Welcome everyone to the fourth edition of Bogle Heads on Investing. In today's episode we'll be speaking with Christine Benz of Morningstar. Christine is a certified financial planner and is the director of personal finance at Morningstar. Hello everyone, my name is Rick Ferry. I am the host of Bogle Heads on Investing. This podcast is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501C3 Corporation. Today our special guest is Christine Benz who holds a certified financial planner certificate and is the director of personal finance at Morningstar. Christine has been with Morningstar for over 25 years. She started as an analyst and an editor. She serves as the director of Morningstar's Mutual Fund Analysis and is the author of several books. So with no further ado let's get to Christine. Today we have with us Christine Benz who is a Bogle Heads favorite. I want to welcome you to our podcast Christine. Thank you for being on the show. Well Rick it's my pleasure and it's my pleasure to have gotten to know you through the great Bogle Heads organization. Great, thanks. I have a lot of questions for you today and I'm looking towards you to be my go-to person for what to do year end 2018. There's been a big tax law change that took place that affected a lot of things we do in 2018. The first thing I'd like you to do if you could is talk a little bit about the tax law changes, how it affects investors and then what should we be doing this year year end tax planning based on these tax law changes. Yeah, all good questions. There is a lot that is different about the tax laws for 2018 and beyond. The biggie I think probably affecting most investors is that many fewer of us will be itemizing our deductions than was the case in the past because we have a higher standard deduction. If you're a single taxpayer, single filer, your standard deduction is $12,000 for 2018. It's $24,000 for married couples filing jointly. That means that your itemized deductions may not exceed that standard deduction. It feels a little weird. If you've been in the habit of making charitable contributions, as my husband and I have over the years we've always got this file on our desk, we write a check or donate something to Goodwill, we put some supporting documentation in that file. Well, it's kind of weird knowing that our tax advisor has told us that we probably will be standard deduction people this year that we're not necessarily having to keep that paperwork. So that's a really big thing and a big change. You have heard it mainly in the context of charitable contributions. I think that's true because I've done the same thing. I've looked at my taxes for 2018 and I've said I'm going to be doing standard deduction. I know I have a small mortgage payment on my home. I make charitable contributions, but it's not going to add up to $24,000. My medical expenses because I'm a military retiree pretty much paid for. So I look at will I even get to $24,000 with the property tax on my home and such? And the answer is no. So I've stopped keeping track of charitable contributions as well. I go to Salvation Army with a box of things and they say to me, do you want to recede? And now I say no. I can't stop saying yes for some reason and I'm still keeping them. But I think it's just sort of I'm just so anchored on the ways of doing things. Another big thing related topic is that there's now this cap on state and local tax deductions, which includes the property tax. So if you were in the past in excess of $10,000 in all of those deductions, well, you could deduct them. Now there's a $10,000 cap on how much you can deduct in state and local taxes, including property taxes. So that's kind of a blow for folks like me in a state where we do have, or certainly in an urban area where we have very high property taxes, those will be capped at $10,000. So that'll put a lot more folks into that standard deduction camp as well. So aside from deductions, I mean, what other things should we be thinking about when it comes to year-end tax planning? Well, one thing I would point out before we leave this whole idea of deductions is seniors who are taking required minimum distributions from their IRAs have a nice way of still being able to get a tax benefit from charitable contributions. And that's by using what's called a qualified charitable deduction or QCD. And the basic idea there is that you send a portion of your required minimum distribution directly to the charity of your choice. And I always advise people to have their investment provider, whether it's Vanguard or Schwab or whatever, work directly with the charity of their choice or the charities. It doesn't need to be just one to enact this qualified charitable distribution. But the beauty of that strategy is that the amount that you steer to charity through this QCD, it doesn't affect your adjusted gross income. So it's as if you never took the income. And the beauty of lowering your adjusted gross income is that you are eligible for more credits and tax deductions than you otherwise would be.  So that's one point I would make on that front. Let me get some clarification on that because I've always been a little bit confused. So I haven't paid taxes on the money that's in an IRA. I would say I've got $500,000 in my IRA and I'm over the age of 59 and a half. By the way, do I have to be over the age of 59 and a half to do this? You have to be over the age of 70 and a half to do this. So you can start pulling your money from your IRA once you're post 59 and a half. But you have to be subject to required minimum distributions, which kick in at age 70 and a half to be able to take advantage of this QCD. Unfortunately, Rick, you've got to, I think you've got a little bit of time before you can take advantage of this maneuver. But folks who are subject to RMD can take advantage of it. So that's the key. That's the key I didn't understand. I have to be subject to the required minimum distribution. And then let's say instead of taking $50,000 out and paying taxes on the $50,000, I could have say $10,000 of that go directly to the charity. The charity would get $10,000. I would not have to pay taxes on that $10,000. Exactly right. And then I only have to take out $40,000. That's a great deal. That's right. It is a great deal. So it's something that people who are very charitably inclined and making huge contributions should take advantage of, as well as smaller donors. It's really a no-brainer. So it's a way to earn a tax win in this era where many fewer of us will be able to get a deduction from our charitable contributions, which is not to say you shouldn't be charitable, but just that you'll probably get less bang from your charitable contributions. One point I would make, though, is I've been hearing a lot about this concept of what's called charitable clumping or charitable clustering. And the basic idea is if you aren't able to take advantage of this qualified charitable distribution that you're too young, you can potentially aggregate your charitable contributions into a single year and deduct them in that year. So when you think that you will make a lot of charitable contributions, you will be over that standard deduction threshold. So that's an idea to consider rather than making a lot of smaller contributions, maybe save them for a single year when your itemized deductions will exceed that standard deduction. Or save them until you're 70-and-a-half. Right. Or you could use a donor-advised fund, too, for this purpose. So you can, and Vanguard offers donor-advised products. But the idea is that you could steer your charitable contributions into that donor-advised fund, maybe take advantage of this bunching strategy where you're making a sizable contribution in a single year. And the beauty of the donor-advised fund is that the money does not have to get doled out to charity all in one go. That you can actually take your time to distribute it over a period of years. Do your due diligence on the quality of the charities and so forth before you actually make the contributions. So those are very neat tools for people who are charitably inclined and not subject to RMBs. And as with all taxes, consult your tax advisor first. Absolutely. Could you talk a little bit about healthcare and how that works into this new 2018 tax law? Well, the biggie there is, again, it gets back to deductibility. So many fewer taxpayers will be deducting their healthcare costs because they will not be in excess. Their itemized deductions will not exceed the standard deduction. So there again, if people have some latitude to maybe delay procedures or speed up procedures, elective medical procedures and try to bunch them into a single year, perhaps that same year where they make sizable contributions and will be deducting doing itemized deductions, that can be a good strategy. I think that's another area to get some tax advice. And of course, it can be difficult to really time your healthcare costs. A lot of these things are out of our control. But if you do have procedures where you know you'll have high out-of-pocket costs and you can potentially aggregate them into a single year when you'll be an itemizer, that can be a good strategy. One other area that I'd like to talk about before we get into investing is the cash flow out of your portfolio. If you're retired and you're taking, or you need to take money from your portfolio, you've got IRAs, you've got personal accounts, you've got Roth accounts. Could you give us some guidance on how the tax law changes have affected that strategy? Well, I think the general rules of the road still hold up where when you think about tax-efficient withdrawals, sequencing, you generally want to think about spending taxable assets first because they have fewer long-term tax benefits associated with them, followed by tax-deferred accounts, and they have some tax benefits you want to hang on to them perhaps a little bit longer, followed by Roth IRA accounts, which you usually put in the save-to-later camp because they have the greatest tax benefits associated with them, and they're also the best assets for your heirs to inherit. So typically we would put them last in the withdrawal queue. And I think that that strategy generally still makes sense.  So I think that that general calculus still makes sense under the tax laws. There are a couple of neat things so that people can think about holding significant taxable accounts. So people who are in a temporarily or maybe permanently low tax bracket, for 2018, that's single filers who are earning less than $38,600, or married couples filing jointly who are earning less than $77,200. People in that tax range or below can actually take advantage of what's called tax gain harvesting. And this strategy basically entails that if you have these appreciated holdings on your books, if you have positions in your taxable accounts that have appreciated since purchase, you can sell them and even rebuy them the next day because there's no wash sale that applies to appreciated securities. You can sell them and essentially wash out the tax burden associated with those securities. So if for whatever reason taxes go up or if you are in a higher tax bracket in the future than you are today, you can wash out the tax burden associated with the securities. And this is the part that I forgot to mention. You're in the 0% bracket for long-term capital gains so you won't owe any taxes on having made that change. So that's a neat strategy to consider. Let's get into more on the investment side of this. One thing I want to talk about is the difficult year for active funds not only because the performance has not kept up with the indexes but also because active funds tend to distribute their embedded capital gains as they turn over their portfolio. So it appears that we're going to have a year where the funds lost money and people are going to have to pay taxes on distributions. It's a double whammy. I have been tracking these mutual fund capital gains distributions for us just because I think maybe no one else wanted to do it. But it's been really eye-opening to see that in a year like 2018 where not only have many active funds underperformed but many funds have losses or at least some funds have losses and yet we're seeing these huge capital gains distributions because we're seeing redemptions on active funds. So investors are fleeing active funds. That means that the managers are having to sell securities to pay off departing shareholders. That leaves a smaller base of shareholders who are holding the bag and left to pay taxes on the distributions. It's been kind of a terrible spiral for people in active funds where they have had to pay capital gains taxes for several years running including in 2018 where we've had kind of a volatile to lousy market year. So this does illustrate one of the issues with actively managed funds where you have higher turnover where you can see these big distributions come at a time that isn't especially opportune. It wasn't such a big deal in the year like 2017. I think it was great. I think many investors while they might not have loved paying taxes on the distributions they at least had strong returns to show for themselves but in 2018 it's kind of slim pickings on the return front and investors are going to be getting sacked with these huge capital gains bills. So let's explore this a little bit. You know we talk about this thing called asset location where you want to take your less taxable assets and put them in your personal account like municipal bonds. Right, and index funds. Right, exactly. And more taxable assets. The ones that you'll have to pay taxes on like corporate bonds into your retirement account. But now we can actually go a step further. If you have actively managed equity funds and you have index funds, index stock funds. You have a combination call it core and satellite or core and explorer whatever you want to call it. And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this but from a tax location perspective it seems better to put those actively managed funds, equity funds if you're going to have them in your IRA accounts and put your index funds in your taxable accounts. Does that make sense? Absolutely. That's such good advice Rick. And another related point I would make is you don't have to go out of your way to own tax inefficient funds in your tax deferred accounts. So just because you're getting a tax break doesn't mean that you need to own actively managed funds there. That if you like index funds you can just as easily own them in your tax deferred accounts and you're not really giving anything up. So I think that is really important concept asset location, what you're putting where. I would say individual stocks are another place to the extent that you own individual stocks taxable accounts are generally a good place to house them because you have more control over capital gains realization than you do with a fund where you get that distribution whether you have sold a share or not. In the case of individual stocks the only way you are going to trigger some sort of a capital gain situation is if you yourself sell. Let's talk about that too because now we can differentiate the difference between using mutual funds, open to mutual funds and exchange traded funds. Exchange traded funds are more like an individual stock where you don't get taxed until you sell the fund because ETFs given the way that they are managed and they're created and redeemed there's very little if no capital gain distributions from an exchange traded fund. Now there's a lot of caveats around that but I'm talking about seasoned ETFs versus open to mutual funds where you could have capital gain distributions and that even includes index funds as well. It does except I would say that in my opinion Vanguard's index funds are a notable exception and that the ETFs are share classes of the index funds. So in practice Vanguard's equity index funds have been quite tax efficient alongside their ETF counterparts but that's an exception. Generally speaking you're right I think that ETFs are a better mousetrap from the standpoint of limiting taxable capital gains than our index mutual funds. So if you really want to solve for this capital gains distribution situation the best way to do it is to gravitate toward some type of an ETF. A key caveat I would make is that the income distributions, dividend distributions are not solved for with the ETF format that you still will owe taxes on those income distributions as they're made. So it's not something that you can necessarily get away from entirely by being inside the ETF wrapper. And by the income distributions you mean dividends and interest income that comes off of the securities that are in the account as opposed to capital gains that are created within a mutual fund. That's right the ETF doesn't provide you any shield against receiving those distributions and knowing taxes on them. So even if you're reinvesting them it doesn't matter you'll still owe taxes if you own the holding within a taxable account. Christine I want to shift now to portfolio management because you have a rather unique view on portfolio management strategy and it's called the bucket approach and you've written a lot about this. First of all could you explain what it is and then we can get into some questions about it. Sure I always take pains first of all to say that I did not invent this idea. The person who was most influential to me in terms of wanting to work on this bucket strategy and talk about it to investors was Harold Owensky the financial planner in Coral Gables. And Harold told me probably 12 years ago that this bucket strategy was one that he used with his clients and basically the idea was he would manage a long-term portfolio for them and then he would bolt on this cash bucket which would encompass maybe one to two years worth of the client's living expenses and that money would not be invested in the market but would be held separately. And the idea even though perhaps it did not deliver an absolutely optimized portfolio result because the portfolio wasn't fully invested but the basic idea was that the client knowing that they had a couple of years worth of their living expenses side to side in cash kept them on board with the long-term plan because they knew that disruptions in their cash flows wouldn't cause them to stop being able to go out to dinner or they'd have to really cut back on their food budget or whatever the things that qualified or constituted quality of life for them they knew that those assets were safeguarded. So that was the simple bucket concept that Harold talked to me about and I've expanded on it in my work where I've talked about using a three-bucket strategy where you have that cash bucket and there you're just thinking about well how much in portfolio withdrawals will I need over the next couple of years to maintain my standard of living and then stepping out from there on the risk spectrum. So for the next say eight years worth of portfolio withdrawals well there you're taking more risk with the money with the expectation that you'll earn a higher return and you are stepping out on the risk into short and intermediate term high quality bonds mainly with that portion of the portfolio. So the idea is that you have enough set aside with that cash bucket plus the second bucket which is primarily high quality short and intermediate term bonds to counter Armageddon with the equity bond so stocks could go down and stay down for a good long time for as long as a decade and yet you'd still have more or less stabilized your standard of living through that front end of your portfolio being in high quality instruments and cash which is not to say that people will necessarily spend from their portfolios and precisely that sequence so you won't necessarily blow through your cash holdings and then move on to the short and intermediate term bonds but in a worst case scenario where you encounter that terrible equity market environment right when you embark on retirement that's what I think this bucket strategy nicely solves for. Let me throw out an example. So I've got two million dollars and I need to withdraw from that fifty thousand dollars a year to live the lifestyle I want to in retirement add that to Social Security and maybe some pension money and that gives me enough so I pay my bills and I can live the lifestyle I want. I would put say a hundred thousand dollars in a money market fund or maybe a CD or something very secure, very safe and that is my two years worth of living expenses that is set aside. In addition to that I would put another eight years of money or four hundred thousand dollars into intermediate term bond fund that good quality, high quality intermediate term bond fund so that's another eight years worth of money that's there so that's a total of ten years worth of money. And then I would be free if you think about it that way that's only five hundred thousand dollars. So I could, using the bucket approach justify putting the other one point five million or seventy five percent of my assets into equities, correct? Exactly right. And that's what I love about this strategy Rick is that I think it helps people take something like asset allocation which frankly I think can be incredibly black boxy and it helps them back into well what is the sane asset allocation given my spending from my portfolio and so in the case that you just discussed where you've got someone who's using quite a modest withdrawal rate, the net effect of that is that the portfolio is quite aggressively positioned so a big related caveat is is that person going to be reasonably comfortable with the gyrations in the long-term portfolio and the equity piece of the portfolio so even knowing that the money having that having ten years worth of portfolio withdrawal set aside may not provide all the peace of mind that everyone needs to be comfortable with such an aggressive asset allocation in retirement but I like it in that it does help people get in the right ballpark of what their asset allocation should look like in retirement and the other key thing I like about it is that behaviorally I think it makes sense so you kind of see the light bulb go off with people that if you have a ten-year runway of relatively safe investments to spend from you should be able to put up with market volatility like we've had so far in 2018 or even worse so it should help you stay in your seat with whatever asset allocation mix you've decided makes sense for you. And this whole idea ignores the income that's actually coming in from that two million dollars. I've got the hundred thousand dollars in CDs which might be yielding maybe three thousand dollars in income at three percent then I've got intermediate term bonds that's let's say I get four percent off of that and that would be on four hundred thousand that would be another sixteen thousand dollars almost twenty thousand right there and then I've got one point five million dollars in equity which is yielding two percent in dividends though that's another thirty thousand and pretty much my fifty thousand dollars a year is coming in from cash flow from the portfolio. Well that's such a good point that this bucket one the idea is that you're spending from it as the years goes by so you've got to find a way to refill it and I love the idea of people doing exactly what you're talking about where that bucket one, the cash bucket is being refilled throughout the year from these income and dividend distributions as they occur and then say if there's an additional need above and beyond what's organically being generated through these income distributions and perhaps you can do some rebalancing.  You need to have a strategy in place for keeping this whole thing up and running it won't manage itself but the income distributions for most retirees get them at least halfway or maybe even more to whatever withdrawal they're seeking from their portfolio. Are you physically setting up three separate accounts? How does that work? I don't think you need to I think you could easily just hold a single account but it does get more complicated because most of us are bringing necessarily multiple accounts into retirement, right? So we might have Roth accounts, we might have our company retirement plan assets which might be all traditional tax deferred, we might also have a taxable account. So it's not quite as simple as it seems at first blush when we talk about this three bucket system because you are sort of overlaying the bucket strategy over whatever accounts that you have to maintain because of your tax situation. It gets a little more complex but I don't think you need to set up three separate accounts for each bucket I think that that's probably unnecessarily cumbersome. I like the word you used in overlay because to me that's a great way of presenting it because you've got all this stuff underneath you've got Roth accounts, IRA accounts 401k, maybe rollover IRAs traditional IRAs, you've got trust account, you've got all this stuff, all these different accounts. If you've got a married couple you might have all of that stuff times too so it's not as simple as just three buckets unfortunately. Oh and then the asset location portion of it these types of securities go better in these accounts and those types of securities go better in those accounts. So you've got all this stuff and to be able to put in a simple overlay over the top of it where it using the bucket approach and saying really this is what you've got from a very simple standpoint you've got three buckets, you've got this one, this one and this one, yes within the buckets there are things everywhere within each bucket perhaps but really this is what you've got one, two, three. I think that would be very comforting for a lot of people. I think it is and another point I would make on this topic is from a practical many of us are coming into retirement with most of our assets in traditional tax deferred accounts. And so by the time we hit 70 and a half and we're subject to required minimum distributions it's a good bet that those withdrawals that we have to take from that account are going to meet most of our living expenses. So I think for most people if they want to think about enacting a bucket strategy concentrating on those traditional tax deferred accounts is a good place to do it because by the time you hit 70 and a half most of your withdrawals will probably be coming from those accounts anyway. Very good information. I'm going to ask a question here about hiring an advisor to do this for you. What are your views on hiring an advisor to do this? The more I focus on retirement planning the more I am convinced that this is an area where most investors would benefit from some element of professional advice. So as much as I try to write about retirement planning concepts and do it in a straightforward and easy to digest way there are just so many moving parts to all of this. It also requires a certain amount of comfort with tax matters. So I do think that most people would benefit from at least some element of advice. I would say for the super bull through the Boglehead super users maybe it's just a check on their plan with a good hourly certified financial planner where you just kind of say, well here are the assumptions I'm making, here's the withdrawal rate I'm looking at. Just get another set of eyes on your plan and another advantage of hooking up with someone like that is that you have someone who can serve as kind of a receptacle for all of your information. So if you have a backup source for what accounts you have if something should happen you've got sort of a backup plan in place. So I think that that is just sort of a baseline type of advice that I think almost anyone embarking on retirement should consider if someone feels like they need more hand holding and more ongoing advice maybe they have something really complicated going on perhaps a family business that perhaps paying someone in a different way where you're paying ongoing advice either through some type of retainer fee or a fee that is based on your assets under management that might be money well spent so it's very individual dependent but I do think that most people would benefit from some type of advice and I would use myself as an example there are a couple of areas where my husband and I just felt like we needed a little extra help one was in a tax issue and the other was in relation to long-term care insurance whether we should buy it whether we had assets to support ourselves for long-term care whether we needed the insurance so we sought out an hourly advisor this past summer and it was a tremendously beneficial relationship it was not cheap I will say that and writing the check for services definitely something that you feel viscerally when you write the check for that advisor but for us it was money well spent and I think many individuals could benefit from some type of advice I also think it's crucial to distinguish between whether you're looking for financial planning guidance or whether you want investment advice a lot of people I think embark on some sort of a quest for advice without really being clear about where their need is so I think that introspection sort of stepping back and saying where are the areas where I'm super comfortable where are the areas where I'm less comfortable I think that's a necessary step too I've used financial planners and I've used tax planners personally as well I don't have knowledge about the various healthcare plans before I went on the military tricare system I did I had to buy my own insurance so I use the services of a financial planner to help me fair it out what's available and what's not available same thing with tax planning I pay a tax consultant to help me with my taxes above and beyond doing my taxes so we the people in the investment industry or in the financial services industry use a lot of the same people that we're recommending people out there use right you definitely want your portfolio manager to be conversant in tax matters and planning matters but it's very rare to find someone who does all of those things so I think it's important to identify where your potential issues are and make sure you're seeking out the right type of advice. Christine I'm going to, Christine I put a post up on Bogleheads.org that I was going to be speaking with you and I asked people for their input if they had questions for you and I got a number of responses and I'm going to go over some of those questions now and some of them are what we talked about already and maybe you can elaborate on them and others are new so the first question I had was about aging parents and there are those of us who are dealing with our aging parents or becoming aging parents ourselves what specific financial advice can you offer people who have aging parents or they're becoming aging parents to tell you I'm right there in the middle of this right now with my parents my mother is in her late 80s and my father is in his early 90s and we're right in the middle of that what words of wisdom can you give us about aging parents? Yeah this is something I've talked about at the Bogleheads conference I was the youngest of six girls and actually always loved having older parents because they were so battle tested they really had seen it all and they were very laid back fun parents and great friends I could not have adored them more and I had the great good fortune of living very close by and seeing them through their last years my dad passed away in 2014 and my mom in 2016 and so there's so many different dimensions of caring for aging parents there's just a hands on dimension for some of us families first responders where we're doing kind of basic blocking and tackling for the second household in addition to our own where we're making sure that the grocery shopping gets done and that our parents should still be driving cars and all of that kind of stuff and then there's the whole aspect of watching their finances the story I sometimes tell is of my own mom and dad who I think had been advised to not purchase long term care insurance and ultimately they didn't run out of money but they did need long term care toward the end of their lives where my dad developed dementia and had in-home caregivers for several years and then we ultimately moved him to a facility for care but in the meantime my mom had more physical ailments and she needed full-time in-home caregivers so for a period of time we actually had the two situations going where we were paying for the care and the facility as well as paying for the 24-hour caregivers at home from my mom and as you can imagine that gets very costly in our hurry so I guess one thing I gleaned from that is when you hear of sort of these one size fits all asset thresholds that if you have $2 million you don't need to worry about self-funding long term care or you don't have to worry about purchasing insurance for long term care I think that's an open question it depends on how much you're spending from your portfolio from when you're well it depends on variables like the ones I just discussed where if you're part of a married couple both of whom need long-term care that that can be very costly as well so helping parents oversee their finances later in life is a challenge if you don't feel like you're someone who's watching your parents trying to help you don't feel like you can give that the hands-on attention that it needs helping them identify a financial advisor who can work with them I think is a great service that you can provide as an adult child of aging parents I often speak to groups of people who love overseeing their portfolios they're really into their investments it's a hobby for them and oftentimes they're the main person in their household who's interested in this particular hobby they've got a spouse perhaps who isn't at all interested so I always tell people that they need to develop some sort of backup plan in case they can't manage their money themselves I always think about how I was my dad's sort of de facto backup plan because he and I had always talked about investments he was the person who got me interested in investments in the first place and I was there to see his investments I was on all of his accounts and could watch what was going on but if you don't have an adult child or a spouse who's particularly interested in financial matters I think having a financial advisor is particularly especially appropriate in that situation as well let me speak to that because I've been an advisor for 30 years that relationship with the advisor has to be solidified has to take place before there's an issue where the person who is managing the portfolio can't manage it anymore or isn't around to manage it anymore the relationship with the advisor has to already be in place and I'll tell you why I have had countless number of people come up to me and say to me if something happens to me my spouse is going to call you well I always say to a lot of people before you leave the room today you should come up and say that to me because everyone who has ever said that to me no one has ever called me there is no relationship there so even though something happened to a lot of these people over the last 30 years their spouse or their children are not going to call somebody they don't know somebody where there's not already relationship there has to already be a relationship established or they're not going to call so even though there's a lot of good intentions that you pick out the advisor that you want your spouse or your children to work with when you're gone if that relationship isn't already in place it's not going to happen you made that point at a Bogleheads conference and I have repeated it the importance of solidifying that relationship if you selected your spouse to who's going to handle things when you're gone we'll go ahead and make that introduction make sure that your spouse has a comfort level with that person because you're exactly right and oftentimes the surviving spouse who's not that into financial management might meet someone in the interim someone will show up or is recommended by another person that he or she knows and maybe it's a person who has great soft skills great on the investment front for whatever reason and that that relationship will get solidified before the one the intended one will so I think that's such an important point because oftentimes the person who isn't particularly investment savvy will respond to softer skills so the person has to be kind of the complete package or at least know that you have a comfort level with them I'm going to jump to another topic I'm going to lump three different questions from Bogleheads together and has to do with active management you appear to be an advocate for mixing active and passive funds together could you elaborate on why you like both active and passive and or maybe one or the other maybe you like all active because I've noticed you have talked about that a lot of your a lot of what you write is about active management so if you could get into is Christine an active believer a passive believer or are you down the middle yeah good question I think it depends on the investor I would if I had to put myself into one of those three camps I would probably say down the middle certainly the data are compelling for index funds where we look at our active passive barometer that my colleague Ben Johnson and his fellow passive strategies researchers put together every quarter certainly the case is very compelling for index funds outperforming the average active fund but I will say that I have some active funds in my portfolio I also have passive funds the reason I have a comfort with active funds is that I think I'm a pretty good selector of active funds all of the active funds that I've owned I've owned for many many years so I think I'm good at choosing them and I think I'm also good at staying on board through their inevitable performance weakness so I do think that if someone wants to own active funds they need to have that A understanding of the strategy and B understanding that there will be periods when an active fund underperforms but a key point I would make about active funds is all of the data we have about active fund performance points to low cost being very very important so to the extent that you have active funds in your portfolio you want them to be good and cheap as well so you'd want to focus on say the cheapest quartile subset of active funds to give your fund a fighting shot at outperforming but I don't think that it's something that investors necessarily if they are dogmatic about it about having only index funds that's absolutely fine and I think that that's certainly a great tax efficient way to build a portfolio but I'm not disturbed if investors want to have a component of active funds in their portfolios as well. Low cost is the key point I would make on that front. A couple more questions with the time we have left and these have to do with your job over at Morningstar. One of the mogul heads was interested to know about all of the interviews that you gave or not gave but actually you interviewed people like me. You've interviewed me several times. Yeah. And a lot of other folks they wanted to know in your interviewing experience what has been some of your favorite interviews and what have been some of your not so favorite interviews and if it's me then don't say the name but if it's me. Could you just asking about interviewing and your favorite interviews and your most challenging interviews over the years because you've done so many. Oh gosh that's a good question. Well certainly my annual sit down with Jack Bogle rates as one of the highlights of every year for me and one of the highlights of my career is just feeling like I've gotten to know Jack a little bit and I love interviewing him. He's very much on message as everyone would not be surprised to hear he tends to be quite consistent in terms of his thinking but I just find his sober thoughts on the market his honest take on the industry to be just so refreshing. I think of him as the conscience of the financial services industry. So that's been a consistent highlight for me in terms of things that haven't gone so well. One that ultimately did go well but was a little bit stressful was I was interviewing the author Michael Lewis at our investment conference a couple of years ago and my colleagues know me as the Michael Lewis superfan so when I heard that we had hired Michael Lewis to appear at the conference I think they felt sheepish about asking anyone else to do the interview with him it had to be me. So I had been preparing for this interview for a long time I get out of the shower and turn on a Michael Lewis podcast it was just like a couple of months leading up to nonstop Michael Lewis. So I had this short list of questions that I had written on a piece of paper and he and I were getting mic'd up and set to go on the stage and I think there were well over a thousand people in the audience and I walked out and I had something in front of me that was not my list of questions it was I don't know what it was it was a grocery list or something like that and I looked down and thankfully I had spent enough time prepping for this that it worked out fine but it was just a moment that will live forever in my memory I would say a consistent group of people who are tough to interview our college professors not all of them some of them are great I got to interview Richard Taylor once Nobel Laureate now and he was absolutely linear and on message and just a wonderful person to talk to but sometimes college professors I think are used to not being in that format and so used to having a lot of time to ramble and they tend just to not lend themselves super well to video interviews kind of those seven to ten minute videos that we do from Morningstar.com so I would put the whole category of college professors into my less successful video interviews anyway I would agree listening to some of those interviews that Nobel Laureates interview and some of them are very good and some of them should just stick to writing yeah right okay one last question have one Boglehead who is interested through because of you and because of your work and a lot of the things that you've done it has interviewed interested now in getting into the financial planning field and switching careers and helping people like you've helped so many people could you give him some words of advice yeah I think it's a great field I don't work with clients in a hands-on one-on-one way but I love the idea of you know helping people in that fashion and I do think that it's a field that affords a lot of flexibility to go in many different directions one sort of blanket piece of advice is to check out Michael Kitzes blog K-I-T-C-E-S his nerd dive view blog he's written a lot of stuff about specializing in growing careers in the planning industry and I do believe based on some of his writing that coming into the field with some sort of a specialty I think can be incredibly powerful so trying to think hard about what subsets of investors she would most like to help I've latched on to pre retirees and pre retirees is a key area of interest for me simply because I recognize that people at that life stage really need the help they're so receptive to getting advice and I think the experience of helping my parents through their last years sort of crystallized my interest in working on that topic and with people at that life stage but I think it's helpful to think about what segment of the population do I want to work with do I want to help my fellow young millennials who are just starting careers sort out their financial priorities do I want to work with a specific maybe occupation where perhaps that was the field that I worked in and I'm transitioning from so I want to help that particular population think that specialization can be very important in terms of trying to build your brand and also just trying to home in on what you're going to pay attention to and what you're going to tune out I think that that's one thing since I focused more on planning and retirement planning there's a whole part of the Wall Street Journal that I really don't spend much time with anymore so the whole area of corporate actions and what's going on at the management at XY and Z company I might be interested personally but it doesn't it's not must read for me in terms of things that I need to stay up on on my work so I think that focusing can also be helpful from that standpoint what about the person who is changing jobs they might have been an engineer or dentist even and now as a second career they want to become a financial planner what advice would you give to them I think the key thing is to find out what you need to do to get the right credentials and also make sure that you are hooking up with the good guys in the industry because I think you might find that it's easiest to get a job with a firm where in hindsight after you've worked there for a couple of years you don't love the business model you might not think it's serving consumers particularly well and Rick I know that was kind of your personal experience your own trajectory but I think it's important to do your due diligence at the outset on what sort of business model do I want to align myself with do I want to work in a commission based firm or do I want to be in a fee only firm that more directly aligns my incentives with those of the people I'm trying to serve so I think doing your homework on that front can be really important before you make the leap out of your industry and the other thing I would make before we leave the topic of credentialing is the CFP the certified financial planner program is extraordinarily flexible in terms of allowing you to do self-study so you should be able to work in the CFP program alongside your regular work before you make the leap into the position and into the career Christine you've been very helpful thank you so much for this interview wish you a Merry Christmas a happy holiday whichever you choose and thank you so much Rick happy holidays to you thank you so much for including me and all the best to you and your family in 2019 thank you this concludes the fourth episode of bogelheads on investing we hope that you are enjoying these podcasts and are able to visit bogelheads.org and pass the word help other folks as well


BitMonkey, how are you doing? Hope you're doing well. Gang, should we do a comic book haul? Let's do a comic book haul. I have no spreadsheet. I didn't make a spreadsheet or anything. It's two lots I bought from the same seller. I've never bought from this seller before, okay? And... He didn't tighten up the box, the comics in there. So the comics have been banging around on their way to me. I'm not happy about that, but we'll crack them open to see what... How they are. Crack! How are you doing? Thought I smelled something. Pulpy comic goodness. Pulpy comic goodness. You're gonna love one of the lots in this. You're gonna love one of the lots in this. Oh my God, the cats are going crazy. The treats must have had a little bit of crack in them. Cold shower or for psycho mask? No, thanks. I like my warm showers, man. What's in the box? What's in the box? Let's take a look. Do you have any Alan Moore comics? Indeed. Psy night for dinner indeed. I got Alan Moore comics. I got some of the original Alan Moore swamp things. And I got the first appearance of John Constantine, the first cameo and the first appearance. I got Alan Moore. I got Watchman, V for Vendetta. I got Alan Moore. You gotta have Alan Moore. You gotta have Alan Moore. And some of the newer stuff as well. Imagine there's a dead squirrel in that box and she's showing up on the scale. It'll make for a great live stream.  You know what? They're not really into catnip sleepy waves. And gang, before we crack this open, don't forget. Free Assange, Free Assange, Free Assange. Julian Assange is a publisher and journalist that has been crucified for trying to bring transparency and accountability of capitalist power to humanity. For more information, see wikileast.org, defend.wikileast.org and our Julian Assange and Wikileast playlist on SensorTube. Somebody just opened the box. I'm making the OCD. Open the window. Ashlose the squirrel. Craig agreed. You got to have some Alan Moore in your collection. Indeed, he chose Lord of Iron. How are you doing? Watchman TV series is off my list now. Nice. It was a good series, man. Heard it's a super political, you know what? It was a good, no, no, no, watch it. It's pretty good, man. Elder God, it's a good series. Watch it. No, no, no, no. Don't get turned off because of the left thing. It's a really good series. Let's crack it open this way. I got to tell you what these, how much these comics cost to me. There's two lots in here. Put them in bubble wrap. But then, like, why, why would anybody do this? Like, it's a no-brainer. Pack them in tightly. Like just put paper in there. Look at this. There's nothing. Like it's a loose, right? Like they've been banging around on their way here. The guy seemed like a really nice guy. He's a really nice guy. But seriously, you got to tighten the stuff up. This is what he put in there. This.  What? That is the most r-thing I've ever seen. That is insane. Why would you do that? That's crazy. That's crazy. Hey, Chihou and Chad. The watchman said, also, she said yes. She said yes. Lord of Irons. Oh, look at the kitty cat. Lord of Irons. She said yes, you're proposed. Yeah. The watchman is incredible.  White root. I like the movie by Snyder more. A watchman movie was amazing. Okay, Chihou and Crack. Congratulations, by the way. Lord of Irons. When's the, when is the, what is it? Time to knock? Greetings, Dr. P. How are you doing? He probably was Russian. Matt, I don't know. You don't ship comic books, anything in a box that's banging around. Why? Like it takes, like he took enough care to pack them up like this, right? Why wouldn't you just put paper? Like something just to tighten it up, right? It's a no brainer. I don't think I'll be buying from this guy again. Okay. Hopefully I can really leave him a positive comment. But I will send him an email saying, look, Matt, come on. You gotta, you gotta pack him in tightly. M.T., how do the bookshelves behind you not collapse under the weight of, of comic? Well, the graphic novels, and I built the bookshelf. So I made sure it was tight, right? I made sure it was a good bookshelf, solid bookshelf, right? So what you see behind me, I put together. I mean, if you've seen the long version of it. So I knew what it was gonna put in there and I built it accordingly, right? What make are they? You mean the wood? It's just a two by, two by eights I bought and I put it together, right? It's not newspaper, it just put bubble wrap, paper, anything. It makes no sense to me. They're similar, a smaller box, smaller box, but just put it in a smaller box. That's it. Why would you do that? Crazy. Okay, let me tell you about, but the first lot or the second lot, I guess. Now I bought this lot because, because I bought the other set first and it was $25 shipping with the other set and I looked at this stuff and I wanted to include something else to distribute the cost of the shipping. So, you know, I grabbed this lot and I'm happy to get it. It was a fair price. It was like going price, right? Have you received damage comics? Yeah, for sure I've received damage comics before. Unfortunate, not often, but it's unfortunate when it happens. What's the tip on winning eBay auctions? Be patient, be patient. I always lose a bit higher if you always lose a bit higher. I want to start collecting something like you, but most stuff is digital now. Ah, yeah, I don't go for digital. I don't do digital collectibles, not even crypto collectibles, right? Crack, I'm thinking of doing a custom book case as well, Chichou. I should message you, friend. Brother, two by eights, two by eights get little brackets, the brackets that go like this, just that L-shaped, right? You screw them in and make sure you're against the wall and lock it in. I just go overboard, right? Lock it in. I know I'm putting books in there. It's going to be heavy. And I just do that. I take my time. I put out music. I enjoy it. I appreciate it. I build custom. I make enough room for the switches. I have to switch is there and I change up the heights and I'll make them all the same height because certain books are taller than other ones, right? So I change up the heights. That's the way I go about it. Let's find out how are you doing? I always enjoy sorting by ending sooner. Five seconds left. It's a fun game. Yeah, and bit last second. There's some experts out there that I'll be at. I think they're running programs to do it. It's a truly dream to have a comic shelf like that. I'm planning to do one in the future. Cool, cool, cool. Sorry, I don't know English. I'm from Latin America. Salutes, this Mexico, salutations from Canada to our Mexican brothers and sisters. Okay, let me show you what we got in this one. This lot, the shipping was free on this one, but basically $25 shipping for everything. This lot was incredible Hulk. Okay, it cost $40 Canadian, which is, I don't know what it is, US. Right now it'd be $32 US, okay? So this is the lot we got. We got incredible Hulk number one to nine by Jason Aaron. Number one is a second print. Hulk number one and two by Mark Wade. Marvel Knights Hulk number one and totally awesome Hulk number one to six for $32 US. Hulk out. Let me show you this. This is the second print of the incredible Hulk by Jason Aaron, yeah, by Jason Aaron. And Jason Aaron is one of the top comic book writers right now to layer on this. The comics don't seem to be damaged. It's the other lot that I'm more concerned about. Incredible Hulk number two, Jason Aaron. Cool shark cover, rawr. Chichoy ASMR working. I thought about doing a couple of other shells but I'm holding off right now. This is a beautiful cover. Incredible Hulk number three. I haven't read this one. Nice cover, really. The covers are these are really nice. This isn't, Jason Aaron is great. Yeah, crack. Like Jason Aaron is phenomenal writer. Incredible Hulk number four. Yeah, I didn't know he did Hulk run either. I bought this lot mainly for the totally awesome Hulk. Who's the artist? The artist is, there's Jason Aaron. Willis Portasio, Allen Martinez. Aref Pianto and Benny Malana. What percent of the comics you buy, sell, do you read? What percent? Very small percent. Very small. I read a lot of comics by the way but there's no way. Like I'm not even close to, maybe I've read like 20% of my collection. Not even, not even. Since I started making comic book videos I sort of bought a lot of comic books. This one is number six. Beautiful covers. Like I read comics every day. Number seven. Wallet, how are you doing? Number 7.1, it's still the first print. I don't know why it was 7.1. Ah, gravity, you were watching Rocky 4, awesome. Incredible Hulk, 50th anniversary. Stay gray. Part one. This is Incredible Hulk number eight. Lovely covers, lovely covers. Right, let me do this. I'm gonna move the chat over again. I'm moving the chat over and I'm gonna move the notifications over so they don't get in the way of the covers. Incredible Hulk number nine. Aaron, Ferry, and Bartolf. I just went to the bookstore and saw an entire collection of Sandman comics and this dude grabbed them before I could. What do you mean, like graphic novels for sale or the single issues? Here's Hulk one shot, number one. Oh no, this is the Wade's Hulk, Hulk number one. Mark Wade is a hit and miss in terms of writer goals. Sinai for dinner, but why do you buy comics if you don't read them back in the day? Do you always think of collecting? I buy them because I do read them. I like collecting comic books. It's also an investment. You know, we've talked about this and we've done ASMR math videos on this. I'm gonna do more, real. Let's see, Mike, how are you doing? Art has been one of the greatest places where you could have parked your money. Here's the one shot, Marvel Night's Hulk. Joe Kittenge. I'm not even gonna pronounce it. These are the people that are working on this. Marvel Night's. Those bars and novels sell comics too? Yeah, they sell graphic novels, right? Single issues from two to 15. Oh, what did he pay for them? Man, number two to 15, that includes the first appearance of death, first appearance of Lucifer, first appearance of a lot of the characters. Whoa. Here's a totally awesome Hulk number one. And I've read this, it was fun. It was fun. And I read a $1 copy of this. I bought it for $1 or a comic book store who was selling it. But this is fetching a higher price now. But it was a fun read. I've read the first two or three issues of this. But the ones I had, they weren't in good condition. This is in really good condition. Like it's in mint condition. Let's crack it open, let's see. Yeah, Mark weighs daredevil. I read a little bit in crack, really good. So take a look. It's in really good condition, near mint condition. So good, good.  Are they? I haven't read them. Crack. Here's number two. Saga from Image Comics. Saga I've read a little bit, very good. Couple of issues, but need to read more. I need to read the whole series. Silva. Number three. Fin-fang-fum. One of the big evils in Marvel. I've read a lot of Saga. Yes, I really enjoyed it, but I didn't keep up. Totally awesome Hulk. Number four. Kissing. Nice. Totally awesome Hulk. Number five. Totally awesome Hulk is getting slapped around by the ladies. Who's that girl with Hulk? I don't know. I'll show you. Here's totally awesome Hulk getting smacked around by Lady Thor. Right? Here's totally awesome Hulk with the Enchantress, I think. I forget. Oh, what's her name? Crack, what's her name? Enchantress? And this is the girl, I think that you're mentioning. Lady Halbender sitting in a tree. Hulk and Lady Halbender. I guess this is Lady Halbender. And Free Assange, Free Assange, Free Assange gang. Julian Assange, the publisher and journalist that has been crucified for trying to bring transparency and accountability of capitalist power to humanity. For more information, see wikileaks.org, defend.wikileaks.org, and our Julian Assange and WikiLeaks playlist on SensorTube. This was the extra lot we got. $32 US, $40 Canadian. It's Enchantress DC. I can't remember. No, Enchantress is Marvel, Marvel. I believe it's Enchantress, Enchantress. Can't remember pronouncing it. Looks like Thor's sister, is it? No, that one is, I don't think it's Thor's sister, but Enchantress was in Suicide Squad. Well, they sometimes have the same name. You're right, I googled to confirm. Did you, okay, cool. Now, let me put this bubble thing here so the kitty cats won't get to it. Let's crack open this next. This is the important one. Oh, this is important too. Hot Mom, how are you doing? How are you all today? I think everybody's doing pretty good. Let's crack open this one. This one cost $80 Canadian. Okay, and then there was $25 shipping, which was distributed between these guys. So $25 shipping and $120 total. So the total was, oh, sorry, $145 Canadian was the cost of this whole shebang. And these books here were $80, Canadian 80 times eight, so $64 US, okay, $64, $65, $66 US. Rolling around, is that a band? Now, this is a comic book series. It's issue number one to, issue number one to 11, I believe, okay, issue number one to 11. And I have this series, not all of it, but I don't think I have the whole series. No, I don't have the whole series. It runs for 42 issues, this series. I believe it's 42 issues. It's an independent comic book series. Crack, have you guessed what it is yet? It's an independent comic book series. And it's a comic book series that I have been recommending very much. I have to change the bag on this. Ready? This comic book series, number one to 11, okay? Is it, no, it's independent. It's abstract studios, abstract studios. Crack, abstract studios, who is it? It's some, it's back there. No, it's not Strangers in Paradise. It wouldn't be $80 if it was $80 abstract studios. Number one, first appearance. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's. Rachel, Rachel, Rachel Rising, Rachel Rising. Check this out. First print, should be first print. We're gonna crack it open, okay? Adventures of Chicho, wait, I know them. Rachel Rising number one. This is the bag is dirty. Rachel Rising, Rachel Rising. Let's crack open number one. We're gonna take a look at it. They looked in mint condition, except for number one. Number one's got a couple of things in it. Okay. But it was pretty sweet, sweet copy. It's a pretty sweet copy for the price. Here's the Blemish. So take a look. I showed to you. Yeah, this is a great series. Pick it up. The price is kicking up huge. Okay. So number one, and pretty good copy, right? This part here was the problem with it, right? Let me see if I can ill focus or not. See that little scrape there? Okay, that guy right there. Otherwise, nice copy, nice copy. Very nice copy. Here's the bag. Oh my God, jeez. Don't hurt the comic, Cheecho. What are you doing? Crazy. Did we put any dents in it? No, nothing on the bag. I might have put a thing in it or something. Like a little, the thing. But no, not bad. It's pretty good. Not damaged. From gem 10 to nine. Once again. It is what it is. It is what it is. Yeah, I damaged it a little. It is what it is. It is what it is. But still very happy to get it. It's at least an 8.5, right? At least an 8.5, right? What have I done? What have I done? Haven't seen your streams in a year. God damn, deployment. Oh no, deployment. It's for Cheecho. I'm reporting this to the comic council. I know, I know. What was I thinking? Let's see. So that's, it's not a bad copy. It's a good copy. It was a better copy before I dropped it. Now it's like $5 down the drain. That was like a little bit more down the drain. That was a little bit more down the drain. Okay. So, let's put this baby here. Let me show you the other ones. I'm gonna crack open number two as well. I'm gonna crack open number two as well. Delete the stream. No, it's part of the game. It's part of the whole thing, right? I'll be careful and more careful next time, right? Yeah, these are at least 9.2, right? So this is Rachel rising number two. We all saw nothing. Here's the back cover. It's at least a nine actually. Like, oh no, let's say 8.5. 8.59. 8.5. The number one. Okay. So, number two. This is a great series game. If you haven't read this, read it. Okay, if you like Epic, if you like Epic, let me make sure the box doesn't fall over. Here's number three. Okay.  Indeed, Allah, God. Here's number four. That's the grade. Sinai for dinner. So when I say 8.5, that's 8.5 out of 10, right? And 10 is like a pure gem. And the prices vary according to the grade. So for example, let's assume here, let's assume racial rising number one, let's assume this is 8.5. Graded 8.5. Now I bought the whole lot for $80 Canadian, right? 8.5 racial rising, man, it depends. If you're looking at buy it now prices, they're like $80 for an 8.5, right? I saw an auction of racial rising number one in near mint minus condition, which would be like 9.2, right? Go for $15 US. I couldn't bid on it because the guy was going through eBay's global shipping program. There's no way I'm gonna go through eBay's global shipping. Very unfortunate, right? If the person, the seller in the United States was not going through eBay's global shipping program for the comic that he sold for $15, I was willing to pay $40, let's say $30, right? He would have doubled his money, okay? But let's assume this thing, graded at 8.5, you can buy for $30, right? $40. A grade of nine would probably cost you around $60. A grade of 9.2 would probably cost you around $70, $80. A grade of 9.4 probably cost you about $150. A grade of 9.6 will probably cost you $200 plus. A grade of 9.8 probably cost you around $300, $400, or that's what it's going for, for buy-it-now auctions. If you can get it at a cheaper price, fantastic. That's why I shoot for the auctions. This is Rachel Rising number five. I should be playing GTA right now. I should be playing GTA. GTA will be there all the time. She'll show live streams, comic book calls. Often, but not as often as you play GTA. Number six. Number seven. Yeah, the covers. Beautiful, beautiful. He's an amazing artist. Terry Moore. Number eight, amazing epic series. And supposedly this has been optioned for a TV series or a movie. It would have to be a TV series. There's no way you could cover all this. What goes on in the series in a movie? Like it's not gonna happen, right? Beautiful cover, beautiful cover indeed. And Terry Moore, all of his series, all the comics that he's put out, the main characters for all the series are female. And majority of the characters, the male characters are female. There's a handful of male characters. Powerful female character writing. Welcome to summer, everyone. It's a horror. It's horror, it's epic. It's mythology, huge mythology, huge mythology, beautiful series. The prices for these have gone up a lot, especially for racial rising number one. Couple of years ago, we picked up racial rising number one to 20 for $14 US in mint condition, right? The reason we picked it up was because I think the person that listed it spelt it wrong. So I was the only person that bit on it. The shipping cost more than the comics. No, I haven't read witches. I've heard good things about it. We trade everything to watch a chicho stream. Not everything, not everything. I walk with monsters still, plagues my mind. Yeah, all the God, I was, the walk with monsters for like three days, I was like, heavy, may need a number two, maybe, maybe. I walk with monsters, we did a reading of, I walk with monsters, brilliant number one issue, first issue.  And the artwork was simple, but just caught the moment of what was happening. Amazing storytelling, highly recommended as well, right? Independent horror comic books are is where it's at. Like really, because they don't have the corporate censors saying, no, no, no, you can't show this, you can't talk about this, you can't write about this, because independent creators, just like independent content creators, independent streamers, independent newscasters, they can tell you the truth, right? They're not obliged to corporate power, right? They can tell the stories they want, talk about whatever they want, share their love, their hate, their respect for whatever it is that is in their lives without corporate censors preventing them from speaking their mind, right? Hence one of the reasons I support independent comic book creators much, much more than the big two, right? So that's my recommendation to people and independent content creators, videos and whatnot. That's where I get my information entertainment, most of it, right? Oh my God, for me, it had a very 70s vibe to it. I mean, the visual instead of words, yeah, very visual instead of words. Thing around, thing around, loafing around, loafing around, I had to figure that out. Loafing around, how are you doing? It's up to you. I hope you're keeping well, good sir, doing well. Thank you very much. I plan on, after this stream, going into the patio and planting some herbs and whatnot, taking, you know, spending time in the garden. Fun, how long have you been live, gang? Up time, up time. We've been live for 45 minutes, 45 minutes. I hope you guys are doing well. Gang, I'm very happy to have this. I shouldn't have dropped racial rising number one. What was I doing? Selavi, selavi, selavi, selavi, selavi, selavi. Good thing we got a really good copy of it as well. Very happy to have this as well. And I'm still looking up to pick up racial rising at a good price. It's on my watch list. There are certain comic books that I'm buying multiple copies of because not only do I love reading comic books, not only do I love collecting comic books, not only do I love sharing comic books, not only do I love the stories that are being told through comic books, not only do I love the art, the variety of art that we see in comic books, I also love investing in comic books because it is art, it is a collectible, it is human history, it's a human artifact and collecting art, art has been one of the greatest places you could have invested your money, okay? May it be comic books, may it be original paintings, original artwork, may it be toys, may it be collectibles, end of story, right? So it connects up to investing in personal finance and since creating videos on comic books and live streaming, I love sharing these things with you guys. So it's a win, win, win, win, win, win, win, win, all right? Why would I not do it? Cheryl, I had two days of dirt, manicured this past weekend, exactly what I needed, total attitude, yeah Cheryl, I've been spending time in the patio as well. It's looking lush. I took some pictures in the last couple of weeks. I never shared those pictures and since then, like strawberries are out, gooseberries are out, raspberries are coming out. So good, so good.  Oh my God. The comic police are on way. Please stay in your current location, loafing around. If you find a good comic book listing, how can you send it? If I find a good comic book listing, how can we send it your way? Through Discord, right? You can message me as well. And I've seen some amazing comic books being listed, but I can't buy them because either they're in the UK and the shipping to Canada is insane, or they're in the US and they're shipping through eBay's global shipping program and I'm not gonna go through there unless it's an amazing deal and whatnot, right? So share it through Discord. If I don't buy it, someone else might, right? Which is great. Share some images, I will.  I need to, I need to. I just been really busy doing other things where I share in the videos. Gang, should we call the stream? I haven't set up another, haven't put my schedule in yet. I'm still going through the videos.  So I'm sort of managing my time on that front and I'm still archiving some stuff on the website and doing some back-end work, okay? Like I honestly have been doing terribly mentally and when I saw your notification really made my whole day. Thank you to you. My pleasure, man. My pleasure. Thank you for being here. By the way, gang, I saw a lot of follows and stuff go through. Thank you very much for the follows. Thank you for being here. Thank you for the discussions. Movies, please. I know there's two movies I still need to watch. One of them is The Lighthouse. I've been going crazy with the animation. My hero, Academia, we're in season four now. I think we have to finish the season before I can get into something else. And I'm going through Demon Slayer and I'm on the last four episodes of Demons. So as soon as I finish Demon Slayer and the Demon Slayer movie and then I'm gonna watch the two movies that we're supposed to watch and then we do two movie streams back to back because we're gonna talk about the movies we recommended. We had pick to watch and recommend new ones. It needs to be done. It needs to be done. I think in the next stream, we're gonna announce, we're not gonna have a stream this weekend. Apologies, cause I'm doing a lot of work in the gardening busy with the students this June. So they're exams and stuff and I'm putting out the short videos. But as soon as summer comes and in a couple of weeks, next week we're gonna have streams for sure. But we're gonna kick up the streams into high gear mode again in the summer. Okay, definitely outside in the patio. I need to watch three of them, but I will watch them fresh. Okay, yeah, I've been holding off watching them so I can watch them just before the stream. That's my plan. Okay, oh my God. My hero Academia is amazing, yeah. And so is Demon Slayer, yeah. The movie left me, oh man, don't tell me anything about the movie. I don't wanna know, I don't wanna know, I don't wanna know. Right, actually I should do this. I don't wanna know, I don't wanna know. I'm going through it speeding on Zala's cause there's been some people saying that it's amazing. I wanna make sure, I don't get any spoilers going into it. Amazing Demon Slayer, the series. And my hero Academia gang, amazing heart, amazing heart. Both of them, Demon Slayer and my hero Academia, so much heart, so much love, so much truth in both these series, so much of it, that they are must watches and they put Hollywood to shame, to shame.  Amazing, amazing, amazing. Gang, let's call it a stream. Thank you for being here. Quick outro, I am on Patreon. Patreon.com forward slash chicho, C-H-Y-C-H-O. If you wanna follow this work, if you wanna support this work, if you wanna know what this work is about, which is really layered on mathematics, Patreon is a great way to do so. And for those of you who are sporting this work on Patreon gang, thank you for the support. It is in large part because of your support that we're able to do this. Heligasej are trying to stop 21st century, 21st June freedom day, they better not, they better not. My pleasure, I used post-movie discussion, finally convinced my kiddo that he needs to watch cowboy bebop with me nice and almost more importantly that he should learn, test, oh, the tank on bass, nice. The theme song for cowboy bebop, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.  Tank, the theme, yeah, yeah, yeah. What a great. The soundtrack for samurai shampoo is nujabas, samurai shampoo, cowboy bebop and space dandy. Space dandy soundtrack was good but samurai shampoo and cowboy bebop, amazing, amazing, right? The art is breathtaking. It's not watching anime at this point, it's watching a museum, a true piece of art. Gang, we are live streaming on twitch.tv forward slash gcho live, C-H-Y-C-H-O-L-I-V-E if you wanna participate in the chat which is happening over here actually. Twitch is where you wanna be at. And gang, thank you for the follows, thank you for the subs, thank you for the discussion, thank you for being here. Mods, as always, thank you for taking care of business. Him on bass, me on banjo. Cheryl, while there's a lot of trumpets, a lot of horns in the tank, right? What a track, man, I feel like cranking that right now. They are remaking Highlander, I won't have this Highlander, the original one was amazing. I do announce these live streams 30 minutes or just before we go live on Mines, VK, Gap and Parler and Parler is having hiccups update yin yang. So follow the work on Mines and you can come to our Twitch channel anytime you want in the chat type and exclamation mark social and we do have a Discord page where you can share information. Tang, tan, tanakzu, zon, zon, tan. The last time I was here, we were talking politics, I think. I meant to ask you an off-topic question. You were ever university professor in your lifetime? No, I couldn't be an academic. I'd be tan, tan zon, I would, I wouldn't last long in the field of academia.  I threatened to take one professor to the dean. I said, because I was trying to take a course and you had to get it approved by your advisor and he wouldn't sign off this course for me to take. He said, oh, it has nothing to do with the field you're in. I go, I don't care, I just wanna take it, right? He goes, I won't sign it. I go, what are you talking about? It's my money, I'm paying to come to this university to take courses. This isn't elective, I want to take this course. He goes, I won't sign off on it. I said, you won't sign off on it? I'll go to the dean and talk to them and make you sign off on it. He wasn't happy about that. I took two courses with him next time, next semester. He tried to fail me on the stats course. You have this professor presence that you bring to the room. I'll take that as a compliment. Thank you. Chichou withdrew professors out of the window or it's not just me, I went to university. Oh, Waterloo. And by the way, it was amazing. I had amazing professors as well. Don't get me wrong, right? There were amazing professors I had but there were also garbage professors, right? Stats was my favorite course, Waterloo, yeah. And Waterloo and I got a math minor. I went to University of Toronto, awesome, awesome. TO, I spent some time in TO. I lived in TO a couple of summers during my co-authors. Fun, I used to go to TO all the time. Man, Toronto, amazing ethnic food. Greek food, Korean food, Japanese food, amazing. Korean food, so good, Korean town. Oh my God, I need some Korean food. Toronto is nice, but congested, congested. I used to one summer, I lived in a tower and on the corner of Bloor and Sherbourne, smack in the middle of downtown. Waterloo, what did I miss? I lived in Kitchener, Waterloo for a, you wished in Kitchener, Waterloo, cracked, really? I went to university in Waterloo. I went to University of Waterloo. Very good eats in Toronto. I am Chinese but love Middle Eastern Persian food. And Chinese food in Toronto as well, right?  And gang, we will be uploading this comic book called Livestream to SensorTube, to Bichu, to Rumble and to Odyssey. And for those of you that are sporting this work on those platforms, thank you very much for the support. Crack, you went to, you lived in Kitchener, Waterloo, so you must have gone to the comic book stores there. Now in them books, right? Live there around, oh, was now then still there? 1999, 2004-ish, okay, okay. What's your favorite comic book? Wow, I can't say what my favorite is. I have a lot of favorites, man. I got a lot of favorites to hand. Racial Rising is one of them, what we picked up. There's a reason I picked this up, right? One of my favorite comic books, right? Phenomenal read, phenomenal read. It's a must read. If you're a comic book aficionado, you must read the series, right? Like, if you like, read this, read the series. It's the omnibus, it's the complete series of what I just showed you. It's main characters are female, powerful female characters. It starts off as a horror, okay. I'm giving a little bit of spoilers. Goes mythology, babe, look, it is phenomenal. It'll take you for a nice ride and the artwork's brilliant in it, right? Like black and white, but brilliant, right? Amazing storytelling. Sometimes very minimalistic, sometimes very detailed, like, look at this, right? Very minimalistic sometimes, right? Very little text. And then sometimes there's lots of text. Is there a way I can read or purchase e-books online if that exists? Like, yeah, for sure. Most of these books you can buy digital. You should be able to buy them digitally. 100% time, okay? So they're, and I've read digital comics before and I have a small folder with digital comics, but I usually like hard, you know, I like holding the comic books and stuff like this because I spend a lot of time on the computer, so I wanna make sure my eyes don't go guga-gaga, right? Yeah, yeah. Through Apple Store? I believe so. I believe so. Comicsology is one of them, yeah. Like Krax says, Ted, comicsology, you can buy a subscription to certain publishers and read everything they have. Like it's like a Netflix type of thing, right? So you can buy subscriptions and read whatever you want, right? Or buy individual digitals and they go on sale a lot. Like one of the companies that I love, their superhero, if you like superhero, is Valiant Comics. Valiant Comics, especially the early 90s stuff when they first came out, as well as the 2012 relaunch of Valiant Comics. If you can read the original 2012, not the original, the relaunch of the 2012 Valiant Comics, highly recommend reading those series. Harbinger, Exo, Archer and Armstrong, phenomenal reads, phenomenal reads. And Bloodshot. Yes, that is exactly what I'm looking for, perfect. Yeah, check it out, Ted. You should be able to do easy peasy, okay? Aside from that gang, thank you for being here. And probably see you guys in about a week for more live streams. If I don't get another comic book haul, and there is a comic, okay? Aside from that, I'll announce the streams in a few days. Thank you for answering my question in a short period. My pleasure, Ted. I hope you find some comics that you love reading. Bye, everyone. I hope you have a fantastic next few days.