Financial Advisors Correct the Internet (Part 2)

Financial advisors Brian and Bo react to some of the internet's most viral money advice and separate smart financial strategies from dangerous financial myths. From Nancy Pelosi ETFs and Robert Kiyosaki's "Savers Are Losers" philosophy to leveraged real estate, whole life insurance, financial advisors, Roth IRAs, S&P 500 investing, entrepreneurship, and financial independence, we break down what actually works for building long-term wealth. If you're looking for evidence-based investing, retirement planning, personal finance, index fund investing, tax-efficient wealth building, and common-sense financial advice, this episode explains why boring often beats flashy. Learn how Financial Mutants build wealth through disciplined investing, low-cost index funds, and proven financial planning principles instead of chasing viral trends. 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.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.

• 0:39Speaker 00

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 0:47Speaker 01

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• 1:00Brian Preston?

  If you're worried the internet's lying to you, never fear. We're here to correct the internet.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Brent, I am so excited to correct the internet today. Here we go.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  I've bought into the Pelosi fund.

• 1:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  It's doing really well.

• 1:12Speaker 05

  I bet it is.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I only put a thousand dollars in there, but it's beating my own money, guys.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Oh, Caleb.

• 1:18Speaker 05

  It's crazy that you could know, oh, we're going to do this big deal with AI chips. Nvidia makes AI chips. I'm just going to buy a ton of Nvidia stock and then boom, we pass this thing. Hey, look at that. 500% increase. Nancy Pelosi is the scapegoat, but if you look, it's red, blue, across the line. They're all trading, making tons of money. They all go into Congress broke. They all come out richest and they get $100,000 a year.

• 1:44Brian Preston?

  It is amazing that there's not more restrictions on these elected officials with essentially profiting from knowledge because insider trading all through what we do has a lot more restrictions than what our elected officials have to deal with.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, insider trading is illegal, but folks getting called on it and actually being able to like track down insider trading is not clear cut, black and white. And it is a little bit frustrating for everyday investors. Now, what I think is the better learning thing here is oftentimes you can come up with an idea and you're like, oh, I'm going to go buy this fund. Maybe it's some fund that tracks a politician or maybe it's some other fund, some high flyer, some growth, some tech thing. And all of a sudden you do it and you get a 20%, 30%, 40% rate of, or maybe, maybe you participate in an IPO of a stock that comes out and all of a sudden it shoots through the roof at IPO. Now, holy cow, I'm a genius. I've got to double down. I figured this out. And low and behold, if you've given it enough time, time will expose all fools.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  And if you give it enough time, you'll recognize that, man, maybe that strategy I figured out, maybe that thing I thought that was this magic bullet that's going to go make me all this money wasn't quite as good as I thought. And maybe the thing I ought to be doing with my dollars is the boring, slow, consistent, low cost index investing that's proven to build millionaire after millionaire after millionaire after millionaire through time.

• 3:05Brian Preston?

  Well, and even if you wanted to use this strategy, Nancy's retiring, so just stick with the S and P 500.

• 3:12Speaker 06

  I, that's an applause line.

• 3:16Speaker 07

  I don't think people truly understand what Robert Kiyosaki means by savers or losers. If you're getting your feelings, you probably need to listen up. Yeah, because the advice you're listening to right now is advice that was given to you before the iPhone even came out. You save $10,000. It's sitting in your account. Inflation, let's call it 3%. Money debasement, let's call it 10%. The hurdle rate is 13% for you to break even. Last time I checked, how you'll savings accounts aren't paying 14%, so. So you think you're getting a good deal, but you're already getting taxed on that interest anyway. So rug pull. Oh yeah, the S and P 500 is pretty decent.

• 3:55Speaker 07

  It does just around 13%. Also, here's this though, look into assets that grow over 13% in a year or find a way to exponentially increase your income over 13% in a year. Or you can start a business and you can exponentially increase your income.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  What was the 10% money debasement thing?

• 4:16Brian Preston?

  I don't know. He was, he threw so much in that cookie jar that I don't even know what the, the point. I have so many questions. Look, I thought he was going down the, the, the solid path, whereas basically you can't just let your money sit in cash because inflation is going to eat it alive over the long term. But then when he started throwing tomatoes at the S and P 500, I mean, we have shown over and over and we've even, we survey our millionaire clients, being consistent and starting early, even with things like the S and P 500 is going to make you fabulously wealthy and successful over the long term. So to hear somebody poo poo it really kind of disappoints me because that's, because what can you, yeah, maybe you can do a one

• 4:57Brian Preston?

  off and, and make greater than 13% in a year, but consistency? Nah, get out of here.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I was going to say. It's not untrue that entrepreneurship and investing in small business, that's where they can have outsized returns, but they are outsized opportunity, low probability success. But you know what has a high probability success and also a lot of opportunity? Investing in low cost index funds like the S and P 500. Yes, inflation will erode your money, but if you can earn eight to 11%, which is what the S and P makes on average over the long term, then I'm going to argue your dollars are not just going to keep up and keep pace with inflation. They will actually grow through time, increasing your purchasing power greater than the rate of inflation, which is what you want to do as you build towards financial independence.

• 5:44Brian Preston?

  And if he was kind of implying on real estate, because Kiyosaki's real estate with levered debt, you know, guys, if you do that too early, all you're going to do is play the wonderful game of big banks taking from little pockets when the market goes bad and you don't have other people's money to pay the rent. So make sure if you're going to do real estate, we love real estate. We do real estate. Just have deep enough pockets that you can survive those bad moments because they will come your way while you're doing real estate. Here is what a financial advisor would likely do with your money if you gave them $200 a month to invest.

• 6:14Speaker 07

  The first thing that they would do is they would just open up a Roth IRA for you. This would just be the investment account. Now that $200 would go into that account, but it would actually get split into three different buckets. The first bucket would be $120. The second bucket would be $50 and the last bucket would be $30. Then they would take this $120, the bulk of it, and they would basically put it into S and P 500 index funds, things like VOO, for example. They would take the $50 and they would invest it likely into international index funds, VX US is an example. Last $30, they would probably put into something more aggressive,

• 6:56Speaker 07

  something with higher risk as an example, QQ, QM. They would just automate this entire process by connecting your bank account, setting up an automatic withdrawal of $200 and then automatic purchases of all these index funds in these exact amounts. Like if you did this from the age 30 to 65, at the end, you'd end up with about $360,000. It's not bad. Here's the thing, if you did this yourself, you'd actually have closer to $458,000 just because you would have to pay them about a 1% fee every single year.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  I agree with everything and I mean literally everything that this guy said. If you're hiring a financial advisor and all that financial advisor is doing for you is opening up a Roth IRA, having you deposit $200 and auto investing that $200 across three different funds. Yeah, you shouldn't pay an advisor. That's not the thing that a financial advisor should be helping you with. And if you're paying 1% for that type of service, you are likely overpaying.

• 7:56Brian Preston?

  If you're only getting investment advice from your advisor, that industry has already been commoditized. You do financial planning when your life gets complicated, when you actually get to a situation to where you don't know what to do with your taxes, you don't know what to do with your retirement plan, you don't know what to do with your investments anymore because you know there's some efficiencies that you can pick up. And also don't forget, everybody always loves to quote the 1% rule, but when you're worth 2 million, 3 million, 5 million, everything gets cheaper and cheaper. This is like buying toilet paper at Costco.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  That's the most frustrating part to me. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Every time you see one of these people line up what a financial advisor does, they assume that the financial advisor adds no additional value. Well, the argument would be if you can do it all on your own, the exact same way and you get no value from what a financial advisor would provide, then don't hire a financial advisor. An advisor ought to be able to add enough value to your financial life that not only does it justify the fee, but you are in a better place because of it. Price is what you pay, value is what you receive.

• 8:57Brian Preston?

  Every one of our clients can vote with their feet. By that, what I mean by that is that we don't do any proprietary products. We're using index funds. We're using ETFs.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  No lockup periods.

• 9:07Brian Preston?

  Exactly what he covered. So you have to ask yourself, why in the world are all these millionaires not leaving when, when we let them, we even lead with in the, in the initial, when they're signing up, look, if you don't like this after a year, if I can't do these three things that I told you I can do, leave. And they don't.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  The action's on the court and as the official beer sponsor of the NBA, Michelob Ultra is getting fans closer to the game with a chance to win courtside seats, merch and more. Visit michelobultra.com/courtside to enter. Michelob Ultra Courtside 26 to 27. No purchase necessary. Open to US residents 21+. Begins on October 1st, 2026 and ends on June 30th, 2027. Multiple entry periods. See official rules at michelobultra.com/courtside for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Blowing ad budget on metrics that look great until the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it, it wasn't.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Rich in your twenties, if you keep wasting money on these three things. First is your lifestyle. Most people make it, spend it, make it, spend it and have nothing to show for it. Second, a house. Most people in their twenties aren't married, so they don't need to buy a family home. Instead, buy rental properties and make some passive income. Third is a car. Most people finance a luxury vehicle with money they don't have to impress.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  People they don't even like instead buy a cheap second hand car and you'll have the last I love one. I love three. I don't not love two.

• 10:58Brian Preston?

  I would just put a note on it.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:59Brian Preston?

  House hack it.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that. That's a great example.

• 11:02Brian Preston?

  Yeah, house hacking is is a great alternative to telling people to jump right into what in our system, it's step eight of the financial order of operations to get into doing real estate investing. I think what I'd rather you do is probably around step four, when you're trying to buy your own primary residence, why not try to find a duplex, a quadplex or something in your area? Because not only are you going to use other people's money to pay your own mortgage, but the banks, because you're living in that house, it will give you more favorable underwriting. They're also going to give you more favorable on the interest rate. It's just a better deal all around. Don't just jump into to deep dive into the the deep end of real estate when there's other ways in between.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  When you think about one and three, buying or letting your lifestyle increase or also buying luxury vehicles are often things that you do to impress people whose opinions do not matter. Don't waste your money doing those things. Only spend money on things that you truly value. Don't worry about what the world around you thinks.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  We are in $30 million worth of which means we owe banks $145,000 every single month in mortgage payments. Now, let me explain to you why that's a good thing and why it creates massive unreceivable wealth for me. So that $30 million worth of debt allows me to own $50 million worth of real estate. So that's $20 million worth of equity that I would not have if I was not in that $30 million worth of debt. But on top of that, that debt owns real estate assets and those real estate assets bring in over $350,000 in rent every single month, which of course is more than my $145,000 in mortgage payments

• 12:44Speaker 00

  plus all owning expenses plus positive tax free cash flow. And if you want to learn how to do this for you. This is exactly how Dave Ramsey went bankrupt back in the 80s. He was way over leveraged and all it takes is another COVID to wipe this guy out completely where the government's like, you can't evict anybody and they're not going to pay rent and you're going to like it. Meanwhile. The mortgage companies and lenders don't care. They're going to collect. And so this guy is not taking into account risk whatsoever. And it drives me crazy.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  You know, I don't disagree with what George is saying there because if you are highly levered and you have no financial foundation to pull back on or to fall back on, when COVID happens or when the great recession happens or when one of those things happens, it can cause you to go belly up. That's why if you are going to invest in real estate and you are going to take on debt, you better make sure that you are deep pocketed enough that you can weather those financial storms.

• 13:36Brian Preston?

  Well, the team is taking my my financial sidearm away. If I had it, I would, you know, flip it around and then start doing the math. There's a big difference between if you took down this debt pre 2022 or even 2021, when you could get interest rates in the 3% or less, even on some commercial property versus right now, you're probably going to be at 6% or greater. So for you to think that you're going to get the exact same return as somebody who might have done this five to six years ago, might be putting yourself in a box or in a bad situation because the other people's money, not only with what George said from a risk perspective, but you just might have a bad deal from what is even this property worth?

• 14:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. And let's let's not sleep with the fact that he said he had $50 million of assets with $30 million of debt. That's $20 million of equity that he has in those assets. Most people who want to get into real estate, who want to start on this path, don't get to start with $20 million of equity. They want to start, okay, I'm going to borrow as much as I can and put as little down as possible. If you're playing that game, there's a very good chance you're going to get yourself into a very scary and very, very dangerous situation.

• 14:44Speaker 06

  Here's a secret I learned from rich people that took me forever to understand, but I'm going to explain it to you like you're a fifth grader.

• 14:50Brian Preston?

  Oh, I can't wait.

• 14:51Speaker 06

  This is going to blow your mind. So this is using a whole life insurance policy as your own bank, essentially. So if you had $30,000 saved and you put it in a bank, you'd earn 1% interest over 10 years, $33,000. It's like nothing, right?

• 15:05Brian Preston?

  Three and a half.

• 15:05Speaker 06

  Well, if you wanted to buy a car for $30,000, you'd take that money out of the bank and then your 1% would go to zero. This is why banks are rich and we're not. Now, a whole life insurance policy, when you put that $30,000 into a policy, it earns regular market return. So 10% interest, power of compound interest, you've probably heard this before, right? 10% interest for 10 years turns your 30K into 81K. The kicker, when you want to buy that car.

• 15:31Brian Preston?

  Where's the disclaimers?

• 15:33Speaker 06

  Money out of the policy and it still gains this interest while you're paying it back to yourself.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  There's just a lot.

• 15:42Brian Preston?

  Where's the cost of the insurance?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  There's just a lot of stuff wrong.

• 15:45Brian Preston?

  There's a lot of hands in the cookie jar when you're buying insurance products. There's the cost of the insurance. There's the agents that are selling you the insurance and 10%. When's the last time you reviewed a policy that consistently made 10%?

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Let's let's go down this path and say that you did do the $30,000 of the policy and you did earn 10%. Let's say that it turned into $100,000. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go buy a $100,000 car or $100,000 beach house, $100,000 fill in the blank. If you pull all the cash value out of that policy, you know what you have to do? You have to then make sure that every single year you were putting enough back into that policy to cover the cost of insurance so that the policy does not lapse and create a taxable event for you. If you don't have the cash value in there to sustain that, then you have to put the money in. You know what happens every year you get older and older and older? The life insurance gets more and more and more and more expensive. It is not a free lunch like these infinite banking people try to lay out. It does not work the way that he described.

• 16:40Brian Preston?

  Anybody who says they've created a better mousetrap, but it's got a lot of fees and commissions, you have to scratch your head and go, something's just not math in here.

• 16:47Speaker 06

  Children are a lifestyle choice as much as they are a financial choice. I always have people telling me it's easier for me to retire because I don't have kids. And yeah, it's true.

• 16:55Brian Preston?

  It's expensive mattress.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  My life is so much easier.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  She just put the cat in the bed.

• 16:58Speaker 06

  Entire evenings working on my business. I don't have to wait in the school pickup and drop off line. I don't have to feed anyone except myself. I get to sleep in every single weekend. I don't have to pay for daycare. I don't have to save for someone else's education. I get to focus on my financial independence and my happiness first every single day. That was an intentional choice I made because I want to live a certain life and children would quite frankly ruin the life that I want to live. Does that mean I don't like kids? No, I love kids. If life wasn't such a capitalist hellscape, I would consider adoption, but I just refuse to be trapped working forever, raising the next generation of workers for this system. I want to get in.

• 17:34Brian Preston?

  Oh, this makes me sad.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Get out.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  That's all right. So that's a choice. That's an opinion. And I certainly don't want to like fault her for her opinion and and her feelings around that. But I agree with you. It's kind of sad. I have kids and I love my kids and are they a burden sometimes? Absolutely. Are they expensive sometimes? Absolutely. Just sometimes I just want to grab them? Absolutely. Would I trade that for all of the money in the world? Not a chance. I worry that there will be some fulfillment that does not happen if she thinks that just having money and having wealth and having freedom is that all this life is about.

• 18:12Brian Preston?

  The thing that that troubles me and I want to, I want to share this and maybe this is too much sharing because y'all know I'm at this stage of life now where I kind of wish we'd had more kids because mine are starting to leave the house. And here's the thing, I can go back in time and remember who I was back when got married. I don't, I didn't really like kids. I can still remember a moment where I was in public accounting. We were at a team outing and I was talking to some other of the male associates there and a kid fell over and like hurt their knee and everybody was making fun of us because we all just stared. We didn't know what to do. And I was like, I'm not a kid person. I don't, we don't know what to do to fix this kid. And then I have my own children and holy cow is like, okay, I'm not a kid person, but I love my kids. There is something

• 18:56Brian Preston?

  really amazing that is in us that when you have your own children, it is a love that you just can't fathom what what it is. I mean, it is, it is just the, it's the strangest thing because I've never considered, I don't, I don't feel like I need to smell babies and and do all this other stuff. But as soon as I had my own kids, I was like, oh, I'm in on this. I hate to hear so much pessimism drowning out what could be a lot of joy in this person's life.

• 19:22Speaker 03

  I borrowed $300 million.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  You borrowed 300 million?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  And I bought the best real estate in the world for pennies on a dollar. That's how you get rich, not by working hard and putting in a stupid 401k full of stocks.

• 19:36Brian Preston?

  It is a way to get rich.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  ETFs. Those are for the peasants. I don't touch that garbage.

• 19:41Brian Preston?

  It's rage baiting.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  It's just not true that you cannot build wealth that way. And I would argue more millionaires have built wealth that way than by going $300 million in debt.

• 19:52Brian Preston?

  Do you know how you get to the point where a bank will give you $300 million? You had to have enough success and enough financial foundation underneath you that you were a good bet for the bank underwriters.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, the internet does not have your best interests at heart, but we believe that there is a better way to do money. It's why we have all of our resources available at moneyguy.com/resources, all of our free tools, all of our calculators.

• 20:18Brian Preston?

  They're free.

• 20:18Speaker 03

  Because we want you to be able to do money better.

• 20:22Brian Preston?

  Yeah. I mean, our system is easy. We go take all of our free stuff, create success. We don't ask anything of you until you reach a level of success that it's gotten complicated. Your simple life gets really complicated with success. And then I want you to remember who planted all the seeds, who gave you the knowledge. That's how the abundance cycle works. We love to work with you. We work with people all across the country. I'm your host, Brian, joined by Mr. Bo, Money Guy team, out.

• 20:53Speaker 06

  Hey, Bo's here. On your next track, listen for the decisions, distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front, every choice deliberate. With Bo's, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bo's.

• 21:09Speaker 00

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