October 20, 2022

Episode 223: A Financial Goals Master List (n=310)

October 20, 2022

We recently created and conducted a very interesting survey based on financial goals, and today, we get to share some of the data we collected and the answers that were given to the questions. Although there are some definite limitations to our expertise as surveyors and data collectors, the findings are most definitely illuminating, surprising, and useful. Listeners will get to hear a bit about the process of building the survey as well as some of the raw numbers and data before we get into the list of goals that were submitted, collated, and ranked. We also share some of the ways that these were split across demographics such as age and gender. Apart from this focus on the survey, we share some thoughts on Eat the Rich, Coin, and The Next Millionaire Next Door, and finish off the show with some very impactful letters from listeners that we have received recently.

Key Points From This Episode:

Thoughts on the new Netflix show, Eat the Rich, and the story of GameStop. (0:01:58)
What to expect on the podcast in November during Canadian Financial Literacy Month. (0:05:17)
Reflections on the new film, Coin, and the founding of Coinbase. (0:08:08)
Introducing the results from our recent survey on goals. (0:11:23)
The process of building the survey and the questions we included. (0:18:22)
A look over the basic data of the survey. (0:22:27)
Popular objectives from the survey and how these were split across different demographics. (0:23:17)
The answers that were given in relation to each specific question. (0:28:02)
Developing best practices for goal setting for an advisor environment. (0:30:17)
Limitations to our expertise in designing this survey and analyzing the data. (0:32:43)
Running through the complete list of goals in order. (0:34:29)
Introducing this week's book discussion on The Next Millionaire Next Door. (0:39:46)
Standout findings from the research that was conducted for the book. (0:44:00)
Utilization of an 'expected net worth test' in the book. (0:49:50)
A look at some of the listener messages we have received lately. (0:52:29)

Read the Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from two Canadians. We’re hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: This is Episode 223. Welcome, everybody to another episode. For those that are watching on YouTube, yes, I'm in my new home office setup. Same home, different office.

Ben Felix: I'm super jealous.

Cameron Passmore: Really?

Ben Felix: It looks very nice.

Cameron Passmore: Oh, it's all in the pot lights. These new pot lights that are out these days are unreal.

Ben Felix: It looks great. Just having a nice little room, my setup’s – I won't tell you how crazy it is. It’s a strange one.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah. I got James' old bedroom, so he's on the other room now. I put in nice pot lights, and do some nice soundproofing on the back wall, so it will get better. But it's nice to be in my own room. Oscar is not crazy being up here though.

Ben Felix: No?

Cameron Passmore: So that's why you don’t see Oscar. No. So you know Ben, I'm a fan of habits, and completely agree with Katy Milkman and other guests who have said that, by saying you are something, you will do something, and become something. So as you know, I got a Peloton a long time ago, and just decided that I'm going to ride the Peloton every day that I'm home. So you don't have to debate which days of the week, you just do it. Anyway, tomorrow, Friday, when this drops, it will be last Friday. I’ll be doing my 1000th Peloton ride if you can believe it.

Ben Felix: Wow.

Cameron Passmore: I say that not for applause. Anybody can do it. It's just shows the power of doing something every single day when you're home, but the numbers just – I wasn't paying attention. All of a sudden, I get this email from Peloton saying it’s coming up. So I'm trying to do a live ride and maybe we'll get a shout out, which is kind of cool, and maybe some other – our listeners will be there. The other thing, you mentioned bundling in this episode. I don't listen to the trainer on Peloton anymore. I actually listen to a podcast, I'm bundling podcast listening with the free training experience, which is cool. Have you watched it on Netflix the new series called Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga?

Ben Felix: No.

Cameron Passmore: Are you going to watch it?

Ben Felix: Maybe.

Cameron Passmore: You're skeptical.

Ben Felix: No, I'm not skeptical. I don't think that my wife would be interested and I usually only watch Netflix for like the one hour that we're sitting together on the couch at night.

Cameron Passmore: Okay, that's pretty good. Anyways, most people are aware of the whole GameStop Saga that happened in late 2020, that led to the massive rise in the price of GameStop shares. I've heard the story a number of times, like Barry. The author, Spencer Jakab, the guy from The Wall Street Journal who wrote the book, The Revolution That Wasn't. So I knew the story, but it didn't have a full appreciation like I think you do for WallStreetBets and the characters behind this. I didn't really connect as well to all that. Anyways, this whole thing comes to vibrant life in this very wacky little miniseries, three episodes, 35, 40 minutes each. It's funny, it's funk, it's interesting, it's accurate like how things happen. The timelines are very well explained. You learn about the character, Roaring Kitty. Do you know about Roaring Kitty?

Ben Felix: Oh, of course.

Cameron Passmore: Anyways, the whole thing is wacky. This groundswell that basically put the screws to hedge funds and cause the short squeeze, how short squeezes worth to do a very good job of explaining that. The role Robinhood played, when Robinhood disallowed their customers to buy more GameStop. What's the story behind that? And that links to Citadel, and that links to Melvin Capital, Elon Musk tweeting in the middle of it all, cause the price to go up even more. All these concepts are really, really well done. It's quite comical to watch like this Roaring Kitty is just this crazy character, and they show the video clips of him. The amount of money that was lost is wild, like $20 billion was lost in the squeeze.

Ben Felix: Insane.

Cameron Passmore: It's insane, but it's a pretty engaging, entertaining video of a pretty, crazy story.

Ben Felix: Does it talk about who came out on top?

Cameron Passmore: They have actual people in there who did make a fair chunk of cash. So they have real people, that like real Reddit, watchers that piled one of this and did make some money, yeah. There was a number of characters that they interview to the story.

Ben Felix: Interesting. That whole episode killed WallStreetBets. They used to be one of the subreddits they would go on every day.

Cameron Passmore: Oh, really?

Ben Felix: Because it was really interesting and funny. But then, the number of people, what are they called, members, whatever of the subreddit swelled. It was like well below a million. It was increasing, it was growing. Then, when this thing happened, it went up, I don't know, like six million or something, and then I just stopped, just stopped being interesting.

Cameron Passmore: So you went before the popularity hit?

Ben Felix: Yeah, because it's like super geeky finance humour, with a kind of edginess that I find funny.

Cameron Passmore: Then it just became this, bury the hedge funds.

Ben Felix: I couldn't tell you. I never go in there anymore.

Cameron Passmore: But were you there through the episode, like through the price taking off and people just buying whatever they could, buy more, and more, and more, and that coincided with Robinhood and ease of trading.

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Cameron Passmore: Wow. I didn't realize you're that active in there.

Ben Felix: I was active. I've read the post, but –

Cameron Passmore: Also me, but lurking.

Ben Felix: Yeah, lurking. Exactly. But at all, it changed the whole subreddit when all this stuff happened.

Cameron Passmore: So November is Financial Literacy Month in Canada. In the US, I didn't know this, April is Financial Literacy Month. But in Canada, it’s November. As you discuss back in episode 217, there's certainly a great need to increase our collective financial literacy. In November in the us episodes, we're going to be quickly reviewing 10 books that we think can help improve anyone's financial literacy. Then in the store, for Financial Literacy Month in the month of November, if you spend $30 in the store, you will get 50% off a deck of Talking Cents cards. The cards are already pretty affordable. Now, they're really affordable, and you get the free socks and koozie with it. I think Angelica is going to start the sale right away, and not wait for November 1st, but it goes until November 30th. The store can be found at rationalreminder.ca. I had someone reach out to me, Ben, on LinkedIn and ask for an update on the crypto series.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Well, I feel bad for kind of just letting it die without us saying anything in the last couple of episodes. We had one more guest lined up, and they ended up having to cancel, and then want to reschedule for some time in October. So we have not rescheduled yet. But the intention was to have that final episode, and then finish with one more episode with just us kind of summarizing everything. I still have to book that final guest, but then in the interim, I also found one more person that I want to talk to, two more actually. Two more, because there's one more guest and one – remember our very first episode in the crypto series was with a Rational Reminder listener who was a software engineer. He'd written about blockchains from a software engineer’s perspective, what they're actually useful for. He was our very first episode.

We have another Rational Reminder listener, who is also a software developer, and is working on like a theory and related projects. They're very much in the pro-crypto camp, but also a dedicated Rational Reminder listener. I think it will be interesting to talk with them in an episode to kind of get their take on the crypto series from that perspective, just to see if there are any kind of blind spots that – because we did have a lot of skeptical perspectives. I'd want to hear from somebody who's working in there. Like we kind of heard with Ari Juels, in the last episode that we did publish, that there's maybe a different perspective if you're working in the space than if you're looking at it from the outside in.

Anyway, so there are those two more guests, and then the one episode with a listener to kind of review the series, and then we will cap it off with an episode at the end. But all of this timeline is kind of uncertain right now, because I still have to book those last two guests. And I told the listener that I want to talk to them after we've published the final episode, but it's not dead. We will finish the series. It's just, things got a little shaken up because of the one guest cancellation and I haven't gotten it back on track yet.

Cameron Passmore: And we got a pretty busy fall.

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Cameron Passmore: Speaking of crypto, and I didn't put this in the notes. But I watched that new feature film, I guess you could call it called Coin, which is basically a story of the Brian Armstrong story, the founder of Coinbase. I rented that on the weekend on YouTube, and it was $5 on YouTube, and I watched it. Did you watch it? I'm guessing not.

Ben Felix: Are you trying to bait me into giving you perspective on it?

Cameron Passmore: No, not at all. It's interesting story. Seems like a really nice guy. Lots of decent intentions. I've told other people who have asked me what I thought of it. I learned a lot, learn a lot about him, learn a lot about Coinbase. But having gone through, what is it, 17 episodes of the crypto series, it would have been really nice to have some counter arguments just to kind of challenge some of the basic beliefs and statements. That would be my main feedback, but it was well done. But it's a feel-good movie about Brian Armstrong and crypto, which is okay, but I would have liked more diverse views included. But it's a professional, like it's a real movie. It's a real thing.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I haven't watched it, and I'm not really comfortable sharing the reviews that I've read about it, but they were not very positive. But it's basically propaganda promoting Brian Armstrong.

Cameron Passmore: Right. Oh, I know. I saw the reviews. But I'm trying to, glass half full, but more challenge would have been good. Next idea. I'm in London in the middle of November, London, England. I’m looking to set up a happy hour for any listeners or people who might be interested just meeting up and chatting. If you're interested, drop me an email at cpassmore@pwlcapital.com. I’ll let you know what the plans are. That'd be kind of cool. So far, I think we have half a dozen people that want to really meet up.

Ben Felix: Really?

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: Wow.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, just put on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Ben Felix: When is it?

Cameron Passmore: Middle of November. So it’s going to be like probably the 15th-ish. Tuesday the 15th is the date we're looking at, so it'd be like after work sometime. I'm presuming some pub somewhere, but we'll see if there's any interest first.

Ben Felix: What are you doing in London?

Cameron Passmore: Presenting at a conference?

Ben Felix: What are you presenting on?

Cameron Passmore: I love that surprised you.

Ben Felix: No, it’s not surprise. I’m just curious.

Cameron Passmore: I'm presenting on the impact of Rational Reminder, on our business and how that helped us, and also on our succession plan that we talked about.

Ben Felix: Interesting. Okay. Cool.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah. Anyway, so in this week's episode, Ben, you presented the goals, research you've done, which is beautiful. We talked about the Next Millionaire Next Door, the book and discussed that. At the end, there's some pretty meaningful, impactful messages, and at the very end, there's one extremely meaningful message that we got from a listener. So pretty powerful stuff at the back end.

Ben Felix: One? Those were all pretty deep –

Cameron Passmore: They all were, but the last one, it's a – it's yeah, they're all pretty impactful. I agree.

Ben Felix: Yeah. We finally did the long-awaited goals survey results. I think it's pretty cool.

Cameron Passmore: That's a mandatory takeaway for everybody. Absolutely. When that paper is available, mandatory.

Ben Felix: Yeah. That was a neat exercise to go through. I say it in the episode, but like, thank you, again, to people spent that hour of their time, at least, because they probably thought about it outside of actually having the browser window open to fill out the answers to respond to that. 310 people, that's a lot of people's time.

Cameron Passmore: All right. With that, let's get to the episode.

***

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 223. I must say, Ben, I am super excited for this topic. I think this is just a phenomenal piece of research that you've done.

Ben Felix: I don't know, I feel under qualified to – I feel under qualified to report on the data that we've collected, because we collected some really cool data. I mean, thank you also to the people who participated in the survey. We had – I’ll talk about the data in detail, but we had 310 people who spent on average, about 50, 5-0 minutes, each completing the goal survey that we asked people to complete. That's a –

Cameron Passmore: Serious commitment of time. It's incredible.

Ben Felix: There's a lot of man hours that went into this. Anyway, so we have this really cool data set. I feel like I'm under qualified to report on it. Because of that, we have actually sent out the data to a few people who are much more qualified, just to say like, is there anything in here that you think we could tease out that we've maybe missed? So maybe some more interesting stuff comes out of that. But for now, I'll report on what we found.

Cameron Passmore: Well, what you found, I love it. I just love the output. I love the thought that went into this. I think it's going to have a meaningful impact on a lot of people.

Ben Felix: It’s a really cool project. I mean, I'll back up and introduce what we're talking about for anyone who maybe doesn't know. We did this goal survey, the idea being that generating relevant objectives for financial planning, in this case, based on values, information, and knowledge is a necessary part of any decision. But it's something that people aren't very good at doing, empirically, and that's been studied. People are not good at generating a comprehensive set of the objectives that are important to them. Of course, as financial planners, it's super common for people to sit down with clients and say, “What are your goals?” But knowing that people are empirically deficient at identifying what their goals are, it's a bit problematic.

One of the big studies on this is from Bond, Carlson, and Keeney, 2008 paper. They find in three empirical studies that participants consistently omit nearly half of the objectives that they later identify as personally relevant.

Cameron Passmore: Half?

Ben Felix: Half, yeah. And that the omitted objectives were perceived to be almost as important as those initially identified by the participants. Another interesting data point from a Morningstar study, I'll get to in a second. Those findings suggest that decision makers are deficient in using their personal knowledge and values to form objectives for the decisions that they face.

In financial planning, I think this is a pretty significant impediment for people who are giving financial advice, or likewise, for somebody who's trying to make a financial decision on their own without financial advice objectives in, – well, I guess, it's probably true in any context, but I think in – I know in financial planning, objectives will often be conflicting. If you sit down and build a financial plan around a set of objectives that are incomplete, you may be making yourself worse off if you're not working, or you may be moving away from some other objectives that you would have thought it'd be important, but missed in the identification process. I think, like I said, it's probably true in any context or most contexts. But in financial planning, I know that there are always tradeoffs and conflicting objectives.

There’s another paper from Bond Carlson and Keeney. This is a 2010 paper. They suggest that not thinking broadly enough about the range of relevant objectives, and not thinking deeply enough to articulate every objective within the range that is considered are the main impediments to generating a comprehensive list of objectives. In that paper, they offer a few interventions like ways that you can deal with that, with that problem. The steps they suggest taking are generating a list of objectives. So sit down and generate the list. We know that list is going to be deficient.

Then the second step is to set a challenge of increasing the number of objectives relative to what was initially identified. So we looked at different numbers, but as a rule of thumb, they just say, try and double whatever the size of the list was. If you initially identified three objectives, try to identify three more. Then they also suggest, consulting categories. In this paper, they empirically tell us all these different interventions. So in introduced categories, say, for the objectives that you're setting, objectives will generally fall into these categories, and then that might inspire more objectives that were previously missed.

The last step, they suggest, after the first three, and it has to be after the first three, otherwise, it combines the objectives that you choose, is to consult a master list. Now, master list don't always exist for decisions. The whole idea of this goal survey that we did is that we wanted to see if we could create a master list, but basically, crowdsourcing financial goals and seeing if we could create a list, a comprehensive list of goals that people might have. This was sort of attempted in 2018 paper from Morningstar. It's a nice paper. They had 318 people, so a tiny bit larger than our sample, but it was much less comprehensive. All they did is basically step one of our survey, and they constrained it to your top three goals. Ours is very open ended. I'll talk about the prompts we gave in a minute.

Anyway, this Morningstar study, they just said, “Rank your top three goals,” 318 people. They do replicate the usefulness of the master list in goal setting. They find that on average, 26% of their participants changed their top goal after seeing the master list. That does pretty crazy, right? What are your top three goals? Then they say, “Here's a list of goals that other people chose," 26% of people changed their top financial goal after seeing that list.

Cameron Passmore: Think about the implication for all those financial planning discussions that are going on all the time, if you don't have the best possible goals for the individual.

Ben Felix: Yeah. No, it is crazy to think about. In this Morningstar sample, they found that 73% of people change at least one of their top three goals after seeing the master list. The vast majority people were changing at least one of their goals, but the 26% changing their top goal, I find pretty crazy. Pretty crazy, but not unexpected after three other papers that we just talked about.

In that paper, they conclude, the Morningstar paper concludes that a master list may indeed be useful, the master list that they generate. I think it's because of the way that the study was conducted, like their objective was not to conduct a master list, it was to see if a master list is useful. But because their questions weren't super comprehensive, that list that they came up with – I mean, we talked about this when we introduced this goal survey a while ago, the list they came up with, when I look at it, it doesn't look comprehensive and it doesn't look like goals that I would tend to assess as sensible if I were giving somebody advice. So we wanted to make something more comprehensive.

What we did is built a survey with three questions, kind of like the Bond, Carlson and Keeney paper, or the suggestions that they have for generating objectives. So three questions. The first question, I'll read it. It said, “Imagine the life that you want to live and create a list of the financial goals that will get you there. These can be short-term goals and long -term goals. Effective goals are statements. This, we drew from Ayelet Fishbach’s work. Effective goals are statements of a desirable state, not the means to get there, and they are abstract. For example, saving up a $10,000 emergency fund is a means, not a goal. The corresponding abstract goal would be feeling financially secure. That was the first question.

Then people wrote the responses, and then when they clicked next in the survey, that brought up the second question, which was the challenge. So it challenged them to double the size of their list. Then the third question, presented the PERMA-V model, and a short description of what the model is. We've talked about that in the podcast a few times, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on what the PERMA model is, but it's like a model for wellbeing. We described very briefly what each of the categories are, and then asked people if that elicited any further objectives that they may have initially omitted. So three questions. We'll talk with the effect of the questions as we go through the data.

Yeah. So we had 310 people, 49 minutes to complete the survey on average. 76% of the respondents were men, which is a lot and it wasn't ideal, but relative to our like, 95% male audience, we are pretty happy with a gender distribution. So 23% were women, the remainder were non-binary, non-conforming or did not disclose their gender. But for the most part, respondents were either men or women. The majority by age were 25 to 34 years old, that was 138 of the 310. Then, 96 people were 35 to 44. Then the rest fell on either side of that age distribution, but the majority were those really 25 to 44-year-olds. In terms of individual objectives, there are three questions, but somebody could have – because it was open-ended, so somebody could have put six objectives into question one if they wanted to.

In total, there were 2394 individual objectives, once we parsed out all that data. It's a lot of data. What we then did is went through all of that data, and tried to identify overarching objectives that captured all of the 2394 individual objectives. We ended up with a list of 28 things, statements, objectives, goals, whatever you want to call them, that we could fit all of the underlying objectives that people had identified into.

Cameron Passmore: Interesting. So you boiled it down, basically.

Ben Felix: Boiled it down.

Cameron Passmore: From 2400, down roughly to 28.

Ben Felix: Yep, and it's not perfect, and I’ll talk about what I think the limitations of what we've done a little bit later, but I think it is pretty good. At least of our sample, the 28 objectives that we've identified are fairly representative. But I also don't think we have a very representative sample for like the broad population. I'll talk more about that too.

Cameron Passmore: But the goal is to come up with a list of goals you delivered.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I think in terms of sample bias, we have a pretty interesting one, because the majority of people who fill this out are podcast listeners. If they've been listening for a while, they've heard all sorts of episodes about wellbeing, and happiness, and purpose and meaning and how that all relates to money. I think the objectives that we generated with this exercise are probably bias in a pretty good way.

Cameron Passmore: Can you think of any obvious omissions? Did anything come to you as you're going through the data?

Ben Felix: What kind of omissions?

Cameron Passmore: Just a goal that you thought might have been there that wasn't there? I'm just curious.

Ben Felix: I mean, the master list didn't exist. I didn't know what was going to show off on there. I don't know. We'll talk more about the objectives that people identified in a bit. But I want to talk a little bit more about the data. The first question yielded on average 2.74 objectives. The second question added 1.92 objectives, so people didn't quite double their list on average, but kind of close-ish. The third question produced an additional 1.4 objectives, which is also interesting. So 6.08 objectives on average per respondent. Those are six objectives based on the 28 categories. People might have had 20 objectives, but those boiled down to six, based on the categories. That make sense?

Cameron Passmore: Mm-hmm.

Ben Felix: Like a lot of people listed the same objective, basically in a bunch of different ways. So we categorize that as one listed objective. Okay. So now, I'll talk about some of the things that people identified as being important to them. The single most common objective, which was shared by 70% of respondents, 70.3% of respondents was being financially independent, or being in a position where work is optional. Same kind of idea. Financial independence was hands down the most important. We did break this down by gender, because we had the data and it was interesting. The financial independence objective occurs more frequently for men at 71.7% of respondents than for women at 66.7%. This is the aggregate data split up by gender. We also had to split out by age, and by question, talk more about that in a second.

The second most common objective, which is related to financial independence, but I think it is distinct in some important ways, which is feeling financially secure. I think you could be financially independent without necessarily feeling financially secure, and you could also not be financially independent and feel financially secure.

Cameron Passmore: That’s a great point.

Ben Felix: That was the next most frequently selected objective or objectives that fit into that category or most frequently reported, second most frequently. This one had a big difference in men and women. So 57.9% of men identified that as being important. Whereas, 68.1% of women. That’s one of the biggest differences is by gender. The biggest difference by gender was, in the frequency of objectives related to travel, leisure time, and experience with family. So 59.7% of women had objectives related to that.

Whereas, only 46.4% of men did. Then the other big gender difference was being generous with loved ones, so 33% of women identified that as being important. Whereas only 23% of men did. We didn’t on the non-binary, non-conforming or people who didn't identify their gender, because there was only, I think, in total five fell into those couple of buckets. But those data are included in the aggregate, the overall data. When we split it up by gender, those don't show up.

In the age cohorts are also – again, there is some sample size issues here, because like in the 18 to 24 buckets, I think the sample was 18 people. Then likewise, in the in the older groups, there weren't a ton of people, so I didn't try and dig too much into trends there. But there were a couple that really jumped out. In the 25 to 34 age group, 50% of people identified homeownership as being one of their primary objectives. But that one – so this is one of the cases where there was a very clear trend across the age groups. That importance decreased pretty much monotonically down to 12.1% for the 56 to 64 age group.

Cameron Passmore: Likely because they own a home.

Ben Felix: That's what I figured, that's my guess. We didn't control for a current homeownership in the data, but that'd be my guess. So it becomes less important because people are just more likely to own a home. That did include though not just buying a home, like in that overarching goal, we fit in people who wanted to buy like their first home, but also people who wanted to upgrade a home, or build, or buy a dream home. So it's just like a homeownership related objectives. They became less important over time. Another one that jumped out as interesting by the age cohorts was the importance for having the ability to be generous with loved ones. Keeping in mind that these two age cohorts were the biggest sample. I don't know, maybe there is something meaningful in here. But in the 25 to 34 group, 16.7% of respondents said that it was important to be able to be generous with loved ones. But in the 35 to 44 group, that almost doubles to 29.7%.

Just so people who are listening know, I'm going to go through these comments, and then at the end, we will go through all of the 28 objectives so that people who are listening can get it. I want to also say that we will have a paper that will hopefully come out the same day the podcast does, that summarizes all the data and has the actual master list in there. Anyway, splitting it by questions, this was very interesting. Because if you think about the purpose of the study, it's really how can we elicit better objectives? In the survey, we partially did that, we didn't have the master list in the survey, because that's what we’re trying to build. But we did have two different treatments in there, which was to double your list and the categories to help people think about goals. It was interesting to look at how people answered each question differently.

By far, the most common response to the first question, which was just, what are your goals, was financial independence and financial security, so kind of same as the overall data. In question two, when people are asked to double the list, the prevalence of finding and affording engaging hobbies increased quite a bit, financially supporting communities or causes that are important to me increased quite a bit, and maintaining physical health also increased quite a bit. As people sitting down, they come up with their first 2.7 goals on average. Then we ask them to double it, then people kind of thought about these other things that might be important.

Cameron Passmore: That's before the PERMA-V was added in at the third question, though?

Ben Felix: Before the categorical, yeah.

Cameron Passmore: That's interesting.

Ben Felix: And in that second question, this one was also interesting. Almost as many respondents reported, affording travel and leisure time with family in the doubling challenge, as they did in the first question. So that – I mean, again, I'm not an expert in evaluating survey data, but it seems like that indicates that that is an important objective that people have. But a whole bunch of people that sat down to think about what their goals are initially didn't identify it, and just asking them to double that list, which seems that this is an objective that's not universally, because not 100% of people chose it. But a majority of people find this to be an important objective, but a ton of people didn't identify it at first, and just saying double your list got them to do it.

Then in the third question, where we did introduce the PERMA-V categories, a lot more people articulated goals related to finding and affording engaging hobbies. Again, maintaining physical health, I think was one of the biggest ones in the third question. Strengthening close relationships, and giving time to causes that are important to them. Again, just interesting to see the progression of what people identify as important based on the prompts that they're given. But it doesn't seem like those treatments or interventions, whatever you want to call them that just asking people to double their list seemed to help. Giving people category seemed to help. Of course, we couldn't test the master list, because that's what we're building. But one of my takeaways from that is that, I guess we know this from the other research, but just saying what are your goals is massively deficient in identifying actual objectives.

Cameron Passmore: Do you plan on going back to the people that participated in this survey and sharing the goal list to see if their goal count increases from the six?

Ben Felix: Well, we made it anonymous. So I couldn't – I don't know who the people are.

Cameron Passmore: Yes, that's true. How could we do – I need to know though, what their final goal count would be once someone who went through the exercise goes and looks at the list of goals to see where do you end up. Does it go from six to 10? Does it go to six to eight? Do the six change?

Ben Felix: It would be interesting.

Cameron Passmore: Then follow-on question, have you thought about best practice for goal setting in a client advisor environment, like do you think is best to go through the three-step process?

Ben Felix: I mean, one of our objectives with this tool, and one of the reasons that we wanted to have it is for that, like I think, I've been talking to our financial planning team about this, that when we're onboarding clients, going through a process like this would be useful for the same reasons we've talked about. We may not have a good grasp, and people may not themselves have a good grasp of what their objectives are, because they haven't gone through this exercise. So now, we'll have not only the empirically tested by these two other studies, and by ourselves, process for eliciting a set of goals, we will also have this master list to refer to as a final check.

Cameron Passmore: It's interesting to think about, because if you give someone just a menu, say, “Oh, yeah. I'll take that one. That one sounds good.”

Ben Felix: The master list is the last. It's the last step, and it's for exactly that reason, because people may be buying a spider if it's the first thing they see. Then the other thing that I think is, we could continually iterate on this. As we go through the actual process with people, maybe their objectives to show up frequently that aren't on the master list, and then we should add to it.

Cameron Passmore: The other question that comes to mind is, will a better list of goals end up with a more inspired individual? I would tend to think, yes, because the more customized and more reflects your true goals, whether you thought of them on your own, or through a prompt, if you have better goals, I would like to think you're going to be more motivated to stick to the day-to-day activities that will lead you to that goal accomplishment.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I think that’s very probably true. We both read Chris Hadfield’s book recently, and the way he articulates how goals can be used is pretty phenomenal.

Cameron Passmore: Sure is.

Ben Felix: Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut if people don't know who he is. I do want to touch on some of the limitations of this research. Like I mentioned, I'm not a – I don't know what expertise you would have to have to do this properly, but I'm not that.

Cameron Passmore: You know you’re not it.

Ben Felix: Then also, in categorizing the goals, like getting them, creating the master list of the 28 things that captured everything else. Again, not an expert there. I think we did a pretty good job, but not an expert. Also, the way that survey was designed, also not done by people with expertise in survey design, or behavioural science or anything like that. There could be bias in the way the questions were asked. Then the sample bias I touched on earlier, this is say, mostly are largely podcast listeners. There were some people from the public who did it. There were like friends and family of Rational Reminder listeners. There were some PWL clients, there were some PWL employees in the sample.

But the majority were podcast listeners, so there's going to be bias in there. We know that. My guess, I don't have, other than gender and age, which I think we do have from YouTube. But other than that, my guess is that podcast listeners would be wealthier than average. We know that they're more male. We know they're younger than average, probably more financially illiterate, if they're listening to our podcast. All those things introduce bias to the sample. But as I said earlier, it introduces interesting bias, where it's like, I would almost rather base my goals on the master list generated by that group than the one generated by the average population.

Cameron Passmore: Correct.

Ben Felix: Is that a bad thing to say? You cringed a little bit.

Cameron Passmore: No, not at all. I'm just saying, to me, that’s good bias. You want people that have thought about this to contribute to the greater good, which is exactly what happened. If someone doesn't like the goals, they're not going to choose them for themselves.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Anyway, we have that as final product. I'm looking at the at the table now. I'm going to go through them just so that it's there in the audio as a reference. The most frequently reported goal category or the category that most goals fit into was being financially independent.

Cameron Passmore: Is the first one of 28.

Ben Felix: Yeah, first one of 28, and these are in order of frequency of how many people in the sample selected that as one of their objectives. We only counted each objective once. So if somebody like step question one and three, identified something that fit into the same category, we only counted it once. So being financially independent, feeling financially secure, affording travel, leisure time or experiences with family is the third one. Finding and affording engaging hobbies is the fourth one. That one is also more frequently selected by women than men, which is interesting. Financially supporting my community or causes that are important to me, maintaining physical health through sleep, diet, and exercise, assisting children with education costs and early adulthood setup. That one is interesting. It appeared a lot. That was 27% of people identified that as being important. Owning a home, and affording its operating costs. Again, that was 25.8% of the overall sample identified that as being important, but 50% of one age cohort did. There are a few where there's a very obvious trend from across the age groups.

Strengthening and maintaining close relationships, giving time to community and causes that are important to me. This one is interesting, avoiding the hedonic treadmill but not over saving. And I put in brackets enough, like just having the concept of enough. That's something that came up in a lot of responses. Financially supporting and protecting my family. Comfortably affording indulgences and luxury goods. That was another interesting one to see.

Cameron Passmore: That's an interesting one to me. That will link to our discussion for the book review, as you and I talked about.

Ben Felix: Finding engaging work and being in a financial position to pursue it. That was another interesting one, where there are a lot of comments about wanting to find engaging work, but being in a financial position to take what may not be the highest paying job available to you, so that you can do work that is engaging. I think is how I would – so a lot of responses fit into that sort of theme.

Cameron Passmore: What a wonderful goal.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Having ownership of time. I think that one, that was somewhat of a catch all for, because there are other ones that are specific about like having time for hobbies, or having time for family. But yeah, I guess there were enough that fit into just general ownership of time. Gaining knowledge and learning. That was another neat one to see, where a lot of people talked about finishing a degree, or going back to school, or taking courses, or whatever. Leaving a legacy came up a lot. That's like leaving money to heirs. Accomplishing personal successes, paying off debt, having time to spend with loved ones, owning a cottage, vacation property or land. It was interesting to see the amount of responses that were just about owning land, like I just want to own land just so I can have it.

Cameron Passmore: That one is much lower than I would have guessed.

Ben Felix: Owning a cottage, eight percent of respondents, more than twice as many men as women identify that as being important. almost 10% of men and 4.2% of women. Spending time in nature, outsourcing unpleasant tasks, which again, that's kind of related to ownership of time, but just in some cases, people were very explicit about outsourcing unpleasant tasks, and there were enough responses that warranted a category. Starting a business, that was another interesting one that came up a lot more than I maybe would have guessed it would. I think probably that relates to financial independence, I think just based on my reading of those responses that related to starting a business, it was largely about maybe about engagement and accomplishment but largely about freedom as well. Like some of these might collapse into each other, but again, I don't feel like I have the expertise to really evaluate that well.

Gaining or maintaining financial literacy. That was another interesting one that came up more than I maybe would have guessed as a financial goal. There were even ones in there about, like goals about understanding risk tolerance, like understanding my own risk tolerance. That ended up in the financial literacy bucket. Even like understanding portfolio theory so that I feel more comfortable sticking with my strategy. Bunch of interesting responses like that. Raising financially literate and responsible children. That was another interesting one that came up quite a bit. The least frequently reported, but still frequent enough to make it on the list was maintaining balance between work and other aspects of life.

Cameron Passmore: Wow! What a great list.

Ben Felix: It is pretty cool. It is pretty cool. So that's it. That's the end result of the fairly significant undertaking that we did to conduct that survey and process the data. As I mentioned, there will be a paper, hopefully, the same day that this podcast episode is released, that kind of summarizes the survey, and the thinking behind it, and the results.

Cameron Passmore: Awesome. Love it. Great work. Okay. Ready to discuss this week's book?

Ben Felix: Let's do it.

Cameron Passmore: I think this week – I think this is a good topic that you and I can really discuss as opposed to just me talking about a book. This one is called The Next Millionaire Next Door: Enduring Strategies for Building Wealth by Thomas J. Stanley and Sarah Stanley Fallaw. Many people have likely read the original book, which was The Millionaire Next Door, which was published in 2018 – sorry, published in 1996. That was the original book. This book was published in 2018. There's a big gap in time between there and a lot has happened in the world from ’96 to 2018. I remember reading the original book, it was wildly popular back in the ’90s, especially in like the financial advisor arena. Pretty sure, most advisors read it. Many, many clients read it.

I just think back to that original book, and the key lessons are pretty simple, right? Live below your means, assets matter more than income, ignore how your neighbour spend, and basically slowly and deliberately build your financial independence over time, be very deliberate about it. The punchline of this book is that not much has changed in that time between the two editions. This book was started by the same author, Tom Stanley, and his daughter, Sarah Stanley Fallaw. Unfortunately, the father was killed by drunk driver in 2015, literally on the eve of when the first wave of research invites went out. His daughter carried on with the project, she's active in the industry, and very credentialed family.

Dr. Tom Stanley has a Doctorate in Business Administration from University of Georgia, and basically spent most of his career trying to understand how a wide range of American millionaires became millionaires, which is super interesting. Then, Dr. Sarah Stanley Fallaw, his daughter, got a Doctor in Psychology from University of Georgia. In 2012, became interested in the academic perspectives, as she puts at a personal finance. She carried on the work of her father after – well before and after he passed away. With the same objectives to find out, what are some of the traits of high-income earners who are better able to transform their income into wealth. Again, you have sample bias going on here, of course, and they're quite clear about not suggesting causality. It's just, these are observations of people who happen to respond to the survey, who were millionaires.

There are all kinds of chatter online about the quality of the surveys and whatnot. I don't really want to get into that, but I think there are some interesting takeaways from the sample and the writings that they did do. Clearly you need a certain amount of income to be able to become a millionaire. They do talk about that as some of the issues in society these days, like income inequality, and concentration of wealth. What's one of the stats? Like 54% of Americans, if they had an expensive of $400 come up, they would have to either sell something or borrow. They do acknowledge that this study is not about everyone, it is about people who happen to amass a million dollars.

The data in this new book came from surveys that they did in 2015 and ’16, with people greater than $1 million of net worth. The survey is detailed in the book, but did receive 998 responses with a response rate of 9%. Some responses were not complete, so they ended up with 834 responses in the survey.

Ben Felix: Not a huge sample.

Cameron Passmore: It’s not a huge sample. Again, this is part of the – I know you shared with me a Reddit thread, and there's chatter kind of get poke around on a Google search around the quality of the survey. Again, I'm not a survey expert, some of you, or none of us are experts in this. I'm not passing commentary on that. But I do think there are some good lessons that come from this. Yes, it is survivorship biased. It is also biased in terms of who responded. But there's still some neat things there. So bottom line, what are some of their habits. Some of the data around this survey and about Americans, 9% of households in the US in 2018 have a net worth of greater than a million dollars. It was 3.5% in 1996. I do not believe that inflation was taken into account though. I reread it this morning, and they said, the equivalent in 2018 would be 1.5 million, but I don't think that that was a cut off in the survey. Okay?

The median net worth of all Americans in 2016 was $97,000. The mean was just under 700,000. When you exclude real estate, the median net worth of all Americans jobs to $25,000. I'm going to switch to the survey. In the survey that they did, the American millionaires – so here's a list of the characteristics. Seventy percent states that they've always been frugal. That is the theme that comes through the whole book, and the first book. Some would argue that the first and second book are extremely similar. Ninety-one percent rated being disciplined as an important success factor. Only 32% said their parents are better off than those other high school classmates.

Ben Felix: Self-reported though, right?

Cameron Passmore: Correct. Eighty percent were self-made millionaires. Only 10% had received any inheritance or gifts. Ninety-three percent have a college degree, 20% are retired. Those that are working work on average 45 hours per week. The most frequent professions of the millionaires, business owners, lawyers, engineers, managers, physicians, consultants. Most did not become millionaires until late 40s, or early 50s. More than 70% know their personal expenses. Seventy-seven percent, and I would guess you'd be in this bucket, Ben, had not participated in Black Friday shopping in the past five years.

Ben Felix: Oh, yeah. I'm in there. No, thanks.

Cameron Passmore: This one you know well. The median amount paid for the most recent car purchase was $35,000. They tended to drive Toyota, Honda, or a Ford that is greater than three years old.

Ben Felix: You say that because – I bought this book, probably a year ago, because I use their data in the Finding and Funding a Good Life paper on the section on luxury vehicles.

Cameron Passmore: They also said the majority do not live in quote, “fancy houses.” The market value of a home is less than 20% of the net worth.

Ben Felix: That's an interesting data point. I get that question a lot. What percentage of my net worth should my home be?

Cameron Passmore: Very low amounts of debt. Debt equals equivalent of less than 5% of net worth. In terms of charity, 36% give 5% of their income annually to charity, 25% give 10% or more to charity. Time spent on selected activities and millionaires versus the American public. They read more for pleasure per week, five and a half hours versus two. They spend much less time on social media. Now, this is number of years ago, but still 2.5 hours versus 14 for the average American public.

Ben Felix: Fourteen hours per week on social media?

Cameron Passmore: Per week. It's got to be more than that now.

Ben Felix: Wow! Oh, yeah, per week.

Cameron Passmore: This is like four, or five, six years ago, because they started the survey in 2016. Right? That’s per week. They exercise more 5.8 hours versus 2.5.

Ben Felix: I bet you that social media time has at least doubled.

Cameron Passmore: I forgot the numbers. We talked about that when we reviewed Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus. I don't remember the data. But this links back to why I was highlighting that goal that you mentioned about being able to purchase, was it luxury goods?

Ben Felix: Comfortably affording luxury goods.

Cameron Passmore: Luxury goods. This is another big point they keep talking about in the book is the ability to ignore your peers, your neighbours. They said, where you live has a huge impact on how much you spend, because that's who you typically are around. They also alluded to different professions where certain professions might have a kind of an image of spending more on certain things. To be very, very aware of the impact of who you're around.

Another one here that's interesting. Millionaires sleep, I would say much less, 53.6 hours per week versus 61.5. Super interesting commentary in the book around financial advisors, and they actually dedicate a whole chapter to this. I went back and reread that chapter this morning. Less than a third rely – from the sample. Less than a third rely heavily on a financial planner. Most millionaires surveyed spend 1% of their annual household income on financial advice. So not assets, like not AUM type fee, but of household income, but 1/3 pay nothing. Seventy percent say they know more about investing than most financial advisors. However –

Ben Felix: Unfortunately, that's probably true.

Cameron Passmore: Because again, you got to buy a sample here, of course, much like the Rational Reminder group, you got a pretty keen sense of people, and then maybe bias in actually who accepted to be part of the survey. But the author did spend a great amount of time about how the role of financial advisor has really shifted since the original book was written, and that a good financial adviser can play a very important role in helping people learn how to accumulate, how to set goals, and behavioural coaching.

Ben Felix: That does line up with the topic we talked about earlier, with the goal survey.

Cameron Passmore: Which was a total fluke.

Ben Felix: Yeah.

Cameron Passmore: So there's huge value in that, and with the right support, many more people could have the ability to convert more income to wealth. They're also big proponents of diversified low cost indexed portfolios.

Another thing that they use, which I thought was interesting rule of thumb is what they call the expected net worth test. A lot of this data came from comparing – once you’re in the millionaire cohort, they would compare or how much you had of net worth to what was their expected net worth. So the expected net worth is your age, times your income, divided by 10. So you can say, the average millionaire in the study was in their 60s, the average income was $250,000, which is true. So if you just do that math, age 60 times 250, divided by 10 is $1.5 million.

If your expected wealth is $1.5 million, they then put you in quartiles depending on how much more than expected you had, and able to do comparisons between different quartiles. But I thought that metric is an interesting rule of thumb for people to use as they go through life.

Ben Felix: What's it based on, though?

Cameron Passmore: That, I don't know. I could not find that. It's just something that was used in the original book that they carried through to this book. But it's basically saying that, if you're frugal live below your means, live within your means, and say the difference, you're going to accumulate wealth. It's that ability to accumulate as much as you can over time. I assume there's some math behind this formula.

Ben Felix: So it's like a rule of thumb, basically, where they're saying that if your net worth equals or exceeds your expected net worth, you're probably in good shape.

Cameron Passmore: Well, look, the average millionaire in this survey had a net worth of $3.5 million. If the average one was 60 years old, making 250, you expect them at 1.5. Still, the average one I take away from this has almost double what the rule of thumb would have expected or suggested.

Ben Felix: Interesting. I just want to know what the rule is based on.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: You're doing well based on this arbitrary rule. Good.

Cameron Passmore: So when the author was asked if people with high incomes today are better at accumulating wealth than those from 20 plus years ago in her father's original book. Her answer was, “Not really,” is the clear answer. Most high-income producing couples in general are more of the income statement affluent types than the balance sheet, affluent types. As I told you this morning in our team's chat, I mean, the review of this book is actually quite simple. Spend less than you make. Avoid social influences to spend more. Pay attention to your finances, or hire someone to do that. Target a net worth of age times income divided by 10, and just keep repeating it over, and over, and over.

Ben Felix: So similar to lessons of the original.

Cameron Passmore: Exactly. That's by far the commentary that you see online. I enjoyed the book. Great timeless lessons.

Ben Felix: Cool.

Cameron Passmore: There we go. Shall we jump into some of the very kind letters, messages that we've gotten lately? That we got a nice letter from a director at a firm here in Canada. Do you want to read it, Ben?

Ben Felix: Read the whole thing?

Cameron Passmore: I think it's worth. It's actually a very kind letter, and a lot of thought went into it.

Ben Felix: You want to read the whole letter. Well, let's read like parts of it.

Cameron Passmore: Read what you like. How’s that?

Ben Felix: Okay. So they extend their very sincere thanks for the extraordinary content that we've delivered to the world, and they've been listening for a couple of years, never miss an episode. They often listen multiple times to make sure that they don't miss important content. They bundle the podcast listening with running. “I'm forever motivated to get out for my weekend run just so I can listen to the podcast uninterrupted with a bit of extra oxygen to feed the brain.” They endlessly adore us, which is very kind. I don't know how many people would adore me.

Cameron Passmore: I guess you didn't need to read that. But, okay.

Ben Felix: You wanted to read the whole thing.

Cameron Passmore: This is the back end of the episode. That's okay.

Ben Felix: They can't imagine the void they experience without our weekly insights, and interviews, et cetera. "Unbeknownst to you, we've made a material contribution to their personal development, and to the clients that they serve on a daily basis, to the degree that they need a couple of hours simply to scratch the surface." They've enjoyed the crypto series, which we talked a little bit about in the introduction. That while it has admittedly fuelled their confirmation bias. they've also learned a lot. The podcast has been a tremendous privilege, and provided them to access with two holistic insights across a very broad network of recognized experts. We’re their favourite podcast, bar none. That was the gist of it.

Then they offered a few topics that they would like to see us cover, which –this is – I've said like last three episodes that I wanted to put more thought into this before we talked about it, and we decided that it was taking me too long to do that. We're mentioning this now, but I still do want to get in touch with this person and talk about the topics that they want us to discuss. Maybe we'll save that part of it, and we can actually have this conversation with this person and then talk about it on a future episode.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah. I thought her comment too about the fact that we tend to cover so many topics that they didn't know they needed to know until we brought them up. That's kind of the organic nature of how ideas come up, because we're just kind of scouring all over the place for different things to consider.

Ben Felix: I got to say, their comment about – was it, that conference that I talked about a while ago, and met a bunch of people there who said had similar things to this, that they had learned so much from the podcast, and they enjoy listening. It's a primary source of direction for research that they want to do on their own. I don't think people use our podcasts for primary research, because it's – we just talk about stuff and give overviews of stuff, but it gives people direction in terms of what research they want to dig int more seriously. But the comment about if we stopped, it would leave a void. I wouldn't say it stresses me out, but it's something that doesn't make me nervous. I don't know how to describe it.

Cameron Passmore: Can you imagine the void in our lives?

Ben Felix: Well, yeah. Would it be a void or would it be a – just whole bunch of free time, I don’t know.

Cameron Passmore: A bunch of free time.

Ben Felix: Might eventually be void, but I do think about that. Because I know that if there's a podcast that I listened to every week religiously, and it's like something I look forward to, if it goes away, that's a terrible experience.

Cameron Passmore: Well, maybe we'll be able to do what Joe Rogan did last week, which is, have AI bots create this podcast going forward.

Ben Felix: Did he do that?

Cameron Passmore: He did that. I haven't listened to it yet, but apparently is quite something.

Ben Felix: Like a whole episode that's AI generated.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: Like there’s no humans talking?

Cameron Passmore: Apparently not. That's what I've heard. I haven't listened to it yet, so I stand to be corrected. I heard that yesterday afternoon.

Ben Felix: I don't know if AI generated financial advice content would go over very well.

Cameron Passmore: I don't know. Next one we got was a letter, type letter in the mail at the office. This person said we can share the story. This is a really good story. Someone who's from the US, and said, “Kindly obliged me for a page or two, I'd like to tell you a short story. I was this person, full-time, out of school professional job as a structural engineer. Like Ben majored in engineering for undergraduate, born poor from outside the realm of finance, and was totally ignorant of finance, cannot fathom how money now turns into more money later. It always sounded like gambling. Got a 401(k) and had no idea what it is or how it worked. The brokerage account, which was managing the 401(k) did some allocation guides based on risk tolerance, but didn't understand what any of it meant, and didn't know what to do, or how to choose a better allocation.

In late 2020, when I had a period of time at home, I searched online for information about investing and started at Investopedia. Then took pages of notes, trying to figure out what was the difference between a mutual fund, and an index fund, and could discern that a lot of the informational channels for personal finance were bad, just because it reminded me of some peddlers or salesman. Was still a professional engineer good with numbers and knew that there had to be some solid mathematical spine to investment decisions.” I suspect that resonates with you. “Came across technical analysis at some point in the research, and did not need to watch this person to come to a similar conclusion that he has. Anyway, so the search continued, came across and read it, you're upvoted you YouTube channel, which is pretty cool.”

Ben Felix: No, they said in searches and basically, I read information, in some hardly upvoted comment was a mention of my YouTube channel. I think they're saying it was like a fluke that they thought.

Cameron Passmore: Oh, wow. So in retrospect, knowing the content of your channel, the low upvote count was probably because I was lurking WallStreetBets at the time, which is pretty funny. Anyways, “It was entertaining and there was some useful information there. You just had to watch where you step. The link was a diamond so to speak. In the first video of Ben's that I watched was one of the more recent uploads at the time, and it was about the Fama and French Three Factor Model. Love the reference to academic literature, and the matter of fact, in your speech, there were no extreme certainties or promises, which was refreshing. Anyways, eventually search expense ratios of the funds in his 401(k), and reconfigured allocation of equally diverse portfolio of low-cost index funds. However, that's not where the story ends. After listening to the podcast, I came to admire the way that we discussed our professional personal lives and I've had a passion for helping and teaching others about topics I found to be difficult yet important to and helped to one day be able to do that on a daily basis, whether it be for engineering or finance.

I like engineering and enjoy my job, but I found that pivot into finance to be both feasible and optimal for my professional development. By early 2021, I decided to pursue an MBA and began to study for the GMAT entrance exam. Three exams and 10 months later, I got a score found to be acceptable, and began applying to various programs. By March 2022, so this spring, after many applications, essays, and interviews, I was offered admission into several top programs in the United States. By April, I accepted the full-time MBA into the Booth School of Business at Chicago. Courses just began last month.” How's that for a cool story?

Ben Felix: Unreal.

Cameron Passmore: Very appreciative, and wanted to pass that along in a letter to us. How cool is that?

Ben Felix: This is what I'm saying, though. Not just the void that we would leave, like we're talking to each other, and we're talking to other people, and it's shifting the direction of people's lives. That's wild.

Cameron Passmore: But listen to the next one. I don't know if I told you this story.

Ben Felix: Oh, come on. You're killing me.

Cameron Passmore: This is another one. Pardon, this is the back end of the show. If someone's on interested, they're long gone anyways. But I think this is a really interesting story. I talked to William, reached out on LinkedIn, I think. Talked to him last week, longtime listener, many of his friends are also. Really enjoys our book reviews, and in particular mentioned our interview a couple, I guess, three or four weeks ago with David Senra, who's the host of the founders Podcast. He loves founder stories. He thanked us for inspiring him to get into reading again, reducing his video game, and gaining appreciation for avoiding the addictive interruptions of his phone. The book review we did of Stolen Focus, back in Episode 193 had an impact on him. Get this, he took the founders concept with the need to avoid interruptions from the phone, put them together and is creating a product. I don't want to get into what the product is for privacy, but a super cool product to help people avoid phone interruptions. How neat is that? Super cool to talk to William last week.

Another LinkedIn message I got from Mark in Woodstock to thank us for the podcast, and also thoughtful analysis on how to live a decent and meaningful life. Been listening since early 2020, and learned about your common-sense investing videos in YouTube. At the time, his investments were at his bank’s dividend and mutual fund. After listening to the podcast, all the savings had been moved over to a single all in one globally diversified index portfolio. Has write a bunch of books on finance since then, and just reinforces confidence. That's all very cool.

Outside of investing in the podcast have played a big part in teaching him that money is ultimately only the means to an end and living a decent and fulfilling life. Had some comments for us, love the book challenge, listens to us on Google podcast. Unfortunately, no option for leaving a review there. But if there ever is a chance to do that, he will leave one.

Ben Felix: You left at a big piece of it. Maybe you did that on purpose. Did you?

Cameron Passmore: Fire away.

Ben Felix: Outside of investing, your podcast has played a big part in teaching me that money is ultimately a means to an end and living a decent and fulfilling full life. To that end, they left a job that they were unsatisfied with, took a four-month career break and then pursued work that was more meaningful to them. They ended up making a higher income by doing that. See, that's again, we're shifting the directions of people's lives. That's intimidating or something. I don't know what it is. I guess we do that professionally, maybe to an extent is, maybe it shouldn't be. It just seems different with Internet strangers.

Cameron Passmore: The last one, get this. This one is, for me, pretty impactful. Everyone knows I went to Ireland with Lisa earlier this summer. Steve from Calgary reached out, and I'm not a big fan of giving travel tips, because then, I kind of drive people crazy. But I exchanged some ideas with him where to go, just three. I said, I don't want to drive you crazy with this. I gave him a few ideas where to go as he was heading off to Ireland.

So get this, he sent me a note and said, “My wife and I just returned from our visit to the coast of Western Ireland,” which is where I suggested he goes. I don't know if he was going there before or not, but it's unbelievable. Anyways, “Just returned from our visit to the coast of Western Ireland. Incredibly beautiful place and people. Unfortunately, while there, back home, my mother got ill and died, so we returned home three days early. As sad as that was, we found ourselves surrounded by extraordinary people during that vulnerable time, which will always be a part of me. For example, Tom McHugh was gigging at McCafferty’s Donegal, he said he would be honoured to play his favourite Irish folk song for his mom. It was intimate and personal with a few locals singing along. I wanted to share it with you.” He sent us the YouTube video of this performer doing this song in a pub in Ireland. He said that, “I could share this note and also share the YouTube link.” I’ll tell you, it brought me right back to being in Ireland. It’s incredible. You can feel like the Irish feel of the pub and the music. It’s incredible. So for those interested, you can check out the link in YouTube.

Ben Felix: It’s blowing my mind right now. I think about this, but reading these things is making it just more explicit. It's like, I mentioned this with Chris DeRose too, where I had this feeling. Chris DeRose is one of the guests we have for the crypto podcast. I had listened to hundreds of episodes of their podcast. You create this like weird asynchronous relationship with people, but you see that in these things, where there's all these people listen to our podcast, and they have a relationship with us, but we don't know them. It's weird to think about.

Cameron Passmore: But it’s going on for so long, right? I was listening to Kara Swisher interview this week, and she talks about the power of this medium. It's been happening in radio forever. Like you felt you knew the DJs, like when I grew up, you knew the DJs. It’s just an evolution of mass communication into more micro-customized communication. Like you have even more, like people are listening or even more engaged with the content of the subject matter and the material.

Ben Felix: That’s what I mean. It's different from a radio DJ.

Cameron Passmore: Very.

Ben Felix: It's more niche, it's more targeted, it's more intimate if that's the right word to use.

Cameron Passmore: For sure. I think it does put creative pressure on us.

Ben Felix: That's never been an issue. The creative side.

Cameron Passmore: I'm always amazed, like we have this week, for example, how many pages of notes do we have? Sixteen pages of notes that kind of comes together in the three, four days before.

Ben Felix: I don't worry about the creative side. I can't tell you where the ideas come from, but they keep coming. We had the topic for this week done last week. Then I ended up doing the goals, because we finally finished processing the data, so I threw that paper together, and we ended up doing that this week. Which means we already have next week's episode, the meat of it written. I've got like three more ideas. The creative pressure has never been an issue. But there is a weight of sorts, knowing that there are people listening to us and altering the course of their lives based on that. Like really, you guys, sure you want to listen to me?

Cameron Passmore: That was fun. Anything else?

Ben Felix: Nope. I don't think so.

Cameron Passmore: All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. We really appreciate listening and connecting with you.

Is there an error in the transcript? Let us know! Email us at info@rationalreminder.ca.

Be sure to add the episode number for reference.