Pod Insights Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth Former Financial Advisor: “Do Not Buy A House!” Do THIS Instead! | Humphrey Yang About this episode DISCLAIMER: This content is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice. Always consult with a qualified financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:59 Speaker 02 What I'm going to tell you right now is going to be very different.
1:02 Marina Mogilko? What are the worst decisions people can make with their money in 2025?
1:06 Speaker 02 Right now, I don't have that cash. It's all fully in the market.
1:08 Marina Mogilko? How do you stay sane when the market goes down?
1:11 Speaker 02 Ideally, I just keep all that money in the investing portfolio forever.
1:14 Marina Mogilko? Let's talk about crypto.
1:15 Speaker 02 Oh, I have a 5X. I want a 10X.
1:17 Marina Mogilko? How complex everything is.
1:19 Speaker 02 People saying you should sell everything.
1:20 Marina Mogilko? And you do the same for your meme coin strategy, right?
1:23 Speaker 02 Not financial advice.
1:24 Marina Mogilko? Hey, guys. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. It looks like 2025 is going to be a wild ride for everyone who is interested in investing, starting a business, anything to do with finance. So today, we have a financial expert here, Humphrey, who we're going to talk to about building wealth in 2025, mistakes you can make with your money in 2025, like general wealth building advice. Because I feel like for a lot of young people, it looks like 2025 could be a great year to start building wealth, especially when you see markets growing. It's like, it's a good place to start, right?
1:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
2:00 Marina Mogilko? Everything's falling.
2:01 Speaker 02 Yep.
2:02 Marina Mogilko? Let's talk about that. Can we start with like a general budgeting strategy for people in 2025? How much you save? How much you invest?
2:11 Speaker 02 I'd like to say for most people that they should try to aim to save 20% of their income if they can. If they can do more, that's great. But most people, I think the average personal savings rate in the United States is about 4%. So if you can get up to 10, 15, 20%, that gives you a lot more flexibility. And that will help you save and invest more in the long run.
2:30 Marina Mogilko? When you say save, like, okay, I'm putting aside 10%, does it stay as cash or does it go into a high-yield savings account? What would be the strategy there?
2:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I would stockpile some cash until you have at least three to six months of an emergency fund saved up. So if your monthly expenses are $2,000 a month, that's what you need to live. You should at least save $6,000 or up to $12,000. Put that away, put that aside, that's high-yield, put it in a high-yield account. You don't touch that money, that's just for emergencies. And then anything else you make on top of that and you can save, then you should invest that. That's the general guideline, yeah.
3:06 Marina Mogilko? What should be the investment strategy for someone who's just starting out?
3:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, so investment strategy super depends on the person's risk tolerance and their time horizon. So if they need the money next year, I probably wouldn't say you should invest. Because let's say you need, let's say you need money for a wedding, right? And you know you're going to spend money on the wedding. If you invest that money and it goes down in value, you would probably feel pretty bad about it. And if you can't afford your wedding when you want to afford your wedding, that's not going to be good. Let's say your time horizon is 40 years. So you want that money to be your retirement money. Then in that case, invest all you want and you don't have to worry too much about it. Kind of put it into the market and forget about it. For most people, so I'm going to get to the, what you should invest in now.
3:51 Speaker 02 For most people, I think ETFs are pretty solid and those are just exchange traded funds. That just means you're buying one fund and within that one fund, it encompasses, let's say, 500 other stocks within that fund. So by buying that one fund, you are buying literally 500 stocks all at once.
4:07 Marina Mogilko? Do you just buy that fund or is there a split? Like it has to be like a 20% international, an ETF that tracks Bitcoin, right? We just have these. What would the, the strategy be there? Let's talk about long-term, let's talk about like 10 years.
4:21 Speaker 02 So there are a lot of ETFs. You don't just buy a random ETF. You typically want to buy an S and P 500 ETF. That's the US stock market. You can balance it out with international ETFs. So the rest of the world has a ETF called, uh, I think it's like all world minus US. So basically it's like every, it's like every other stock in the world besides the United States. So you could do that. And then you could also balance it with bonds.
4:46 Marina Mogilko? What's the percentage?
4:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, so a typical percentage, let's say you wanted a three fund portfolio, which is a very famous portfolio. It's, um, a lot of people online like the three fund portfolio because it's very well balanced as well as it does well in times of prosperity, but doesn't have as much downside risk. Uh, the, the typical split on a three fund portfolio is something like 50% in US stocks, 25 to 30% in international stocks, and then the rest would be bonds. But sometimes bonds for a younger investor is not risky enough. So that's something you kind of have to balance and weigh with yourself. Like if you're a riskier type of investor, you might do more in US stocks.
5:30 Speaker 02 Cause US stocks are probably, they have the greatest potential for upside, but they could also go down too. Same thing with international stocks, yeah.
5:39 Marina Mogilko? And where does crypto, real estate, everything else fall into like? How do you decide about those things? And like even individual stocks, cause Nvidia?
5:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know.
5:49 Marina Mogilko? That's like best investments ever.
5:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I think there's this, so we'll talk about how to build wealth. Because what I just kind of laid out for you in terms of the three fund portfolio is a very safe way to compound your wealth. But if you want to build wealth faster, typically you need to take a little more risk. And the more risk could involve individual stocks. It could involve you getting into real estate. It could go, it could be that you buy some crypto. But for the general person who doesn't really want to spend too much time investing, the portfolio I laid out earlier is perfect. Uh, you might want to add 5% in alternatives like crypto or real estate. You could do that.
6:26 Marina Mogilko? But then, so like, cause I'm thinking about myself, like what, what number do you reach? When you start thinking about something alternative? Like, okay, let's say, I don't know, a hundred K invested in the stock market. Is that the time to think about other things?
6:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a tough question. I think you can always think about it, but higher numbers better for thinking about other things because the way capital works, you know, if you get 10% on 100K, that's a lot more significant than 10% on $100. So as your numbers and your portfolio balance grows, you can maybe set aside a portion of your portfolio to take higher concentrated risks so that you could try to make more money.
7:06 Marina Mogilko? But you never start with it, right? You start with, ideally, you start with something that's-
7:10 Speaker 02 Ideally, you want to get your base up to at least $100,000 and then you kind of, from there, maybe you take small concentrated bets on things that you believe in. I think the danger of taking big swings when your portfolio isn't at $100,000 already is that you could, you could go to zero again. Or it could be really demoralizing. Let's say you, you get your portfolio up to 50,000 and you spend half of it and you put it into an individual stock that goes down 80%, then you're kind of right back where you started, maybe, maybe you lost a few years of progress and that can be really frustrating. So instead, what I like to see people do is get that momentum and keep that momentum going.
7:47 Marina Mogilko? Just invest in that. How often do you check your balance? And how do you do regular investing? What would be your advice? Is it like manually or you can automate it?
7:56 Speaker 02 You can automate it. So you can do something in your brokerage account or even your Roth IRA or IRA or 401K where you contribute a certain amount every interval. So typically every two weeks is good. Every month is good too, but that's called dollar cost averaging. You just want to always buy into the market typically.
8:14 Marina Mogilko? Is there a good day? I know for crypto, weekends are good, right?
8:17 Speaker 02 Uh, I don't think there's ever such thing as a good day. I think it doesn't really matter. As long as you're consistently investing, I think that that's more important.
8:24 Marina Mogilko? Does it buy into like, so you, aren't you telling like every second Monday of the month, you buy this, this and that? And every brokerage can do that?
8:33 Speaker 02 Most brokerages have that feature. Yeah. It's just called recurring investment.
8:36 Marina Mogilko? Can you recommend maybe two or three brokerage apps?
8:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, my favorite brokerages are probably Fidelity. That's like the biggest kind of well, most, one of the most well-capitalized brokerages in the United States. Um, another one I think that's very beginner friendly that got a lot of hate in 2021 was Robinhood, but they've made a lot of improvements since. You just have to kind of be careful there. It's a little more gamified.
8:59 Marina Mogilko? Do they have automated?
9:01 Speaker 02 They do have automated. Yeah, you can automate it. And then some other ones like Schwab is fine. M1 Finance is good too.
9:08 Speaker 02 In general, the bigger the, the brokerage, usually the better.
9:11 Marina Mogilko? So you mentioned those different accounts.
9:13 Speaker 02 Sure.
9:13 Marina Mogilko? You mentioned like brokerage.
9:14 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:15 Marina Mogilko? Like.
9:15 Speaker 02 Yep.
9:15 Marina Mogilko? General investment, 401K, Roth IRA. So if a person just starts investing. And they're aiming for like 10 years.
9:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:25 Marina Mogilko? Would you start a 401K or would you just put it in a brokerage account? Because 401K, you can only start taking out money when you're like 70 something, right?
9:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, I believe it's, uh, I think 401K. Sorry, I get, I get a lot of the, the accounts confused sometimes, but I'm pretty sure 401K, you can start to take contributions out or sorry, your earnings out at 59 and a half. But then they start requiring you to take money out around the age of 70 and a half. I think that's required minimum distributions.
9:55 Marina Mogilko? Because when we started 401K. And we started only two years ago. Because when I was talking to my husband, he's like, why would we just put money there? And like, we are 34, like 33, we're so active. Why don't we invest in business? Like, why would you invest in 401K? And I have my financial advisor was like, Marina, you don't understand. Compound interest without tax. That's a write-off for your business. So he's kind of making us contribute every year. But for me, psychology, again, I come from a country where we had so many turmoils, where our savings just disappeared. So what would be your general advice? Like, do you start with a general brokerage account? Or you go straight into tax savings strategies?
10:34 Speaker 02 That's a great question. I believe with your audience, which probably a lot of them are a non-US based, is my guess, you're gonna have a lot of skepticism when it comes to the 401K. That makes total sense. And sometimes it's better to take control of your own destiny and just like, take that money and go buy a house with it or buy a rental property with it. And you can tangibly see the money there. I get that too. The reason why the 401K in America is so good is that it's a forced savings mechanism. So it forces people to save that normally wouldn't save. If you're already a great saver, like let's say you save 50% of your income and you are a better active investor or you feel like you can do some business with it, maybe you do that instead.
11:16 Speaker 02 Uh, if you need the money in 10 years, like what you just said, then you probably. Probably wouldn't invest it in a 401k because you gotta take that money out eventually. And if you put it in a 401k, you're not gonna be able to take that money out.
11:28 Marina Mogilko? But you can borrow against your 401k.
11:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can borrow against it. There's some strategies, yeah. But I would say in general, most people, if they need the money before they retire, brokerage is fine. Yeah, you're gonna be taxed on it, but that's better than, let's say, paying penalties because you're withdrawing from your Roth.
11:44 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, because the balance is a great, like, 10% or plus tax. I feel like a lot of people who are watching also just moved to the US and they're like, starting to realize how complex everything is.
11:53 Speaker 02 Very complex. Now, the 401k is worth it if your employer gives you the match.
11:58 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
11:58 Speaker 02 Because that's just free money.
11:59 Marina Mogilko? And also if you have your own business, because that's a runoff. And what I realized, what my CPA told me, once you get a 401k distribution, it goes onto your W2. So if you're applying for a mortgage,
12:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
12:09 Marina Mogilko? that increases your W2 income, so it's good for mortgage.
12:12 Speaker 02 Oh, that's good to know.
12:13 Marina Mogilko? That was another key take.
12:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's great. That's awesome.
12:16 Marina Mogilko? Cool. Okay, so we talked about saving, et cetera. What about real estate? What about, like, do you rent? Do you rent or?
12:25 Speaker 02 I currently rent.
12:26 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
12:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, but in San Francisco, it's a lot cheaper to rent than to buy. So I live in San Francisco, the city.
12:31 Marina Mogilko? Is there a general rule? So you said in San Francisco, it's cheaper to rent? Like, how do you calculate that?
12:37 Speaker 02 Well, I look at how much I pay in rent and I look at the comparable amount that I would pay in mortgage and what type of house that would afford me. And for the same amount of rent, I would not be able to afford anything nice. It's just like, I get maybe like a one-bedroom condo and I live currently in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom.
12:56 Marina Mogilko? So you're not following the rule where you'll live under your means and?
13:00 Speaker 02 No, I'm definitely living under my means, for sure. Yeah.
13:03 Marina Mogilko? But not too low.
13:05 Speaker 02 But not too low. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I still need space for like my studio and I realize I just kind of like a nicer place to live, so yeah.
13:12 Marina Mogilko? But don't you have FOMO of like missing out on prices rising here?
13:17 Speaker 02 I do.
13:18 Marina Mogilko? Because they double every 10 years, right? Here in the Bay?
13:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, mostly not San Francisco condo market. That's kind of stayed flat.
13:26 Marina Mogilko? That's like a crazy market. It stayed flat. The prices are so low and nobody wants to.
13:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:32 Marina Mogilko? Cause you can't really rent it out.
13:33 Speaker 02 If I can afford something down here and pay, you know, put a good down payment on it, I would probably do that. So down here would be the peninsula.
13:41 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
13:41 Speaker 02 Uh, cause real estate tends to appreciate quite well down here.
13:44 Marina Mogilko? Yeah. And what I realized a lot of people who bought here, they pay twice as much in mortgage versus what we pay in rent. But they are, um, they have this upside when the property just, you know, gains a couple million.
13:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, especially in the Bay area where that's very, very common. I would say across the country. There are some cities where real estate hasn't appreciated in the last 10 years. And so that's what you kind of have to consider. Like where do you live? How does the appreciation look historically? Yeah.
14:11 Marina Mogilko? If it looks good historically, how?
14:14 Speaker 02 Might be a good idea. Yeah.
14:16 Marina Mogilko? Is it an indicator that it's really gonna continue growing?
14:22 Speaker 02 I mean, in, in the finance world, you always say.
14:24 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, cause it's not a predictor.
14:26 Speaker 02 Past performance is not a predictor of future results, but I mean.
14:29 Marina Mogilko? Cause I'm always worried like Hawaii, right? It's grown so crazy in the past 10 years. I'm like, is it gonna continue or not?
14:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think those are, those are tougher questions and those kind of come down to more personal.
14:40 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, yeah.
14:41 Speaker 02 Beliefs and decisions with their money. Yeah.
14:43 Marina Mogilko? Have you ever considered buying real estate?
14:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, definitely.
14:46 Marina Mogilko? Have you bought anything or what's, what's your plan here?
14:49 Speaker 02 No, I want to buy something probably the next year or two. So yeah, I'm still planning to, but mortgage rates right now are quite high. So waiting.
14:56 Marina Mogilko? Are you gonna buy something to live in or you're gonna rent it out?
15:00 Speaker 02 I would buy something to live in personally. Yeah. I think I thought about renting things out, but I don't really wanna be someone's landlord. I think that's what I've realized.
15:08 Marina Mogilko? Why not Airbnb? Like all the depreciation things?
15:12 Speaker 02 I think I feel like I could give, just make way more money.
15:15 Marina Mogilko? With the stock market?
15:17 Speaker 02 Or yeah, or just focusing on my main business. Yeah.
15:19 Marina Mogilko? Oh, interesting.
15:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:21 Marina Mogilko? But you can have someone manage it.
15:23 Speaker 02 I guess I could. Yeah.
15:24 Marina Mogilko? Okay. Okay. Let's talk about.
15:26 Speaker 02 I know you have an Airbnb, so we can talk about it later.
15:28 Marina Mogilko? I'm just trying to understand like other people's strategies. And I totally see how Airbnb didn't really do anything in terms of like income this year. It's just lost money and you know, it generated good revenue, but it still went to like covering the mortgage, et cetera.
15:42 Speaker 02 Did you spend a lot of time on it?
15:43 Marina Mogilko? No.
15:44 Speaker 02 Okay.
15:44 Marina Mogilko? Well, I spent some time. I went there filming and like we bought the furniture.
15:48 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:48 Marina Mogilko? And we're like, we had to change the air conditioner and we had to do the listing, the photo, like everything.
15:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:53 Marina Mogilko? But that was a cool experience for me.
15:55 Speaker 02 Okay. As long as you enjoyed it. Yeah, for sure.
15:57 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, yeah. But not as much as compared to like my, my business.
16:01 Speaker 02 Right.
16:02 Marina Mogilko? Let's talk about crypto.
16:03 Speaker 02 Let's do it. I like crypto.
16:04 Marina Mogilko? I am so like this year, I'm like, should I find me a course?
16:09 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
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17:09 Speaker 02 Maybe you should.
17:10 Marina Mogilko? Yeah. What do you think? Like what, what would be the, what would be advice here?
17:14 Speaker 02 Okay. My crypto advice from what I'm going to tell you right now is going to be very different from my YouTube channel. On my YouTube channel, my audience hates crypto. I've already tried to talk about Bitcoin. I've tried to talk about Ethereum. People are very anti Bitcoin Ethereum on the channel. And so I just tend to shy away from it on the channel. I think my personal opinion is that crypto is one of the best ways to kind of.
17:42 Speaker 02 Level out wealth in a way, it's almost like like a meritocracy. So if you're able to identify really great coins and get in them early, that's like, people actually do make a lot of money with that. However, for every one person that makes, let's say, a 20x or a 50x on a crypto coin, you have 99 people losing all their money. And I think that is incredibly difficult. That's incredibly difficult part about crypto. And with crypto, your greed gets unimaginable, unimaginably high. You get so greedy because you're like, oh, I have a 5x, I want a 10x. And then that's hard to manage emotionally.
18:22 Speaker 02 And if you're in a, if you're buying a lot of crypto, you have to watch it all day because it's 24/7, it never stops. So there are a lot of mental issues, not mental issues, I want to say, but it takes a toll on your mind if you're investing crypto. However, I have seen people turn a small amount of money into a large amount of money just by buying the right crypto coin. But even knowing the right.
18:43 Marina Mogilko? And retiring at 20 something.
18:46 Speaker 02 Exactly.
18:47 Marina Mogilko? So how do you, have you tried picking meme coins to invest in?
18:51 Speaker 02 Yes, I have.
18:52 Marina Mogilko? How was it?
18:53 Speaker 02 Some are great, some are bad.
18:54 Marina Mogilko? How?
18:55 Speaker 02 Net, I'm up.
18:56 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
18:57 Speaker 02 And I do.
18:58 Marina Mogilko? This year, you're doing it now?
18:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:59 Marina Mogilko? So how do you find them? Through friends chats?
19:02 Speaker 02 Typically through friends chats, yeah. I would say you have to be kind of plugged into a crypto community of some sort. You can do that by buying like, let's say, let's say you have the most expensive NFT, right? Like back in 2021, it was like a board eight, right? They might have like a little insider group on Discord where you can kind of trade, trade ideas with each other.
19:24 Speaker 02 The longer you're in the crypto space, the more you get to know the people on in crypto. Sometimes there's crypto Twitter, so you get to know some of the influencers. Maybe if you know some of the influencers, that's great. If you work in crypto, right?
19:36 Marina Mogilko? So it's mostly insider information?
19:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think there is some inside information, but there's also just like keeping a pulse of what's going on in the crypto markets. And you can even make money not being an insider, but you have to keep a pulse on what's going on all the time. And you have to be able to move fast and you have to be very objective and not get too emotionally like tied into it. That's what's, that's what's very hard. Because even if you're right, if you're emotionally too invested and let's say you stay in the coin for too long, you could lose all your gains, so.
20:06 Marina Mogilko? So you track every single day what's going on and if you see it going down, you just sell?
20:10 Speaker 02 Something like that. I mean, I only, I'm only in like four coins right now. But I used to be in like, if you're in ten to twenty, it's hard to track everything. But if you're just in four, then you just check every, you know, you just check the four.
20:22 Marina Mogilko? What is the platform that you're using? Or is it a different platform for every?
20:26 Speaker 02 I have Coinbase, and then I have a Solana wallet on Phantom, and then I have a MetaMask wallet for my Ethereum transactions.
20:33 Marina Mogilko? Okay.
20:34 Speaker 02 So those are decentralized exchanges.
20:34 Marina Mogilko? But all of your coins, yeah, I have MetaMask, I have Coinbase. But I remember when I was trying to play with meme coins in two thousand twenty-one, I had to get in so many exchanges, because
20:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:44 Marina Mogilko? they're all so different, different platforms, you know, they only launched on this exchange, and you're like, oh, I need to transfer money there and convert it into some weird coin to buy another weird coin.
20:55 Speaker 02 These days, it's a lot easier. Mostly, it's just on like, either, you're either on the Solana chain, or you're on, let's say Ethereum or Base, which is Coinbase.
21:03 Marina Mogilko? So Phantom for Solana, Coinbase?
21:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's not financial advice, but you know, if you're trying to get into it, that's what you would do, but it's very hard. I would say if you're completely new to crypto, you probably won't make money. You kind of have to have a good network of people that you already know, you kind of have to get into it a little bit, or maybe you buy into a community, something like that.
21:23 Marina Mogilko? Okay, let's, let's do a simple strategy then. Let's do Bitcoin. Uh, what would be your recommended percentage of the portfolio that goes into Bitcoin?
21:32 Speaker 02 Of crypto?
21:32 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, uh, no, uh, in general.
21:34 Speaker 02 Oh, um, if you believe in crypto for the long term, which Bitcoin is the best asset of all those, I'd probably put three to five percent of your portfolio in Bitcoin.
21:43 Marina Mogilko? Remember how it was one to two percent?
21:45 Speaker 02 It was?
21:46 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, like three or four years ago, I'd ask everyone, or it would be like one to two percent. Now, I think BlackRock created from like two percent to four percent in their portfolio, and like suddenly, my financial advisor is like, yeah, five percent. I'm like, wow, interesting.
21:58 Speaker 02 Yeah, five percent. I mean, five percent is not gonna kill you.
22:00 Marina Mogilko? Then it goes to ten, then it goes to, in fact, it's, it's taking over. It just, it's like, it's wild seeing this trend, and like people believing in crypto and then suddenly not believing, it's just such a...
22:10 Speaker 02 Well, I think this year was pretty monumental for Bitcoin in particular because of the ETF, and also a lot of these institutions adopting it, so I don't think Bitcoin's gonna go anywhere. Let's say in twenty years, um, there was kind of the threat of the quantum computer chip. Did you see that?
22:26 Marina Mogilko? No.
22:27 Speaker 02 The, the Google, Google released like a quantum chip like a couple of weeks ago, and, or maybe last week. And that kind of threatened Bitcoin because the whole idea was like...
22:37 Marina Mogilko? Oh, cuz it's take a lot of energy to.
22:39 Speaker 02 No, the idea is like the chip could just break Bitcoin's encryption really fast.
22:44 Marina Mogilko? Oh.
22:44 Speaker 02 But.
22:45 Marina Mogilko? It didn't?
22:46 Speaker 02 No, it's not gonna happen, not yet, at least. I think that was like a uh, a fleeting rumor or fleeting news. So that Bitcoin's price reacted a little bit, but then it just went back up.
22:59 Marina Mogilko? Okay, so the the strategy would be, okay, if it's five percent and you don't wanna get on those exchanges, you can just basically buy an ETF through whatever, like Fidelity, right?
23:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, you can get exposure through an ETF like Fidelity, yeah. Like Fidelity has their own ETF for Bitcoin and they back it up with Bitcoin, so they buy Bitcoin to back their ETF, yeah.
23:21 Marina Mogilko? That's great. And if you have, say, ten thousand dollars that you would put into crypto next year.
23:27 Speaker 02 Okay.
23:27 Marina Mogilko? How would you do it by utilizing dollar cost averaging? Is it like ten thousand dollars throughout a year?
23:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'd probably do, I'd probably do like ten thousand dollars across the year.
23:37 Marina Mogilko? Yeah.
23:38 Speaker 02 Cuz a year is a pretty good time. It's a longer time in crypto.
23:43 Marina Mogilko? For crypto, it looks like it's such a long time.
23:44 Speaker 02 It is a long time.
23:45 Marina Mogilko? I would say like for stock market, that sounds okay, but for crypto, you might like miss on all the.
23:50 Speaker 02 You might miss, but crypto could also go down seventy percent, you know, in the summer or something. And you might be able to get it cheaper. So, yeah, I'd say a year is pretty good.
23:59 Marina Mogilko? So for, will it apply to any amount of money that you have in mind for investing? Would a year be great for dollar cost averaging? Like if somebody saved up, they've been saving and they're like, okay, two thousand twenty five, I'm gonna do it, so a year.
24:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a crypto, yeah, a year is pretty good.
24:13 Marina Mogilko? Every two weeks throughout a year.
24:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, why don't you do, why don't you split up your ten thousand dollars divided by twenty four equal payments and do it every two weeks, or twenty six equal payments, or two weeks.
24:24 Marina Mogilko? And just ETF that tracks Bitcoin, because a lot of people talk about like Ethereum, that it has so much.
24:29 Speaker 02 That's, yeah, it depends on how deep you wanna get into crypto. I mean, if you're just doing Bitcoin, then ETF is fine.
24:34 Marina Mogilko? There are no ETFs for Ethereum, just Bitcoin.
24:36 Speaker 02 Uh, they're pending. I think they're, they're not fully out yet, but.
24:41 Marina Mogilko? Okay, so Bitcoin, it would be the easiest.
24:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, if you want to buy Ethereum, you have to go on Coinbase or some sort of exchange that's available in your country.
24:48 Marina Mogilko? Mm-hmm.
24:49 Speaker 02 And then buy, you know, buy it through there.
24:51 Marina Mogilko? Okay.
24:51 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:52 Marina Mogilko? All right, well, we talked about investing. These are like good decisions. What are the worst decisions people can make and do things with their money in two thousand twenty five?
25:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I really think it's like, think about the things that kill your wealth early on, like before you get to a hundred thousand dollars in net worth, or let's say a big milestone, like fifty thousand, if you kill your wealth. Shopping, doing dumb things, buying a new car you don't really need. Like, your, your case might be different. You might need a new car and you have the funds that you could afford a new car.
25:22 Marina Mogilko? You know, we spent like two hours yesterday with my husband debating if ten thousand dollars is worth saving, buying the new Model Y or the old Model Y. And I'm like, with the new, you get the service, you get the warranty and all of that. And I'm like, is it worth the headache? But I could invest ten K in Bitcoin. It's just so hard to make those decisions.
25:40 Speaker 02 Those decisions are harder the less money you have, right? Like, actually, they're easier the less money you have, which is like, if you don't have that much money, don't spend ten K on, on the new Model Y when you buy the old Model Y.
25:53 Marina Mogilko? How do you make those decisions? Do you come, come up with an Excel spreadsheet or, and like calculate the NPV?
26:00 Speaker 02 No, that's definitely harder to make that decision, like, off the bat with, with like, you kind of have to know your own personal situation. But your monthly payments or your monthly payment for transportation should not be more than ten to fifteen percent of your gross income. So all of a sudden, let's say you make fifty K a year. If your car payment is like eight hundred dollars a month, like, that's clearly a poor financial decision.
26:22 Marina Mogilko? And then there's the registration fee, which is...
26:24 Speaker 02 Exactly. So I think a lot of people spend too much money on cars. That's typically a wealth killer, especially early on in your wealth building journey. And in America, it's very common, right? That thing, everyone wants a fancy car. And then credit card debt, anything that's slowing down your wealth building. I think that before you get to a milestone number, you should just be as frugal as possible and just get there quicker. Because the quicker you get to that bigger number, the better that money will compound for you, let's say, invested.
26:50 Marina Mogilko? Do you ever sell? Because if you see the market is all time high, you're kind of tempted to sell and you're like, oh, let's sell, wait for another dip. Or use this um upside to just finance my lifestyle this year and maybe not work.
27:05 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I, okay, so my ideal holding period is typically forever. That's the best holding period, but sometimes like right now, all my cash is fully deployed into the market.
27:14 Marina Mogilko? Mm hmm.
27:15 Speaker 02 So I have like.
27:15 Marina Mogilko? All of your, what about your?
27:17 Speaker 02 I have my emergency fund and like my business bank accounts.
27:18 Marina Mogilko? Is it for business or just your personal?
27:20 Speaker 02 Both. I have both cash reserves for business and personal, but all my investing funds are deployed. Typically, I would like to see ten to fifteen percent of my cash in my portfolio. Like that means of all my funds in my portfolio, I'd like to have ten or fifteen percent in cash.
27:35 Marina Mogilko? Do you feel bad about that cash just in the account when the market is growing so fast?
27:40 Speaker 02 No, because, because what happens if there's a correction or something, something unexpected happens? Then I'll have some cash to buy that dip up.
27:47 Marina Mogilko? But that's in the high yield savings account or it's just a checking?
27:49 Speaker 02 That's just in my brokerage account. It's probably, I think it earns four point five percent in the money market.
27:54 Marina Mogilko? I was still, okay.
27:55 Speaker 02 But I want to have extra cash in my portfolio in case there's a dip or a big correction, or I can get some stocks for cheap if something bad happens. Um, right now I don't have that cash. It's all fully in the market, so I'd like to sell a little bit of my positions just to, just to replenish that cash pile going into twenty twenty five, because right now everything's all time highs. It's really, it's, it's kind of frothy, they call it, which means that it's frothing to the top, which is not quite a bubble, but it's like multiples are high right now.
28:27 Marina Mogilko? So are you gonna sell this year or next year?
28:29 Speaker 02 I would probably, if I sold, it would probably be before December thirty first.
28:32 Marina Mogilko? Mm hmm.
28:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:34 Marina Mogilko? Um, when you said you have this money in your brokerage account and it earns four point five percent, is it a standard thing that brokerage, brokerage accounts do?
28:43 Speaker 02 Typically, yeah, typically, if you're in the right brokerage, your money gets called swept into like a money market fund, which just means it's, it just sits in money market funds and those money market funds typically pay around four to four point five percent.
28:57 Marina Mogilko? So if I transfer, is that fidelity?
28:59 Speaker 02 That's, that's in fidelity, but I think Schwab probably does it too.
29:01 Marina Mogilko? So you just transfer your cash there and they automatically start doing that or?
29:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's not a high yield though, it's not a high yield account, it's a money market fund, which means that.
29:10 Marina Mogilko? You can take it out anytime.
29:11 Speaker 02 You can take it out anytime.
29:13 Marina Mogilko? And with high yield.
29:13 Speaker 02 But the rate is not guaranteed either, it fluctuates a lot too, yeah.
29:17 Marina Mogilko? But with those high yield savings accounts, sometimes they give you a period, a time period, like six months, and you can't take your money out before that. Or if you take, there is a penalty.
29:26 Speaker 02 That would be a certificate of deposit, yeah.
29:28 Marina Mogilko? CD.
29:29 Speaker 02 A CD, yeah.
29:30 Marina Mogilko? Wow, that's interesting. Ten to five percent cash.
29:32 Speaker 02 Ten to fifteen percent in cash in your portfolio would be nice. That's me. I'm a little more less risk on. And I'd like to have some cash or opportunities.
29:43 Marina Mogilko? So when you sell your stocks, it's only to replenish the cash?
29:47 Speaker 02 Yeah. Ideally, I just keep all that money in the investing portfolio forever. I haven't withdrawn from my investing portfolio in like ten years.
29:56 Marina Mogilko? Wow. How often do you make investments that are not part of your plan? So you have automated investments?
30:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
30:05 Marina Mogilko? But like, is there like a Monday every two months?
30:08 Speaker 02 No.
30:09 Marina Mogilko? When you sit or like?
30:09 Speaker 02 I'd say this year, maybe I've made four investments that weren't part of the original plan.
30:14 Marina Mogilko? Can you share?
30:14 Speaker 02 Yeah, I bought some Coinbase, bought some Nvidia, and I bought some Robinhood.
30:20 Marina Mogilko? I feel like everyone bought Nvidia.
30:22 Speaker 02 Coinbase, Nvidia, Robinhood, I bought all those. Like, I bought Robinhood in February and March, and then a lot in June and August. Coinbase, I bought some, I think, in February, and then Nvidia, I bought before an earnings report. I remember Nvidia was trading for like six sixty-five, and I was like, oh, I want to buy the earnings just for fun. And it like went up a lot, yeah. But, you know, six sixty-five pre-split, so now it's sixty-six.
30:46 Marina Mogilko? So it's basically triggered by news and?
30:49 Speaker 02 It's usually triggered by news, or I read like a quarterly report that I think is very bullish for the company. And then I try to do some financial analysis on like, what multiple is that company trading for? And do I think that's undervalued? So that was the case with Robinhood, like their user growth was off the charts. Everyone, they started innovating on all these products, right? They had like seven products coming out, including a credit card, which I thought would be really great for their business. Their average deposits were going up. They still had a long way to go before they reached total addressable market for assets under custody. Like Schwab has like nine trillion dollars under custody, and Robinhood had like two hundred billion, so like. Like there's a lot, there's like a way, a long way to go, which I thought was good.
31:31 Speaker 02 And I also thought the price of the stock was beaten down because of the negative sentiment that it had from GameStop. Like people just forgot about it. This was back in February. And I thought the multiples, I think, on it were pretty low. Like it was valued. I don't remember the exact multiple, but it was valued lower compared to comparable tech companies.
31:51 Marina Mogilko? Oh, that's a lot of analyzing.
31:53 Speaker 02 Yeah.
31:53 Marina Mogilko? Do you do that every day?
31:54 Speaker 02 No, that was only for that particular company. I was very interested in it. I was reading a lot about their financials and reading a lot of their quarterly reports to make sure that I want to invest in that company.
32:03 Marina Mogilko? And you do the same for your meme coin strategy, right?
32:06 Speaker 02 No.
32:07 Marina Mogilko? No?
32:07 Speaker 02 Meme coins are kinda.
32:09 Marina Mogilko? You see, you buy and that's it?
32:10 Speaker 02 Meme coins are like, the less you think about it is typically the better it does.
32:15 Marina Mogilko? Okay.
32:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, you can do some research on it, but it's not gonna have the same, like, you can't evaluate a meme coin like a stock. Like a stock has fundamentals that it has backing it versus a meme is like, how good's the meme?
32:26 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, yeah.
32:27 Speaker 02 It's not the same.
32:28 Marina Mogilko? When, uh, talking about like the individual stock investments, what is the percentage of your portfolio?
32:34 Speaker 02 For me, it's fifty fifty now. So it's fifty percent is individual stocks, fifty percent is ETFs. But that's only because all my individual stocks grew so much this year, like Nvidia is up like a crazy amount. Ideally, I'd like to have like sixty to seven percent ETFs and then the rest in individuals.
32:52 Speaker 02 But right now it's definitely higher individual than.
32:54 Marina Mogilko? So basically the strategy would just like, ideally, if you wanna follow your plan, you would sell some of the individual stocks to put it back and rebalancing?
33:02 Speaker 02 Or whenever I add money into my portfolio next.
33:05 Marina Mogilko? You're gonna buy ETFs.
33:07 Speaker 02 To bring the weight back up, yeah.
33:09 Marina Mogilko? Wow, so it looks like a lot of work for.
33:11 Speaker 02 It's a lot of work for, I would say, the, like, if you're working at like a corporate job, you just don't wanna worry about it, just do ETFs.
33:16 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, you just do the, the split that we talked about at the beginning. When does it make sense to hire someone to do that? Or does it?
33:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, no, no, it does. It definitely makes sense to hire someone to do it if you don't want to pay attention to it and you need more financial guidance than than most people like that. You don't want to do it yourself. And you don't feel like you even want to focus your time on it because I'm in it every day. So it's a little different for me. Like I like it. But if you don't like it, number one, and you probably have like a portfolio of. I'd say around a hundred K starts to make sense. Anything below that, they might charge you too much.
33:52 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, and they charge like one percent or?
33:54 Speaker 02 Typical financial advisors will charge you one percent of your of your portfolio size a year. Um, if you're lower than that, they might have just like a minimum fee, but even one percent is a lot. Because one percent will come eat into your compound growth over time. However, they can also offer you a lot more. Um. Advice. Than just investing. They can help you with estate planning, retirement planning. Uh, your kids' education, college planning, stuff like that. They can do a lot more.
34:23 Marina Mogilko? What's your general recommendation? Because I feel there are so many videos on YouTube where people like never ever. Hire someone because it compounds. You can do the same strategy just by yourself.
34:33 Speaker 02 My opinion is if.
34:37 Speaker 02 You need more than investing advice, you go to a financial advisor. But if you just want investing, you know.
34:44 Marina Mogilko? Just do yourself. Just do those splits.
34:46 Speaker 02 Just do a split or do an ETF. Yeah.
34:47 Marina Mogilko? Okay, I think my question that's gonna wrap this up will be, how do you stay sane when the market goes down?
34:55 Speaker 02 I would say I always like to think of what the stock market might look like in thirty years from now. And so you know, in thirty years from now, it's probably going to be a lot, a lot higher than it is right now.
35:05 Marina Mogilko? Is that what you say to yourself?
35:06 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:07 Marina Mogilko? When things go down?
35:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And you know, drawdowns of twenty to forty percent happen. It's like your portfolio could be, let's say your portfolio is at a hundred thousand dollars. It could go down to sixty thousand dollars in a year.
35:18 Marina Mogilko? And if we remember Great Depression, it could go to almost zero. But how do you? How, basically, it's like a conversation that you have with yourself.
35:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, you do.
35:27 Marina Mogilko? Because when COVID happened, everyone was like, that's pretty much like the Great Depression. Okay, we're gonna lose everything, like 2008. And it keeps happening more often than it used to.
35:38 Speaker 02 It's tough because I think this goes back to not needing the money, right? If you don't need the money and you can just leave it in the market and not touch it for a long time, then you're gonna be able to weather the.
35:49 Marina Mogilko? Then don't touch it.
35:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, you're gonna be weather those storms a lot easier. But like, let's say you needed the money next year and all of a sudden it's down forty percent. You might be like, alright, I just gotta sell because I don't want it to go down more. So that makes you more emotional. I think the longer time horizon you have, the less emotional you naturally are because you don't have to worry too much about it. Because you know in like thirty years, it'll be like during the 2008 financial crisis or let's say the COVID crash. If you told yourself in thirty years it will be a lot higher, you'd just leave your money in. And you didn't have to wait thirty years, you just had to wait a year and then it was a lot harder than it was, so.
36:24 Marina Mogilko? Same with crypto, right? When Bitcoin went down so much, people like selling off, panicking. And also, social media doesn't help to everyone.
36:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's the problem is that investing takes a long time and we live in an age where everything is instant. And you're overloaded with news and information and CNBC and people saying you should sell everything and.
36:50 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, panicking.
36:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, really, you should just invest and just like forget about it for like fifteen years and come back and go, oh, great.
36:58 Marina Mogilko? Yeah, that's the best.
36:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's what you should do, but most people can't do it. And so it's more fun to track the market because it's like something to do, you know? Something to talk about. It's like tracking your sports team.
37:08 Marina Mogilko? Exactly, yeah. Thank you so much.
37:10 Speaker 02 Oh, thank you for having me.
37:11 Marina Mogilko? I think it was so useful. This is gonna be my first like video of 2025.
37:15 Speaker 02 No way, this is it?
37:16 Marina Mogilko? I think so, yeah.
37:17 Speaker 02 Alright, sounds good.
37:17 Marina Mogilko? So people can start the year with the right mindset. You know, this year is the year for me to build my wealth, start building it. And from a first, coming from a person who's an immigrant and starting building her wealth in 2020, this year has been just incredible, like seeing that my investments can generate.
37:35 Speaker 02 That much income?
37:36 Marina Mogilko? Income that's compared to my active income? I'm like thirty-four. Can I retire at thirty-five, please?
37:43 Speaker 02 Cool.
37:43 Marina Mogilko? So, yeah, thank you so much, Humphries.
37:45 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
37:45 Marina Mogilko? Super useful. Please subscribe to Humphries' channel.
37:47 Speaker 02 Subscribe.
37:48 Marina Mogilko? He gives advice weekly or several times a week?
37:50 Speaker 02 Every week, there's a new video.
37:51 Marina Mogilko? Every week, yeah.
37:52 Speaker 02 So, put a link in the... Put a link below.
37:54 Marina Mogilko? Yes, thank you so much.
37:55 Speaker 02 All right, bye, guys.
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