Cederburg research, they don't suggest in that paper that stocks are safe. They're still super volatile and an all equity portfolio in their research still has deep drawdowns. They basically just find that bonds, when you adjust for inflation can be riskier for very long-term investors from the perspective of consumption on the volatility of stocks.
The way that I think about this is that flexibility and spending goes a long way in addressing that. Not everybody can be flexible in their spending. It depends on your expenses versus your assets.
When we talked to Elroy Dimson, he made a similar comment that he's a hundred percent equities and just has flexibility in his spending as needed. And that's how they deal with potential volatility. I'd like to think that's how I would deal with a period like that. But as you said, Dan, I haven't actually had to do anything there. So we'll see.
Dan Bortolotti: I'm sure you'll be fine when it comes.
Ben Felix: We'll revisit this after that. I can speak from experience. Hopefully, not actually.
Dan Bortolotti: Hopefully you never experience it.
Ben Felix: Yeah. So that part of my investments, and it sounds like yours too, Dan, is pretty boring.
What you'd expect from each of us. The next piece has definitely surprised people when I've told them about it. A sizable part of my portfolio is in private equity, specifically in PWL's parent company, OneDigital.
Now I don't go looking for private equity market investments. I've been vocally skeptical about private equity funds. And I think in that case, for good reason. Research pretty consistently shows that private equity funds have delivered net of fee returns in line with public stock markets.
And so you take on all this extra risk and illiquidity for what? Historically, not much. Equity in PWL though, and now OneDigital, has been by far my most successful investment.
Now, I know a lot of that comes down to luck. As we said earlier, PWL has done quite well over the time that we've worked here. There's a world where that didn't happen and things didn't work out the way they did, but whatever.
Worked out well. Some of that does have to do with the fact that it's not a private equity fund. It was a single holding in a company that I was working for and knew quite well.
There was no fund. There were not multiple layers of fees. There was no fund manager between me and the actual business.
It was a direct stake in a company that I knew well and was personally helping to grow. I did receive early on some stock options in PWL. I got some shares in exchange for formal ownership of the Rational Reminder Podcast, this podcast and my YouTube channel, which is an interesting thing.
It's like we started these content channels years ago, as a try this and see what happens. Then they became a very important part of the business.
When Cameron was buying majority ownership, he was like, we never really documented who owns this thing. PWL probably does realistically if you just look at how employment law works, but there's a case where we can buy it from you in exchange for equity for formal ownership. I was like, sure, that makes sense. We did that. I got some equity then. Then I did buy some shares.
We were able to buy shares relatively late in the game. I wish that had been available earlier, but it is what it is. I had a sizable chunk of equity, but nothing too, too crazy.
At the valuation, we traded it privately, but then in 2025, as listeners know, PWL was acquired by OneDigital for a valuation multiple quite a bit above what employees had been able to buy at. When we were acquired, I was required to sell a chunk of the equity that I had. Then I elected to roll a large portion of it.
I could have sold it all, but I elected to roll a large portion of my PWL equity into OneDigital equity, which I continue to hold today. Part of that was to defer tax, but it was also a deliberate decision. I wanted to have equity.
Now, I think people have been surprised by that because it's well-known in personal finance that you don't invest in the company that pays your salary. That's the most common personal finance advice out there. I think it's a little bit different when the company's not public, especially when we were PWL, because we were trading at a valuation so much below market as the acquisition by OneDigital kind of proved.
But valuation aside, I put a lot of myself into the company and into PWL. I work more hours than a salaried employee would, and I can see the impact that I'm having on the growth of the business. The idea of just working for a salary, that wouldn't have felt good.
It wouldn't feel good now. Now, I know that I'm taking on lots of idiosyncratic risk. This is what the Rational Reminder community folks have pointed out when I say this, like, oh, what are you doing?
You're taking all that idiosyncratic risk. And it's like, I get it. Company-specific risk, like risk specific to OneDigital.
I know that. This may sound weird to say, but it's idiosyncratic risk that I want to take. Like I want it to be tied to the fortunes of the company that I'm contributing to.
That may be bad advice, and that's probably not something that people should hear me saying, go and do it themselves. But I mean, listen, personal finance is personal. This feels right to me. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. That's what I'm doing.
Dan Bortolotti: I think that this is an interesting decision, right? Because it's one thing to say, I work for such and such a public company, and I have a stock ownership plan, and it's 80% of my liquid assets. That is an obvious huge risk.
To me, it would almost be like saying that if you were just on your own and you decided to start your own business, and you had a great business idea, the business got off the ground, you were earning really good money, and people say, well, that's a huge risk you're taking. You should maybe go work at a salaried position. It's not really the same decision here.
You're a fundamental part of the business. You're not just some pawn who has no influence in whether the business is successful or not. But I think it's also important to consider the percentage of your net worth that's involved.
So again, if you had no liquid investments and you put all of your personal stake into the company, you are taking an enormous risk. But as you've just said, you've got this globally diversified portfolio. You own a little piece of tens of thousands of businesses, as well as a larger piece of the one that you're involved in.
I don't know that that's a terribly risky thing to do. It certainly has an enormous upside. Whatever downside there is, is something that you could manage. If it didn't work out, you wouldn't be on the street.
Ben Felix: Yeah. I would say it's not even percentages. We had this conversation a lot. We worked with folks from Shopify when they were going public and beforehand. So we had the conversation a lot about how much to diversify. I've got this whatever millions of dollars plus, how much should I diversify?
We never really talked about percentages. You want to have a certain percentage of your net worth in one thing versus the other, diversified versus in your company stock. It was always about how much do you need diversified to achieve your financial goals.
Dan Bortolotti: Right. Set that aside.
Ben Felix: Yeah, that's right. If it was 10% of their total liquid wealth, that's fine. If they wanted to take risks with the rest, then that's up to them. Our advice was always, how much do you need to live the life that you want to live?
Let's secure that, or at least take the idiosyncratic risk off of that side. But we never really thought about it as percentages. That's, I think, how I think about it now too.
Dan Bortolotti: That's a smarter way to think about it too, right? It's this idea that if you need, make up a number, $2 million, carve that off, put it in something diversified and safe. If you had $10 million in another, some kind of private investment and it goes to zero, you've still got the two you need. Make up those numbers, whatever makes sense. I think that that's a useful concept.
Ben Felix: Same kind of thing for the business owner that you mentioned earlier. For them, no, they shouldn't sell half their business to diversify, but hopefully they're taking some extra income to save for retirement.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. In something that's uncorrelated with their regular business.
Ben Felix: Right. People hear that and they're like, well, that's terrible advice. Maybe it is. It's not advice that I go and give to people, but that's what I've chosen to do.
The next asset that I'll talk about that I've also put a lot of myself into, unfortunately, is our house. We bought our home in late 2020. I'd rented my whole life prior to that.
Even when I was growing up, as I mentioned, we lived on boarding school campuses. Even then, we never owned a home when I was growing up. My parents own a home now, but my whole childhood, we never owned a home.
Maybe that's why I've always been comfortable with the idea of renting. Renting was great. Unlike a lot of traditional financial advice would have you believe, it's not throwing money away.
The flexibility for us was incredible as our family was growing. We didn't know how many kids we were going to have. We kept deciding to have one more until we stopped at four, but being able to move to a bigger place was amazing.
Without paying rent for the more expensive place in the interim, it's like when we needed more space, we could just end our lease and move to a new spot. We did end up buying a house for two reasons. One is that we were moving out of the city during COVID and we knew where we wanted to live, but we couldn't find rentals in that area.
Then the other one is that we wanted to stay in one place for a very long time. Owning a house locks in the cost of housing yourself in that specific home. An owned home, there's a paper suggesting that it behaves like a long-term bond indexed to the cost of living in that specific home.
The longer you plan to stay in a home, the more valuable that protection becomes. Renting avoids the risk of house prices falling, but it leaves you exposed to rising rents. Some people have commented that I rented in Ottawa during a time when rents were pretty stable and that once I bought, rents went up a lot.
It's possible my experience as a renter was better than people who came after me, which may be true, although I think rents have stabilized now. Anyway, for a family planning on staying in one place, who really wants to stay in one place for a long time, owning reduces the risk of being priced out of that market. Now, I like my house a lot.
People know I put a basketball hoop in the house. We put a sauna in our bathroom, which we love to use. It's a great house.
It's near water, near hiking trails, lots of good stuff. Purely from a financial perspective, owning our home has been by far, by far our worst investment. I don't like talking about it.
I don't like thinking about it. Just because of the way the timing worked out with when equity became available at PWL and when we bought our house and had to do a bunch of necessary improvements, hindsight bias, whatever, the outcome was, we couldn't have predicted that. If I go and run the numbers on how much more liquidity I would have had available if we hadn't bought a house and how much more equity I would have been able to buy in PWL and invest in public markets, yeah, it's a big number. The opportunity cost of owning a house in my specific case is a big number.
Dan Bortolotti: It's funny. I've shared my story before. I was a renter. We owned a house for many years and then we moved downtown, rented for a number of years, and then we were in a position where the owners of our condo were going to kick us out to sell the property, so we bought it from them.
But I hadn't realized, so our timing was almost the same. We bought in mid 2020. This is prime COVID time.
I do not for a minute regret buying. It's been six years because I love where we live. I love the place.
I love the location. I don't know how easy it would have been to find a comparable place as a renter. I also love being able to do the work we want to do on the place without worrying about getting kicked out.
Had we invested that amount of money in the market six years ago after the bull market we've just been through? My God. The condo is almost certainly worth less than we paid for it, even after doing some pretty substantial renovations.
And I don't know, it would be 50, 60% more had we invested it in the portfolio. So from a financial point of view, it was the dumbest thing we've ever done. But from a quality of life point of view, I don't regret it at all.
If there ever needed to be a lesson to stop thinking about your primary residence as an investment, both of our stories, I think, help to make that point. It doesn't mean don't buy. It just means think about it differently.
Ben Felix: Well, that's the thing. Our kids love our house. Our house is cool. Like it has the basketball court. It has a big open sort of concrete area. When you walk into the house, the kids rip around in there on PlasmaCars.
It's an objectively cool house, which is why we bought it when we saw it. It was a bit of a dump when we bought it. It was not in good shape.
It was never finished properly, but I walked in and I was like, oh yeah, this could be a cool spot. I don't think I anticipated how much it would cost to make it a cool spot, but the kids love it. It's in an area with a good school that the kids also love.
We have been here, same as you Dan, six years since we bought, no intention of moving. Like you said, Dan, terrible financial outcome, good financial decision. The last one is cash. Well, high interest savings account, not actual under the mattress cash.
Dan Bortolotti: Briefcases of cash that you keep in the basement.
Ben Felix: No briefcases, no duffel bags. We have more than we probably need. Part of that is because we did all this renovation work with our house and these big bills would come in.
So I'm just kind of used to having a chunk of cash on hand to cover that kind of stuff. I'm not timing the market. It's not a strategic allocation that's going to stay there forever, I don't think, but it's kind of nice just having a little bit more cash than we need on a regular basis, just so we don't worry about it.
I work in financial markets, like you mentioned, 2008, who knows what could happen.
Dan Bortolotti: I think this is an interesting point. I've heard other people kind of frame the discussion in this way as well, like I'm a hundred percent equities except for my cash.
Ben Felix: Good point, yeah.
Dan Bortolotti: For me, for example, I keep barely like a couple of months worth of expenses in a savings account. That's it. But I have a much more conservative portfolio than you do.
Ben Felix: Interesting.
Dan Bortolotti: I don't know how the numbers work out. I'm sure you're not 30 or 40%, but the point is, if you really are a hundred percent equities and you want to feel a little bit safer, chances are you're keeping more cash, which depending on how you look at it, you're not really a hundred percent equities.
Ben Felix: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dan Bortolotti: I just think it's important. I'm not trying to call you out.
Ben Felix: No, it's good.
Dan Bortolotti: You have to kind of make the distinction to say, my long-term investments are a hundred percent equities, but I keep a nice comfortable cash cushion so I can sleep well during market turmoil and that's totally fine.
Ben Felix: As a percentage, it's probably around 5% of the liquid portfolio.
Dan Bortolotti: Okay.
Ben Felix: Not a big allocation.
Dan Bortolotti: Not a big allocation.
Ben Felix: More than we need like on any regular basis. There's an opportunity cost to having it, obviously, but like you said, Dan, it makes us feel good.
Dan Bortolotti: That's what it's all about. It's like the house.
Ben Felix: Exactly. So that's it. I didn't give percentage allocations. A bunch of people, when I made a video on this, were like, well, you didn't give percentages.
Not a bunch of people, a few people. Most people, when I said, yeah, I didn't want to do that, were very understanding. I don't want to give specific percentages or dollar figures. Some people are asking for it. It's like, man, come on, get out of here.
Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. You first, readers. Share all of your personal financial details.
Ben Felix: Yeah. So that's it. Low-cost, globally diversified public equity fund, private equity holding in the business that acquired the business that I helped build, PWL. A house that's been a bad financial investment, but a great home to live in and some cash that keeps us feeling comfortable despite a bit of an opportunity cost.
As we've talked about, not every one of those decisions is perfectly rational, but I think that's fine. We've talked many times on this podcast about the whole premise of the Rational Reminder was always, let's tell people what a rational person would do, but also be clear about why someone might deviate from that theoretically optimal thing. There's more to a good life than the perfect portfolio. The other thing is nobody can agree on the perfect portfolio anyway.
Dan Bortolotti: Well, I was going to say that. I don't think suboptimal is irrational. They're not the same thing.
The decisions that you've described and hopefully the ones I've described as well, they're not for everybody. They're not theoretically optimal, but it doesn't mean they're not rational. We've obviously thought the decision through.
We understand the trade-offs and the opportunity costs, and we've made our decisions after working that out.
Ben Felix: All right. Well, that's it. Hopefully people found it interesting to hear how we invest our own money and how we think about money and all that kind of stuff.
Dan Bortolotti: All right.
Ben Felix: We do have one review real quick. We have a review from Apple podcast to read. Under SEC regulations we're required to disclose whether a review, which may be interpreted as a testimonial was left by a client, whether any direct or indirect compensation was paid for the review, or whether there are any other conflicts of interest related to the review as reviews, including yep, this one are generally anonymous. We are unable to identify if the reviewer is a client or disclose any such conflicts of interest, but we're pretty sure there aren't any because we don't pay for reviews.
Dan Bortolotti: That lines up. Well, I'll read it only if you answer it.
Ben Felix: Will do.
Dan Bortolotti: All right. So this comment is titled Great Insight. I appreciate all the deep dives. Wondering if you could talk about or compare with a Canadian equivalent to QQQI NEOS, or is this just a terrible fund stock consideration? Thank you for all of the valuable content. Help me out on this one, Ben.
Ben Felix: Hey man, if that's your definition of fun, I don't know. I'm worried about you. QQQI is a covered call type investment on the NASDAQ 100. I would direct Nalakakakanners.
Dan Bortolotti: That's why I didn't try it.
Ben Felix: I would direct them to our multiple episodes on this podcast or on my YouTube channel on covered call funds.
I put them in the category of ETF slop when we did a video on that topic. So as we just finished talking about, if you find slop fun, if the income from these funds makes you happy, it is what it is. But also as we just talked about, I think you really have to understand the trade-offs, which is what we focused on in the videos that we did and the episodes we did on covered call funds.
I don't know if we talked about QQQI. I think I might've actually in one of the covered call episodes looked at that fund specifically and compared it to its underlying to just a NASDAQ 100, I guess to QQQ. I'll pull up current data if I can. Let's see. So the QQQI, which the reviewer is asking about compared to QQQ has underperformed. It's only been around since 2024, January 30th, but it has underperformed by 3.37% annualized, which is consistent with all of the other examples that I've run on covered calls. You would expect this type of fund to underperform. It's kind of what you get and it's exactly what you should expect. Anyway, I would direct this reviewer to the many episodes we've done on covered calls.
Ben Felix: Yes, of course. Thanks for listening and I appreciate the review. We have not had as many reviews recently as usual. So if people are listening and have not left a review, we would love to hear from you. Anything else, Dan?
Dan Bortolotti: No, I think we're good to go.
Ben Felix: All right. Thanks everyone for listening.
Dan Bortolotti: Talk to you soon.
Disclaimer:
Portfolio management and brokerage services in Canada are offered exclusively by PWL Capital, Inc. (“PWL Capital”) which is regulated by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and is a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF). Investment advisory services in the United States of America are offered exclusively by OneDigital Investment Advisors LLC (“OneDigital”). OneDigital and PWL Capital are affiliated entities, and they mostly get on really well with each other. However, each company has financial responsibility for only its own products and services.
Nothing herein constitutes an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Occasionally we tell you not to buy crappy investments in the first place, but that’s not the same thing as telling you to sell them.
This communication is distributed for informational purposes only; the information contained herein has been derived from sources believed to be “truthy,” but not necessarily accurate. We really do try, but we can’t make any guarantees. Even if nothing we say is fundamentally wrong, it might not be the whole story.
Furthermore, nothing herein should be construed as investment, tax or legal advice. Even though we call the podcast “your weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making,” you should not rely on us when making actual decisions, only hypothetical ones.
Different types of investments and investment strategies have varying degrees of risk and are not suitable for all investors. You should consult with a professional adviser to see how the information contained herein may apply to your individual circumstances. It might not apply at all. Honestly, you can probably ignore most of it.
All market indices discussed are unmanaged, do not incur management fees, and cannot be invested in directly. Which is a shame, because it would be awesome if you could.
All investing involves risk of loss: including loss of money, loss of sleep, loss of hair, and loss of reputation. Nothing herein should be construed as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit.
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Sources From Today’s Episode:
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Links From Today’s Episode:
Stay Safe From Scams — https://pwlcapital.com/stay-safe-online/
Rational Reminder on Apple Podcasts — https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582.
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