Episode 9: Carson Brown: Dimensional’s Big Flaw

September 11, 2018 Benjamin Felix

Key Points From This Episode:

Being a poor grad student [0:01:48]
Budgeting [0:04:07]
Stuff does not make you happy [0:05:11]
Mental overhead is a real cost [0:07:56]
The Globe’s Financial Facelift disaster [0:09:10]
Rob Arnott’s slam of Dimensional [0:12:29]
Are people afraid of stocks? [0:12:29]
The 10-year anniversary of Lehman’s fall [0:14:20]
Stories from the financial crisis [0:14:20]
Volatility in dollars vs. percentage points [0:19:51]
Automated rebalancing [0:21:10]
My uncle told me to buy weed stocks [0:29:32]
What does a rational investor worry about? [0:30:07]

Read the Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making for Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, and Cameron Passmore.

We are back with our ninth episode of the Rational Reminder podcast. And we've been starting to get regular emails from listeners, which has been really great. And it's validating the project for Cameron and I, and making it fun and interesting to keep going. So if you're listening and you do have a question, we would love it if you reached out, you can send me an email and we really like hearing from our listeners. To start off today, we actually have our first guest on the podcast.

Cameron Passmore: So based on the podcast being out now, one of our great clients and a good friend, Carson Brown reached out to me a few weeks ago and said, "If you ever have guests, I'd love to join in." So Carson, welcome.

Carson Brown: Thanks. Great to be here

Cameron Passmore: So we met, it's got to be five, six years ago or so when we were doing work with the company you're working at. And interesting story, tell us a bit about how we met and how you recall how it all happened?

Carson Brown: I think actually I got a referral from a good friend of mine and he was starting a relationship I think with you. And the conversation was basically, "Hey, you're starting to take savings pretty seriously. And you're starting to do your own thing with a couch potato type fund. Why don't I put you in touch with my friend Cameron and just have a conversation just to get some advice as to how you're doing this."

Cameron Passmore: But your background is not finance though?

Carson Brown: No, no, it's not. No, I'm just, just a programmer. Got a couple of degrees from Carlton.

Cameron Passmore: Just a programmer.

Carson Brown: But just personal finance started to become an interest for me, just personally. I started saving just regularly. I was trying to keep track of my finances as a poor grad student. And it just transferred when I started having a career.

Cameron Passmore: But you knew how the industry worked when you started out? You had an idea?

Carson Brown: Yeah. To a degree. I had some exposure to the advice you get from insurance providers and some of the banks. I worked with a couple of them in my very early twenties, late teens. And I wasn't super in love with the way it ended up working out. It was very rates focused and not so much how am I saving or what am I spending for or saving for. And so I just DIY this myself, some spreadsheets, I really like working in spreadsheets.

Cameron Passmore: But you're wired to want to understand what's going on, not just take someone's advice blindly.

Carson Brown: That's right. And so that's why I really enjoyed first meeting you is because we started talking about what Dimensional funds were and what exposure to the market was and that stuff. And you did it in a way that explained to someone who didn't have a ton of finance background.

Ben Felix: So you've transitioned. You mentioned being a poor grad student. And I think it's safe to say that you're no longer poor now. Over that transition, how has your thinking changed about personal finance and investing?

Carson Brown: At this point, really what I'm interested in doing is making sure that I have the right exposure to the things I'm trying to invest in. So capitalizing on the right risk so that I can get a return over the 10 or 15 year period. The thinking back then was really how can I get out of thinking month to month and thinking longer term. Planning for bigger things that come up as a grad student, can I take a trip or do I not? And then later can I have a car or do I not? Do I ride the bus? And then later, do I have a house? And so as those things continue forward, it's okay, well, how do I plan for that long long-term horizon, 20 now plus years is where I'm thinking.

Ben Felix: Brings up a really interesting point on spending. So when you were a grad student, you couldn't spend because the money wasn't there on certain stuff, you had to prioritize.

Carson Brown: The big thing for me there was that the income was inconsistent. I'd have a grant come in and that'd be great at the start of the curriculum, start of the school year, but it would have to last me. Most of them didn't actually pay out monthly. They were a lump sum. I had TAship and that stuff which was regular. But so it's well, that's got to last me, so I have to ration it out. So I have to plan, well that means a budget. And then just making sure that I'm not spending more than I need for each budget. Or if I am then I can correct it with something later.

Cameron Passmore: But as your situation changed, you made a conscious choice not to spend as much as you could have.

Carson Brown: That's right.

Cameron Passmore: You could have a lot more stuff in your life than you do now.

Carson Brown: The advice I received really early from friends was the golden rule, spend less than you make, if you are able to do it. And so I'm really, really glad that I was fortunate enough to be able to do it. But it also lined up really well with the thoughts from my partner. So Rebecca was also really big into saving and planning and being a bit smarter around where the money gets spent.

Cameron Passmore: But happiness for you doesn't necessarily come from things that you can purchase.

Carson Brown: Right. That's a really tough cycle to break too. It's more of a psychological or emotional kind of thing. Keeping up with the Joneses or replacing experiences for items. I try and keep the two separate. I realize there's a strong relationship between them. But it's about the enjoyment, not the spending.

Cameron Passmore: And talk to us about translating that into the recent planning experience that we did. So we did a live plan for you and Rebecca. I think it's safe to say that your spending choices had a big impact on the plan's success rate.

Carson Brown: One of the best where you've reviewed your budgets and you reviewed history and we've talked about that. And then you're like, "I'm not going to let you spend less than this per month." And that was really funny to us because it was much more than we were thinking. And it's because you have to fill in, well, are you going to take trips more? Are you going to see people more? Are you going to go and do and have some experiences that you wouldn't have otherwise when you're focused on saving? And so that investment plan thing was really well, what does the end game, what does retirement look like? Which was really enlightening.

The other part that I found super, super interesting there was that you showed a whole bunch of potential life paths for over that course with different market returns, different risks, that sort of thing. And how many of those expected outcomes would meet our goal and how many wouldn't. So we ended up just playing with numbers. Well, what if we delayed to this time? What if it was this spending rate? And how would that change the percentage success? And I thought that was so cool.

Ben Felix: I've got one more question for you, Carson, and then we'll get into our regular conversation, just talking about a few things that we've read about recently. So you're interested in personal finance and investing. You get it better than I would say the vast majority of people. You've got experience being a DIY investor and building a couch potato portfolio. So why do you still choose to work with a wealth management firm like PWL?

Carson Brown: It's really about the people. And then it's really about the advice. I have a great relationship with the folks that I work with here. And then the other thing too is that the advice I receive is really tied to my financial wellbeing, not a particular product or not a particular agenda. So I feel like I'm getting a lot of honest advice and I'm happy to pay for that. And then the other thing too is it's a nice, the name of this podcast, it reminds me what things are important, what things I'm going towards.

Ben Felix: Did you find when you were doing a DIY approach, that there was some mental overhead, you were thinking about it while you were managing it?

Carson Brown: Yeah, for sure. It's called a couch potato and it's passive. But you still have to get in there at whatever rate you decide you want to rebalance and do that. You have to manage automatically buying the funds if you're doing it say through a direct brokerage account. And so those things are well I got to go in and I got to put on my hat and do that role. And I really enjoy being a little bit more hands off. It means I don't have to think about it as much, which is nice for me. I don't want to think about it.

Cameron Passmore: I had one more question too. You mentioned Dimensional early on in your remarks. How do you, in 30 seconds, describe what Dimensional is?

Carson Brown: So if you agree on capitalism, you think that generally it's a rising tide. The thing about Dimensional is they found out that the tide rises or is expected to rise higher in certain places before others.

Cameron Passmore: It's a pretty good description, I'd say.

Ben Felix: Completely unrehearsed and it was very good.

Carson Brown: Thanks.

Ben Felix: So that's great.

Cameron Passmore: So going to the regular stories of the week.

Ben Felix: So I think to do an episode this week, we have to talk about that Globe and Mail financial facelift article from last week, which made the rounds on Canadian Financial Twitter. So it was basically about a couple who were in a great financial situation. We've all read the article. Their situation was fantastic. Tons of cash and investments, good DB pension plan, totally equipped to retire. They've been managing their own investments. And in the article, so for anyone who doesn't know financial facelift, the person submits their financial situation and an advisor, a professional from any firm, I don't know how they pick them, gets to write an article giving advice.

So the advice that caused a stir in this case was that these people who are in a great situation, the first thing that this advisor said in the article was that they should hire an investment counselor who charges an AUM based fee. So now they're going to go from having no investment fees, no investment advice fees to having an advice fee. And that is what it is. My default in conversations with people is usually that if you can do it yourself, you probably should. And in this case, the couple had been doing it themselves, so why would they not continue to do so? Then the bigger issue is the portfolio advice. So I don't know, you guys read it. What did you think about the portfolio advice?

Carson Brown: I haven't read all that type of column. I wish that it had a bit of the two sides of the story. And then they got a second opinion.

Ben Felix: That's a good point.

Cameron Passmore: That is, yeah.

Carson Brown: But I definitely think just calling out let's spend let's spend 20% on alternatives, what are those alternatives? What are they doing with that?

Cameron Passmore: Well, receivables factoring was one of them, I believe.

Ben Felix: They talked about alternative income investments, such as private debt, international real estate and accounts receivable factoring to improved fixed income returns and lower overall risk. The interesting thing about that stuff is that it probably does look really good in the back test. If you go and get data on those asset classes, it probably looks great. Does that mean you should?

Cameron Passmore: It also sounds great too.

Ben Felix: That's true.

Cameron Passmore: Who doesn't want receivables factoring?

Ben Felix: That helps justify the investment counsel fee.

Cameron Passmore: But going back to the factors of matter that Carson alluded to, raising the tide. Certain factors have known academically sound higher expected returns. No mention of that at all. And so a counterpunch would have been interesting in the article.

Ben Felix: You start getting into stuff like private debt. Now real estate as an asset class, that is nothing wrong with that. I don't know what they mean by international real estate as part of your alternative income. Maybe REITs, maybe it's just REITs, that wouldn't be so bad.

Carson Brown: Could be REITs.

Cameron Passmore: And REITs are what, two to three percent of global market cap, roughly?

Ben Felix: And Swedroe had an article. Well, it wasn't. Swedroe wrote about a paper recently talking about how the return is actually explained almost completely by size, value, profitability term and credit. So if you have a factor diversified portfolio, like a Dimensional portfolio, this research paper shows that there's actually not a lot of value in adding in rates. If you're a hundred percent equity, then you don't have term and credit because those are fixed income factors. So in that case, maybe there's some place for rates but anyway.

Cameron Passmore: Factors always tell the stories in our experience.

Ben Felix: Well, that's what investment returns come from. You can always explain returns. What was it? The research affiliates, that was on the Masters of Business podcast a while ago. And Rob Arnott slammed Dimensional at the end of the podcast. You had to listen to the whole thing and at the end, it was this pretty big slam of Dimensional where Rob Arnott says Dimensional's big flaw, and he calls it a big flaw or there's something like that, is that they start with market cap. So he's saying that you shouldn't start with market cap at all. When you dig into research affiliates, the RAFI indexes. So they make indexes. And then companies like Schwab will make products based on those indexes.

But the RAFI index is ignore market cap, and they wait based on what do they call them? Economic factors or something like that. Not traditional risk-based factors. They rank them based on fundamental factors or something like that. That's what it's called, fundamental indexing. So they'll rank them. It's basically trying to find under priced securities. So they rank them based on how under priced they appear to be. So the basis of fundamental indexing is that markets are not efficient, which obviously doesn't make a lot of sense. We looked at that last week and we ran regressions on some of the RAFI index funds. And as far as we could tell most of the return difference between them and a traditional index was explained by the factors that we already know about. So it was just a repackaging.

Cameron Passmore: But if you want the factors, buy the factors. That's not really Dimensional's story. This is the purest way that we've been able to find a candidate to execute portfolios is to get those factors.

Ben Felix: We always end up talking about factors.

Cameron Passmore: Well, it's our world and it matters.

Ben Felix: But it all comes back to factors. That's the thing. It's hard not to talk about it. So you had that post from this morning from Josh Brown. That was pretty interesting. You want to talk about that?

Cameron Passmore: Super interesting. And I'm looking forward to Carson's feedback on this. So today on the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the scariest month in markets. So the great financial crisis started 10 years ago today with Lehman Brothers collapsing 10 years ago. And I remember that fall like it was yesterday. It was an unbelievable time. But the point of Josh, Josh was citing articles-

Ben Felix: Can you talk a little bit? I love, love is a weird way to say it, but it's always interesting to hear you tell the story about where you were in terms of you personally, and then where the business was when that whole thing happened.

Cameron Passmore: So the business back then, we were roughly from memory we were managing in our office about $90 million or so. So roughly a 10th of the slides that we are now. And in a matter of four months, because we were in diversified portfolios like we are today, but even a diversified portfolio went down 25-30%. So we went from 90 odd million down to 60 odd million dollars in a matter of a season. And I remember this is before iPhones, this is before wifi devices, you had no easy access. So I looked up this morning some of the dates, because I remember days where markets would go down, the Dow go down 500, 600, 700 points. It seemed to happen day after day.

Ben Felix: Where was your head? Where's your head when this is happening?

Cameron Passmore: You literally think it's the end. So I had two heads. One is you think it's the end of the world. Because every day was getting worse and worse and worse.

Carson Brown: Where's the floor?

Cameron Passmore: Where's the floor? When does this end? And we all succumb to recency effect. That's one side. I remember in our investment committee meetings at the time deliberately, actively rebalancing portfolios and saying either you believe or you don't. We kept believing all the way through. Wasn't easy. And I can remember most people doing their RSPs in the spring of 2009 saying, "Let's just buy a GIC or a bond fund for now."

Ben Felix: So people were coming in with an actual cheque?

Cameron Passmore: Absolutely, absolutely. So I just looked up some dates this morning. So September 29th, the Dow was down 776. The next month we had two days with down 700 plus points. December down 700 points. I can remember being at the Dimensional conference in Santa Monica that October. And coming back to the hotel at night, because you didn't know all day what the markets were doing. And so you had to come back to get on Yahoo in the lobby. Computer would log in to see, it was like, "Oh, down again." It was just mortifying. Every day it seemed to go down, go down, go down. I remember the fed in the US were trying to reorganize the structure of the banks in New York. And it was just an unbelievable time.

Ben Felix: So were you investing back then, Carson?

Carson Brown: Yeah. At that point I had a small amount in an RBC account and a small amount in an insurance product. And so the insurance product was relatively safe from this because it was not really in equities. But the RBC account, when I eventually withdrew and put that in a direct brokerage account with TD. It didn't recover at RBC for sure. I'm not talking huge amounts here but I had lost the 20% for sure.

Cameron Passmore: So one of the points of the article that was in Barron's was that there are fewer people owning shares today than there were back then, especially in the 18 to 29 age group. So you would have been in that group Carson back then. So 42% of that age group back then owned shares and it's 31% today of that age group that owns shares. And so people have got this apparently less desire to own equities coming out of this period. Is it directly linked to this period? I don't know. Perhaps it is. But fewer people own shares than back then. And there's all this talk of, we've had a lost decade of returns.

Ben Felix: Who's saying that?

Cameron Passmore: Well, that's the comment that's in this Barron's article, the lost decade. You hear lost decade mentioned all the time. I don't agree with it, but you hear people talk about the lost decade.

Ben Felix: You're saying that the past 10 years is the lost decade?

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: That was in the Barron's article?

Cameron Passmore: That's been all over. You haven't read something about the lost decade? It does not exist when you look at returns.

Ben Felix: 2000 to 2010 is the last time I heard we had a lost decade. I don't know. All the headlines I've seen have been about the longest bull market in history, which is obviously the opposite of a lost decade. But you did put that Betterment survey, Betterment's a robo-advisor in the US, they did a survey and it showed that 48% of survey respondents thought that the stock market had not gone up in the past 10 years. So there's your perceived loss decade.

Carson Brown: They just stopped listening when it tanked.

Ben Felix: It suggests that. So in the article Cameron mentioned from Josh Brown, he says that a lot of people probably just completely tuned out ever since the crash. Obviously the last 10 years in any market, can you find a market over the past 10 years has done badly? I don't think so.

Cameron Passmore: Nope. TSX up almost five per year.

Ben Felix: Maybe receivables factoring hasn't done well.

Cameron Passmore: S&P 500, 13%. International [inaudible 00:00:19:22], 6%. [inaudible 00:19:23] 60/40 portfolio is 6.2%. And this goes from before the crisis to now. So the crisis is priced into that. I think the point was that people are scarred from this event, who were invested at that. Do you feel that way at all?

Carson Brown: No, for me, it was actually great because when I was able to start contributing with the career and that stuff, markets were going up. So it was timing wise a lucky chance for me.

Cameron Passmore: So we know a lot of people view volatility in dollar terms, not percentage terms. So as your balance sheet has gone up, do you think that way? Do you worry about the percentage drop? Or do you think dollar amount drop might be? How do you get your head around volatility as the numbers got bigger is the question?

Carson Brown: The dollar drop is the one that gives me a gut reaction because that's the end state. But percentage drop to me is probably the one I want to pay more attention to because it's the calculated thing.

Ben Felix: Do you look at it?

Carson Brown: So I don't look regularly. We have these handy quarterly updates and I look at it roughly then because it's sent to me. But I try not to otherwise look at it. Especially with a fund, over a market. I expect it to ebb and flow and move around a bit. And then if I review four quarters or 10 quarters or 20 quarters, I'm going to see a trend.

Cameron Passmore: And do you get peace of mind because you're in the global balance portfolio? Do you get peace of mind knowing that there's machinery going on behind the scenes all the time in your portfolio?

Carson Brown: Oh yeah. Well, I remember having to rebalance when one thing does poorly, one thing does well and be like, "Okay, well I got to sell the thing." It's logical. But it's counterintuitive a little bit. So I really like that it's just automatically doing this. It's daily, right?

Cameron Passmore: Yes. It's all the time. But I think as your situation became more complicated with different types of accounts, Rebecca's stuff, and then you have all these different accounts rebalanced, it does become a challenge to have 14 different asset classes for six or eight different accounts. It does become a challenge.

Carson Brown: Especially back in the DIY one, because I'd have to sell stuff necessarily to make sure that I can balance properly. And so there's a fee involved with selling and I didn't like that.

Cameron Passmore: So do you spend a lot of time reading investment type stuff, planning stuff?

Carson Brown: Most of the planning type stuff that I'm reading is more figure out what lifestyle, figure out what savings rate and little less around these are the hot tips or the things to buy or the things to hold, from an investment perspective.

Ben Felix: It amazes me when you go and look for stuff to read about finance and personal finance and investing. It's got to be 90% of it is about what stocks you should be buying and what parts of the market, or if we're going to go for a recession. You go to any financial publication, like Financial Post, Globe and Mail, it's all focused on security, selection, market timing. Globe and Mail's better and better with guys like Rob Carrick plugging index funds all the time. But in general, it's not easy to find. And if you're an investor who's not maybe educated, maybe not looking for content about index funds and what's actually sensible, what you're going to get is stock tips and market forecasts.

Carson Brown: Well, that's the exciting part, right? That's why there has been so much attention for the new Wealthsimple stock purchase program. I forgot the-

Ben Felix: Wealthsimple Traders.

Carson Brown: Trade. It's the exciting part. It's not the part that you need to do often if you're doing all the other things may be right. But it's where the action is.

Ben Felix: People so badly want to focus on the stuff that they have no control over at all whatsoever. I always see maybe not so much on Reddit because people there tend to be, they get their wrist slapped pretty quickly if they start talking about stock picking in the fire channels on some subreddits. But some other groups that I'm part of in other communities, you always see people talking about how they want to get their feet wet with the stock picking to learn about investing because they want to become better investors. So they're going to go and pick some stocks, do some research.

And I always just shake my head. Even if you learn about analyzing companies and you learn about how to read a balance sheet and things like that, that does not make you a better investor. I think it was an interview I saw with Richard Daley recently, where he says that you cannot build intuition in stock picking because financial markets are random. You can feel like you have intuition. But you cannot actually build intuition when it comes to financial markets.

Cameron Passmore: You also want to talk about debt, I think too. So you've gone through a recent decision at home.

Carson Brown: So debt is something that I have become a little bit more comfortable with over the past 10 years. So our big decision was we're looking at houses, it's do we pull out a mortgage or do we look at some of these alternatives that involve a home equity line of credit. So I made the decision that HELOCs are something that really appealed to me because basically I can convert the house equity back into just investing in the market.

Cameron Passmore: Home equity line of credit.

Ben Felix: So this is doing a Smith Maneuver idea?

Carson Brown: Yeah. I really, really liked that idea because basically well, you have this big, giant fixed asset, but didn't you want to keep fixed income to a pretty low amount? And so I think this was actually covered in one of the earlier episodes of the podcast. But it makes a ton of sense to move those things back into the market if you believe in the market. The other thing too is at the end game, when the Smith Maneuver is complete, you've got a 65% HELOC back in the market and you're just making interest payments which are less than your mortgage would have been. And you paid off your mortgage faster. So it's a cool maneuver for sure.

Ben Felix: It is very cool. I think that it takes a certain level of understanding discipline rationality to pull it off.

Carson Brown: For sure. If we got another downswing, you've got a HELOC worth more than your house. Sorry, you've got a HELOC from your house that's worth more than what you have in your investment account. And so if the bank comes calling to say, "We want to close this loan off because the markets are so bad." You're stuck. You'd be stuck for sure.

Ben Felix: But even if they don't call a loan, it's still just having to do it and having to maintain it. I totally have faith that you can do it. But I wouldn't say that about, I don't know, 90% of people, it takes a lot. You have to understand it at a certain level, to be able to say, "Yes." And remind yourself every day, this is why I'm doing this.

Carson Brown: We ended up not doing it with our condo and I'm glad we didn't because of the complexity there. And then the amount of time we were going to stay in that place. And so for a long while it was the discussion around well, this is an approach, does it make sense? And you're hemming and hawing and looking at it over the course of months and months. It takes a long time for me to make big decisions like that. But I'm happy to do it now because it gives me the position that I want to have.

Cameron Passmore: Especially when you're a more equity biased portfolio.

Carson Brown: Yeah, exactly. It feels disingenuous to have that position and then have a big house that doesn't respect that position.

Ben Felix: So that's interesting.

Cameron Passmore: That is interesting.

Ben Felix: Very rational.

Carson Brown: I'm trying.

Ben Felix: But you're right. We did talk about that in one of the earlier podcast episodes where we talked about mortgage debt and asset allocation and how if you had a conservative portfolio, then what you're doing wouldn't make sense. But because it's an aggressive portfolio, it does make sense. And you're right. You're betting on the market. You're basically just doubling down on the bet.

Carson Brown: Yeah, for sure. If my time horizon was shorter, I don't think that I would be doing something like this.

Ben Felix: And your human capital is also probably very valuable and probably very portable. Based on your experience and your skills, you could probably go and find work anywhere, anytime likely.

Carson Brown: Hoping so.

Cameron Passmore: That mitigates a lot of the risk right there.

Ben Felix: Which isn't true for a lot of people. Even us, we have a certain skillset. But if we went to a different country, we'd be starting from scratch.

Cameron Passmore: But it does give Carson some flexibility that if something doesn't go so well in the markets, you have a way out.

Ben Felix: That's what I'm saying.

Cameron Passmore: Whereas if someone's got their back up against the wall and this is what they need to make it happen, that's a whole different situation.

Ben Felix: So you're in a position, your human capital is safer than say ours, which makes you more flexible in doing things like what you're talking about.

Carson Brown: It's also advanced level stuff that you can't do before you get the basics in place.

Ben Felix: True. Very true.

Cameron Passmore: So you were talking also earlier about the different Reddit sites like fire and the different ones you've been to.

Carson Brown: A buddy got me into a bunch of these. And so I added them to the usual mix of stuff that I'm subscribed to. And it's good because it pads out the cat pictures and stuff. But they're good because the comments are actually where you get a lot of really good discussion. You actually get people with different points of view arguing it out in a way that's quite professional. I'm not sure if they're all actually fire folks or if there's some advisers in the mix.

Cameron Passmore: Oh, there's for sure advisors.

Carson Brown: And it's also interesting to see how much of it is actually the same in the US and Canada. They've got their investment and retirement style accounts and we have ours. But there's actually quite a bit of shared knowledge that works across the border.

Ben Felix: What are some of the bad advice topics you see in there? I haven't poked in there much. Any common things like dividend investing?

Cameron Passmore: The way Reddit works, I think because it's all the upvote, downvote situation, the stuff that is bad gets downvoted pretty quickly. And I don't think you tend to see it.

Carson Brown: If you start browsing by the new posts, it's a totally different world than what's actually ranked as best. So a lot of the good stuff are actually stemmed from maybe bad questions. "Oh, my uncle told me weed stocks are great. How do I get in?" And then the comments are like, "Well, if you really want to do this, here's how it would work. But have you looked at other things too?" And so the comments are actually great, even if you don't maybe agree with the original post.

Cameron Passmore: That's very true. Well, that's probably good. We're at 30 minutes now. Unless you want to keep going?

Ben Felix: You have anything else to add? Anything else you want to?

Carson Brown: No, I think we covered a lot.

Ben Felix: My last question would be what do you worry about in your portfolio or your financial life?

Carson Brown: I'm mostly worried around keeping my options open if lifestyle changes or health issues or grow a family, that those things still remain possible. But also that it's not a Jack of all trades type situation where I'm not actually achieving what I want. I'm not sure if that makes sense.

Ben Felix: It makes a lot of sense. I think you've done the work of knowing that your portfolio is buttoned down, the plan's buttoned down. We've gone through all the different parts of financial planning with you. So that's more the bigger picture type stuff.

Carson Brown: And that's why really the things I focus on are the execution parts that I control. How much can I save? How much can I regularly contribute? Does the budget still makes sense? And then if there's a market downturn, well, that's a whole separate thing. That's not the part that's in my bank account. That's over in the investment side.

Cameron Passmore: And you can't control that anyway.

Carson Brown: I can't control that.

Ben Felix: But what you said is actually really insightful is that the things that you worry about are the things that you are able to control, how much you're saving, how much you're spending, how you react if your portfolio drops. And again, we've talked about how you're maybe different than the average person. I think the average person, if asked that question would be maybe worried about a market drop or something predictive that they have no control over. It's a very, very interesting answer.

Cameron Passmore: Thanks for joining us. It was a great, great time.

Carson Brown: Oh, my pleasure. This was great.

Cameron Passmore: Thanks, Carson.

Links From Today’s Episode:

Rational Reminder on iTunes — https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582.
Rational Reminder Website — https://rationalreminder.ca/

Shop Merch — https://shop.rationalreminder.ca/

Join the Community — https://community.rationalreminder.ca/

Benjamin on Twitter — https://twitter.com/benjaminwfelix

Cameron on Twitter — https://twitter.com/CameronPassmore

'Stock Ownership (Barron’s)' — The Rational Reminder Podcast Episode 9 - Dimensional’s Big Flaw - PWL Capital

'Great savers, not so great at investing' — https://www.theglobeandmail.com/investing/personal-finance/retirement/article-great-savers-not-so-great-at-investing/

'Psychic Trauma' — Psychic Trauma - The Reformed Broker

'How the Financial Crisis Still Affects Investors' — https://www.barrons.com/articles/how-the-financial-crisisstill-affects-investors-1536361852