Financial Advisors React to Viral Money Advice

We're back with another edition of Financial Advisors React, and this batch of clips is something else entirely. From the idea of saving money being "stupid" to a full Roth IRA conspiracy theory, these viral money takes are out of control. Not all financial advice online is created equal and we're here to show you the smarter path forward. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Jump start your journey with our FREE financial resources⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Reach your goals faster with our products⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Take the relationship to the next level: become a client⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe on YouTube for early access and go beyond the podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Connect with us on social media for more content⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bring confidence to your wealth building with simplified strategies from The Money Guy. Learn how to apply financial tactics that go beyond common sense and help you reach your money goals faster. Make your assets do the heavy lifting so you can quit worrying and start living a more fulfilled life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Brian Preston?

  The team's put together some viral videos. Let's check out what they've got going.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  And Brian, I am so excited because they didn't tell us if these are viral in a good way or viral in a bad way. So let's dive right in.

• 0:43Speaker 03

  One of the stupidest things I've ever seen people do in my life is save money when they are young. If you are below the age of 25 and you are a smart, competent guy, why are you putting money in a retirement fund?

• 0:55Brian Preston?

  A little thing called compounding growth?

• 0:56Speaker 03

  You can always make more money yourself than by betting on other dudes. Is it even appropriate for you as a grown man to be investing in other men? What, your dream is to be in the Bahamas sipping on fruit margaritas with your girlfriends while a bunch of old men do the hard work for you of making money? Like, what are we doing here? It's a combination of so many stupid things. First of all, you're not intelligent enough to make your own investing decisions, so you put things in the VOO, the SPX, to let other people make the decision for you. Second of all, you don't trust yourself to have the competence to make more money on your own than, what is it, 10% a year? Like, really? And finally, the one cope that everyone always gives me is, "Oh, no, but you don't understand. It's tax advantage, and I'll be able to pull all this money out

• 1:39Speaker 03

  and not pay my 40% tax when I'm 65." Are we serious right now? When I'm 65, like, what can I even buy with that money? Like, extra applesauce?

• 1:51Brian Preston?

  So he's legit? That's legit?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Well, okay.

• 1:56Brian Preston?

  Because he poo-pooed all over compounding growth.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Language, first, just language. We don't need that. Secondly, when you invest, you actually take ownership in corporations. I'm not betting on some guy or some person. When I go buy the S and P 500, I'm becoming an owner of Apple, of Google, of Nvidia, of Tesla, of Home Depot, of fill in the blank. That's what investing is. It's not betting on someone else to manage the money. It's literally participating in the economy in which we operate.

• 2:27Brian Preston?

  Look, if you want to be a millionaire by the time you're at that retirement age, around $95 a month will get it done. If you want to be a millionaire and you wait until you're 40 years of age, you're going to have to save, it's like a thousand dollars.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  10 times as much.

• 2:40Brian Preston?

  It is 10 times harder to do it. You can do it light and you can do it right if you start early because of that magical thing of compounding growth. The other thing that he didn't even cover, it's free money. These things are tax advantaged, so I think there was a lot there. I imagine he's, he's going to probably try to sell you on something or.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't know what the alternative was. He never, all he did was poo-poo on investing. Well, investing is just simply a place to park money that you've already earned so that that money can start working for you. I don't understand why he was so upset about that.

• 3:11Brian Preston?

  I didn't get, there wasn't a lot there. And then all of a sudden, like he was, it was a normal video and then he started dropping the F-bombs. It just seemed very disconnected. It's almost like he wanted the explicit lyrics label on it so he could get a little, a few more views.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  What's the best finance advice you've ever gotten? Save $20 a day, 20 a day, time 365, 7,300, a year times two years, 14,006, three years, 21,009, 10 years, 73,000, capital interest, 78 grand. Save 20 a day and you always keep broke away. The reason why people don't have money is not how much money you get paid, it's how much money you save. I know people who work McDonald's, minimum wage, and they make more money than people make $40 an hour because they understand where they at. So they save, try to get high. And then the people who make more money, they spend more money and they get more habits. You know what I mean? Hey, good luck in life. You know what I mean? Yeah.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  But you gotta save money. Without saving money, you got nothing to advance.

• 4:11Brian Preston?

  Give that man a podcast.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Preach, man. Alright, what he said, he said $20 a day will keep broke away? Is that what he said?

• 4:17Brian Preston?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  I like that a lot. He's exactly right. That's what, it doesn't matter how much money you make. It doesn't matter where your income is. It doesn't matter how successful you are. It matters what you do with it. So whether you make $100,000 a year, or whether you make $100 a year, if you can defer some of that into the future, you can set your future self up for success.

• 4:39Brian Preston?

  You have to live on less than you make. That's the reality. You live on less than you make. That creates the margin. It actually allows you to start saving and investing. And eventually, your army of dollars works harder than you can. That's what he's saying. Just do something. I love that the numbers of $20 a day lines up quite nicely with what you can do in a Roth IRA. So if you haven't even started an investment account, load yourself up today. If you need more, go to moneyguy.com/resources. We'll hit you up with some free stuff.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Is a Roth IRA still worth it in 2026?

• 5:09Brian Preston?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Speaker 06

  Listen, I don't like Roth IRAs. George Bush created the Roth IRA. You know why he did it? Because he needed money. And there was a ton of money locked into 401Ks. There was lots and lots of money back then. The economy was going down and he needed to unlock this money that hadn't been taxed. Well, how does he do it? Hey, convert your money into a Roth IRA and pay the taxes now. And so you won't have to pay it later. I'm earning money on that. Why would I, why would I give it up to the government so that I don't have to pay taxes later? I really don't like the Roth IRA. And I know, everybody pushes back.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  But if you do an apples to apples comparison of the true cost, you're gonna do better in a traditional 401K.

• 6:00Brian Preston?

  Can I tell you why this is BS and bogus? Is the Roth IRAs, when they came on the scene, remember the funding limits were around $2,000. Roth conversions also had an income cap on them. It wasn't until 2010. That they lifted the cap off of where high income and wealthy people could start doing Roth conversions, no matter how much money they made. So I disagree. And actually, I know in my book, Millionaire Mission, I give the history of the Roth IRA. And it was a truly bipartisan support bill to try to encourage people. And, you know, the Senator Roth, who kind of pushed

• 6:39Brian Preston?

  things forward, the quotes on this, on the why was directly to impact and benefit the saver so that they have money in the future. So I'm not as cynical as it, you know, George H. W. Bush, you know, decided, or George W. Bush decided he needed a little few extra jingle in the treasury, and this is why we got Roth.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Well, and also, he's completely wrong. His apples to apples was absolutely inaccurate. If your tax rates are going to be lower in the future than they are today, then yeah, you should save and pre-tax. But if you're in a low tax bracket environment today, and it's likely your income is going to increase and be higher in the future, Roth 100% makes sense. There is a tax arbitrage that exists, whether you have a higher tax rate now, lower tax rate now, higher tax rate in the future, lower tax rate in the future. They are not apples to apples. There absolutely is a better choice than the other, depending on your unique circumstances. He's just absolutely wrong on that. Traditional does not always win out.

• 7:46Brian Preston?

  Is he blowing? What's going on there, bro?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  I think he's kissing up.

• 7:52Brian Preston?

  Okay.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  I think he was trying, I think, I think he's trying to get the thing to go up. I think he was blowing on it to try to make it go up.

• 8:01Brian Preston?

  I thought, you know, I'll be honest with you. When I remember the first time I ever went fishing with my granddad, he told me if I held my mouth a certain way that I'd catch more fish. Now, I realize as a grown man that he was just, this was entertainment.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  That didn't work? That's not the way that you did it?

• 8:14Brian Preston?

  Don't you see, he's like, he's up here, I feel like that somebody told him, hey, if you want to just, you know, really amp up the buy low, sell high, you know, hold your mouth just like this. Right by the monitor.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Well, it's like, I don't know, Ron, you know, whenever you play golf and you hit that shot and you kind of like start trying to like move it with, and it's ineffective. I think a lot of people, when it comes to investing, they are under the impression that they have more control than they actually do. At the end of the day, we don't get to control what the market does. We don't get to control when the stock goes up, when the stock goes down. What we do get to control is how we participate in it and how far out on the risk spectrum we want to be. And how much we can save into it. As for like day to day, month to month, quarter to quarter fluctuations, that's out of your control. And if you think you can control it, or better yet, you can read it, you might.

• 9:03Speaker 05

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• 9:31Speaker 02

  Be in for a real awakening.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  Babe, why did you cash out your 401K?

• 9:34Brian Preston?

  Uh oh.

• 9:35Speaker 07

  So in 2019, I cashed out over a hundred thousand dollars out of my 401K.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  He's got a thigh tattoo.

• 9:42Speaker 07

  To invest in real estate. And that's because 401Ks are the single greatest scam that anybody can invest in. Now, for 99% of people, if you have no discipline financially and you don't want to invest your own money, for sure, get your employer a match. That's fine. But what 401Ks are designed for is the US government literally said, most people don't have enough discipline to actively invest money on their own. So we're going to create a program that forces people to get into equities, AKA the stock market. And so the 401K is designed for you to not pay tax right now and then draw on it later at 65. Where you're supposed to be paying less tax. But the issue is, I'm going to be really, really rich at 65 years old and I'm going to be in a higher tax bracket.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Not necessarily.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  So you are literally.

• 10:30Speaker 07

  Having no benefit to having a 401k because you have zero control with that capital that's inside the vehicle of the 401k. I'm not your financial advisor, I'm not giving financial advice. If you want to ride that 401k, do it. I'm just saying that if you want to understand how to actively invest your money in real estate and businesses and stuff like that, it's much better to pay the 10% free penalty to go ahead and get that money out of the 401k to where you can control it and actually grow it and do something with it.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  I don't understand, all these people poo poo on this. They're like, oh, you put money to 401k and that money has to sit there until you get to 65. Yeah, that's the point. The 401k money, that's retirement money. That's supposed to be for you later in life. But that's why we like saving into Roth IRAs and saving into 401k and saving into after-tax brokerage. We're not even against real estate, but it's not an all or nothing. And you want to make sure that you're doing it in the right order. At 65, you're going to need that money. So why would you not use this unbelievable tax incentivized vehicle to build assets?

• 11:32Brian Preston?

  The argument falls apart if you just did a Roth 401k. Over 80% of employers offer Roth 401ks. That's where you don't get a deduction now, but you get that compounding growth completely tax-free forever. So if you're young and you really want to leverage things, that's what you ought to take advantage of. It's a really good opportunity. The other thing, look, it's better to be lucky than good sometimes. He did this, he bought, he did his transaction. Let's face this, he took a 10% haircut immediately to pay a penalty.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Plus income tax.

• 12:02Brian Preston?

  Plus the income taxes on it. So he gutted his to put it into real estate. Now, he's likely lucky because he got it right before the huge inflation run-up of real estate that happened in 21. You know, in that three-year period, we had the real estate markets make over 50%. But if you think that we don't have reversion to the mean with, with real estate, did he really make a smart decision or did he just get lucky with the timing of this? And anybody who watches this bad advice, you have to understand that levered debt, yes, it can make you better returns, but there is tremendous risk. If you don't believe that there's a game... That when markets go bad and real estate markets go bad and we hit recessions,

• 12:43Brian Preston?

  big pocket banks taking from little pocket wannabe real estate investors is one of the most horrendous things you'll ever see. And it happens usually once a decade. Just don't be on that side of the game. The easiest thing to do, build a good base, deepen your own pockets. We love 401ks, we love index funds. So then you can get into lever debt down the road when you actually can afford it.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  J P Morgan published a chart around the end of 24 and it was a scatter diagram showing over the years, the relationship between the S and P 500 at purchase and the return over the next 10 years. It was a negative correlation, which means the higher the P E ratio you pay, the lower the return you should expect. Makes perfect sense. And it showed that historically, if you bought the S and P when the P E ratio is 23, in every case, there were no exceptions. Your annualized return over the next 10 years was between 2 and minus 2. So all you have to know. One of the most interesting things about the S and P, on average, it has returned 10% a year for 100 years. But do you know that the annual return is almost never between 8 and 12?

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Kills it or it dies.

• 13:52Brian Preston?

  You know how you fix all this?

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 13:54Brian Preston?

  Always be buying.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 13:56Brian Preston?

  Because, you know, every year in the financial markets, specifically the S and P, I'll use the same example as him. There's about a 14% spread just intra-year from the highs and lows. So you could make the argument that, you know, even throughout the year, the price, if you're using things like the forward price to earnings ratio, you're going to have tremendous variances in that. No matter what that number is, I hold my nose and then I'm always buying. Every month, for me, it's every week, I have the money just popping. And what happens is, is the yo-yo goes up and down. That's the daily prices of the market. Yet we walk higher and higher up that mountain top of expanding returns, expanding economy, economy, because we're the,

• 14:40Brian Preston?

  I believe in the law of accelerating returns. You make money. Instead of trying to beat the market, be the market. That's where success lies.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. When it comes to investing, it's more about your time. In the market, not timing the market, entering at the right P O P and exiting at the right P E. It's about actually being in the game. That's why if you're saving in a 401k, if you're adding to your Roth monthly, if you're participating in an after-tax brokerage account, and you can do it on a systematic, consistent basis, you will recognize those 10% returns over the long term.

• 15:12Speaker 06

  I never thought I'd ever have to explain this again, but arbitrage sports betting is a lot more profitable than you think. All right, there's a common consensus, there's a bit of a controversy going around that arbitrage sports betting isn't worth it and isn't worth your time because of the small return that you're getting. Let me put this into perspective for you. Arbitrage sports betting, you'll get 5% ROI on average every single trade that you take. And you can place multiple, you can take however many trades you want every single day. So your money's compounded every single day.

• 15:37Brian Preston?

  There's a limit there. He should put an asterisk right there.

• 15:39Speaker 06

  The S and P 500, the stock market, will give you 5% on average a month. Compare the two. When you can take 5% of however much money you put in, keep in mind arbitrage sports betting is not regular sports betting. You're betting on both sides so that no matter the outcome, you take that 5% on average. Just keep in mind, there's tons of times where my students, my clients, even me.

• 16:01Brian Preston?

  Oh, he's got a system.

• 16:02Speaker 06

  We get 15, 20% arbitrage opportunities, and that's a lot more than 5%, but it's really just the point where like you can do this multiple times a day. So your money's compounding every single day instead of per month. Why do I have to explain? I don't, I don't understand, bro.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Well, because they won't let you keep doing it.

• 16:19Brian Preston?

  Yeah.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  They won't let you keep doing it.

• 16:21Brian Preston?

  Yeah, that's the big, that's the big asterisk out there. You know, I remember I went through my own phase of maybe I could learn to card count on blackjack and beat the system because there is a statistical, you might have the house edge if you know how to play blackjack in the appropriate way. The problem is, if you're good at it, the Las Vegas casinos or what other casinos, they put you in this black book and they say, nope, we're not gonna let you play in our casinos. It's not illegal. We're just choosing not to let you take money from us because we like taking money from the fish. Yes, you can make good money doing these arbitrage bets. There's all kind of really sophisticated systems that have already calculated where there's arbitrage. You go play both sides of it,

• 17:03Brian Preston?

  but guess what happens probably about the third or fourth bet you make? They cap you on what you can bet. They notify you, hey, we've noticed some unique trends in the way you're betting. So we're going to start lowering your bets to as low as a few pennies, a few dimes, maybe a dollar or two. They don't let you keep doing this. So he's trying to sell you a system. Without a doubt, there are going to continue to be inefficiencies between the different gambling houses that let you do these sports betting, which by the way, I don't even think that's where if this is what you're doing to build wealth, you've lost the plot. Go ahead and start saving and investing in your Roth IRA. Understand what index funds are, but don't let somebody sell you a system that is going to immediately get put into the ground

• 17:48Brian Preston?

  because the betting companies are not going to allow you to take advantage of them. Do you actually want it? Or do you just want other people to see you have it? Like if the rest of the world was extinct, would you really be walking around with a Louis Vuitton bag? Like, I don't really think you would care that much. Looking rich over being wealthy. Status makes people feel important and material possessions oftentimes can give people's status. I saw a quote once that said, it's not about the art, it's about the reaction to the audience. Like people legitimately care more about how other people perceive things than they do about how they perceive it themselves. And the result of this is that our entire society is fake. Everybody is wearing a mask and they do things just to gain social currency.

• 18:24Speaker 02

  If the reason that you're making consumption decisions is to impress others and to put on a facade of how successful and how wonderful your life is, I worry that that's going to be a path to not being incredibly fulfilled with what your dollars can actually do for you.

• 18:40Brian Preston?

  Wealth is silent. It's what sits on your net worth statement. And it's exactly what Bo said. Don't try to impress people who really don't care. And that's why even in Millionaire Mission, I've detailed that car purchases are napalm for your finances is because a lot of us, that's the first thing we do. It's the clothes we wear. It's the car we drive. And you're literally driving and wearing your seven-figure future wealth because you're not actually putting it to work. You're actually just living for the now. And that's, that's a failure recipe.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  If you don't know what to do with your next dollar or where to go, we have a nine-step process to help you figure that out. So go to learn.moneyguy.com and check out the Financial Order of Operations so that you too can know exactly what you should be doing with your next dollar.

• 19:28Brian Preston?

  I'm your host, Brian, joined by Mr. Bo, Money Guy Team.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  When you're building a company, you learn that trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC-backed startup, used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit-ready in a month and closed a multimillion-dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at vanta.com.