Everyone, thank you for coming to our session. This is part of the accumulators track. I'm Karen D'Amato and I am joined by a wonderful panel starting from my right, Dan Egan, is the Director of Behavioral Finance and Investing at Betterment. In his research, he focuses on understanding how our minds and our emotions work in order to help people make better decisions around their money and investing and spending. Next, Nick Majuli is the Chief Operating Officer and Data Scientist at Ritholes Wealth Management. He's the author of the blog of Dollars and Data, an author of the recently published book, Just Keep Buying, which he's supposed to be waving up now, but you can see it. And he'll be discussing the book tomorrow morning at 8.10, so set your alarms early for that one. And Randy Bruns is the founder of Model Well and a senior financial planner with the firm which serves consumers with hourly and flat fees. And as an advisor, Randy works directly with clients who are widely varied in their ages and in their financial resources. Thank you all for being here. I think the accumulators audience is an interesting one because it can encompass people from their 20s into their 60s, potentially so an audience potentially of people of very different stages in their lives, different financial circumstances. And I guess the place where I wanted to start is sort of with a big picture issue. We all have lots of demands on our time and our attention. And so to set the stage, Nick, I was hoping you could discuss your guidance on where people should focus. So thinking about do I focus on my income, my spending, saving, investing, how do I prioritize where I'm putting my energy around my personal finances? Yeah, thanks, Karen. Thanks for coming out. In terms of prioritizing time, I mean, this is a Boglehead's meetup, right? So we all talk about investing and, you know, how much should I have international? How do I rebalance all those types of things? And that's very relevant for the people in the other room, right? They've done most of their accumulating already. Their money's already saved up. They're trying to, you know, go through the next 20, 30 years, et cetera, of their life. And all those little things matter a lot. But for people in this room, people are still accumulating, or those especially younger, it matters a lot less because you don't have all that money yet, right?  And that's what this room is really about. And so when I talk about where you're going to use your time, it's your income. It's like that's everything. I think that's something that's downplayed in most of the personal finance community, is like income, income, income, it's everything, right? And so people talk about, you know, savings and things like that, but I think you have to focus on growing your income. And that's like the primary way to build both. And then that question of how much you're focusing on investing versus just finding those dollars to save. I mean, we may have people in this room who have already accumulated a lot and they're still accumulating more. So for them, the investing decisions do become more significant. Yeah, they'll start to become more significant as your investments can actually earn you more than you could save in a year. And let's just use a simple example of this. You know, if you have a million dollars saved up, you know, a 10% returns $100,000, can you save 100,000 in a year? Maybe some people in this room can, right? But what happens if it's 10 million? Can you save a million in a year? Most people probably can't, right? So you see as that investment value gets higher, you start to have less and less control over what happens to your wealth, right? At least on your, with your savings side. So that's what I would say focus on income if you're especially just starting out. So I wanna think about my income. I wanna think about getting money into savings. But Dan, you were telling me that one thing I probably don't need to bother with is using one of those cool apps to track all my spending. Like, why not? That seems like it should help me. Yeah, so one of the more interesting elements of money management is how much time and effort you spend stressing about your money. It's this perversity of like, you think you own things, but actually if those things require time and concentration and effort, they kind of own you. They own your attention. And one of the traps people can fall into is thinking that budgeting is about looking in the rear view mirror at what I spent. And being like, oh, I overspent on takeout last month. Oh, I underspent on this. There are like consistent studies that show like the more that you do that, you're not gonna save more.  And there are a constant sort of escalating benchmarks of if you did good last month, you should do even better this month. People who are very good at saving as a process tend to invert the usual thing. They don't say I'm gonna exert a lot of self-control and I will have saved money by the end of the month by not spending it. There's lots of different ways of saying this, generally pay yourself first, which is effectively I make two grand. I know that I should be saving 500 of that when I get paid. I'm gonna auto deposit it into a savings account somewhere so that it's not even in my checking account to spend. That's sort of like top down, think about a budget at one point, lay out very simple math, you know, like one plus one plus one equals three, I'm gonna save one third of it, allows you to save systematically and in a way that doesn't stress you about what specifically you spent money on. Your retirement doesn't care if you spent it on cappuccinos or muscle cars or any other thing, it's just a matter of how much money did you save? The spending should not be something that causes you stress because you know you are saving enough from the outset. Thank you. Let's talk a little bit about the investing environment we find ourselves in. So it's a year when stocks and bonds have done terribly, inflation is high, it's scary, the economic conditions are scary. Bill Bernstein says that's a great market for accumulators but he also said, you don't know until you're in that bear market how awful it's going to feel. So Randy, if you could talk to us about when you talk to potential clients about investing and investing in an environment like this, what are you talking to them about? How are you trying to get them to look at the world? Well you stole my quote from Bill Bernstein this morning and I paraphrased him on Twitter. I said, Bill Bernstein had said, I would love it if I were an accumulator, I'd love a market like this, I would drool over it I think is the word he was using but and it is true because if everybody in this room is an accumulator, volatility is good, it helps you buy more shares mathematically, you end up paying a lower share price on average than the very same mutual funds or companies you're buying into but that still doesn't mean almost like something I've heard is like you can take a, you can do a flight simulator and have a good feel for what it's gonna feel like in a plane crash but until you actually get into a plane crash that can't simulate the feeling. So what we do in our firm is we remind investors of their time frame but we also make sure they know not just how much they need to save but also that there are going to be major bumps along the road and we don't say, oh if you're in an 80-20 portfolio that has historically fallen as far as 37%, we actually put it in terms of dollars and every meeting with our clients we make sure we're the nag that says, hey here's how much value you could lose if things go south and then things do go south and they can't say we didn't warn them and yeah. Dan, what are some lessons from behavioral finance that'll help us act more intelligently in this market? So the first one that actually I'm gonna play off of which is distance and time. Distance and time are very powerful assets in multiple ways and one of the most powerful is that when we are stressed, when we are scared we make worse decisions that are generally more short termists. We say like what do I need to deal with? Right now I don't care about the long term I just wanna feel better in the short term. One of the unfair advantages that a lot of accumulators are gonna have is that they're gonna be looking ahead 10 plus years and when I log in, I remember during March of 2020 when it was kind of like the trough of the pandemic related drop, I logged in and looked at my retirement plan that consists of like okay I'm gonna keep saving for this many more years into these account sites, et cetera and it said something absolutely horrifying like you're gonna spend $300 less per month in retirement and I was like oh nevermind, okay, no problem. I'm not stressed about that anymore. The more that we can remove stress by using distance and time as buffers between ourselves, the smarter decisions we make and one way you can think about this is Jeff Bezos has this quote that he's like if Amazon had a great quarter this quarter it's because of decisions that we made three years ago. Like when you are thinking about these things the decisions you make today they roll out they kind of get realized in terms of the outcomes years and years into the future and you realize that you think I don't need to react to what's going on in markets right now, right? Like we are planting trees these things take decades to grow effectively. Stuff matters, you need to come and intend to it you need to think about seasonality and what do I do in different seasons but give yourself that relaxation that like I should not be worried about this quarter to quarter because I am sticking to a plan that plays out over decades. The more that we allow ourselves to have distance and time in how we make decisions we make better decisions that play out better and we get to say we made an awesome decision three years ago and we're bearing the benefits of it today. I know Nick you were also saying you feel like people one of the risks today is that people are so focused on the short term which I think it feels natural I mean we're always bombarded with so much news and information but when it's scary I think it's you pay a lot more attention to it than the days you look at the market and you say oh the market's up again great and you go on with your life as opposed to the market is down a lot today I'm gonna spend a little more time thinking about it. Other tips for how I can resist that and keep my focus where it should be? Yeah I think just like studying history you start to realize how much stuff repeats itself. For example recently my sister and I went to Florence and I'm not just it's not a brag this is relevant and they had these little thing called wine windows I know because they're really good with the hell yeah they had these little thing called wine windows that apparently during the black plague they used to sell wine and things out of these little windows to prevent face-to-face contact with people during the black death because it took out like some cities took out two thirds of their inhabitants right in Italy it was really bad so during COVID they started reusing the wine windows so you see history repeats in very odd ways and just like that little things like that little stories you find out about stuff it's like we're sitting here looking at like this ticker tape moving and it like really doesn't make that much of a difference right and I really love Dan's answer about when he logged in in like March 2020 and he said oh I just lost you know X hundred dollars a month in retirement and I think a really cool just easy way to think about that is like for every hundred dollars a month you wanna spend in retirement that's about $30,000 in principle right using like the 4% rule or something it's not perfect just assume that for now just trust me on that right so if that's true if you're down you know $90,000 in your retirement account right now what did you really lose you lost $300 a month in retirement so and if you actually look at the retirement date on how people spend money in retirement they don't actually most people don't pull down principle they just live off their income so it doesn't matter it's actually kind of very interesting what I'll talk about I need to have much more money in retirement this and that everyone just lives off their income no matter what that income is even the people that have no savings they just live off their social security right so if you have some savings you're ahead of them right and so you're just gonna live off whatever income you have and I'm not saying it's gonna be a great retirement if you don't have a lot saved but you're going to make it work like everyone else in America is currently making it work right so that's one positive side there's a key kind of insight here which is when you start thinking about your balance like a score like in a video game or something and that you just want your score to go up it puts you into a very bad place but when you convert it into what matters to you and your life it's very easy to be de-stressed about it so again March 2020 I worked for a FinTech company markets were down, things were not good my wife said hey just so we're clear like if you get laid off what happens and we had a very large emergency fund and I was like at least over like six to nine months we don't have to worry about anything that meant that I didn't stress at my job I was able to focus on the income on doing what needed to be done it meant that I didn't think about taking money out of a retirement account where there might be tax penalties and I can't put it back in so the only other thing is like think about setting yourself up if you're worried about markets think about why does it actually affect anything other than like looking at a score and making you feel good or is there an impact to your life and if there is an impact to your life how can you like hedge that or immunize how do you make it so that you don't care what markets do because if you care what markets do and it's not just because it's a score you're in a risky position and you want to focus on that as almost like financial planning thing to do how do I not care about markets? So I appreciate your point about the emergency fund part of what it is buffering me from is making a short term decision that might not be the right one for the long term I feel like emergency funds that's one of the pieces of advice you always hear and I think there are a lot of people who don't do that so how much of an emergency fund do you recommend people have and where do you put it and I'm just wondering if we're on an agreement here on the magnitude of that? So studying for the CFP exam they I always remember they said have somewhere between three to six months of spending in an emergency fund and it would be six months if it was just one sole income earner or one of the earners was less that had less than stable income but we would typically recommend three to six months in most cases we would definitely put it in like the highest FDIC insured savings account you can find that's still accessible I personally have my checking account through Chase Bank which is a phenomenal bank if you live in the Chicago area but it's horrible when it comes to the interest rates they pay on savings almost offensive so I chose Ally for its online savings account and don't wait for a Chase banker to remind you of this but you can actually link external accounts where I don't even go to Ally anymore I just go to Chase to move money in or out to Ally back and forth but I also think having an emergency reserve plays into your risk tolerance during tough times because we can look at our investors and our clients and say you have to spend through this before you even get to that and so if somebody has afforded themselves a lower required return we would agree if they need a bigger savings account because the savings account at the end of the day is just going to follow inflation you're not going to beat inflation but if they've afforded themselves the ability to have an overabundance of recommended cash and savings if that allows them the peace of mind to ride out a down year like this, we're all for it. So yeah, the only thing on emergency fund, I agree with that I think it's also very individualized every person's different I'm guessing many of you know Morgan Housel Psychology of Money, he wrote the book he's 25% cash and he's been like this before he had a bestselling book like he was 25% cash so it's like some people and he's like I sleep great at night I'm never going to change that so I think that's way too high of an allocation personally but that's everyone's each their own so don't feel bad if you have like oh I want to have two years of emergency cash like I think Bill Gates when he was running Microsoft early had at least what 12 months or 24 months of cash you know when he was running the company he's like I want to be able to say if we got no more money coming in the door I can pay my employees for at least a year or so so like there's different ways of thinking about risk management but yeah. So when we look at the people who are attending the conference if you're here you are probably pretty darn serious about investing about thinking about your personal finances about saving in your 401k and doing other things you know you should looking ahead to the long term. Randy what are some of the things that people may be less likely to focus on because they're awkward and painful and difficult to even talk about? I love this question because it's one thing to build a financial plan based on everything going as expected but then something doesn't go as expected and this might be an estate plan for a young family or even if you don't have kids yet you should everybody every adult should have an estate plan just to know who makes your health decisions if God forbid you end up in a hospital or who manages your finances if God forbid you end up in a hospital having term life insurance in place whether it's before you have children or if you ever plan to have anybody dependent on your income get a term life insurance policy immediately while you're healthy long term disability it's all based on everything in accumulation is based on your ability to save which starts with your ability to earn an income and if you suddenly can't earn an income as I learned in March of 2020 day one of COVID I thought I had COVID I ended up collapsing in the shower my wife drove me to the or my wife drove me the ambulance took me to the hospital and I found out like I was in the hospital all day long I found out at about 430 that night that I had a tumor on my brain and because it was day one of COVID I couldn't go home they said we don't know what the hospital is gonna look like if you're even gonna be back in here we would suggest you get it removed immediately so that was Thursday March 12th day one of COVID and on Saturday March 14th I had surgery so and if I didn't have Alex here who's my partner at the office he pretty much saved our practice from what could have been financial ruin just because it's not like COVID just hit and everything else was a breeze but the stock market fell 30 plus percent that sharp period of time and if I didn't have a long term disability insurance policy in place I would have had to sell or didn't have a savings account in place I would have had to sell from assets that were sharply down in value and they wouldn't have been there for the ensuing recovery which as everybody in this room knows was extremely sharp so we are professional nags at making sure that those areas like having an emergency savings having a term life insurance getting in a state plan and having long term disability insurance which most employers provide those are the things that are very easy to overlook and say well it'll never happen to me I mean I'm not gonna say I knew I didn't own long term disability insurance because I knew for some reason I was gonna get a brain tumor but I knew the financial implications of something like that so catastrophic happening so yeah I was just thinking as you were saying that and I'd say thank you for sharing that obviously that really brings home the things that can happen to any of us so suddenly and that is why we make plans but I was also just thinking when talking about estate planning that is a phrase that has a bad name because you think well it's about estate planning it's about dying so I'm not gonna think about it and I'm not gonna die right now I'm young but if you go to an estate planner all those other documents the healthcare proxy, the living will your powers of attorney I mean those are not about when you're dying they're about now if something happens to you and you were temporarily incapacitated and so I think if we thought about it as like critical legal documents as opposed to just estate planning maybe a few more people would focus on it Dan I wanted to ask you from Hey Karen Yes So one last thing on the estate plan so I have an almost six year old and a four year old that like my wife and I got in a estate plan because we didn't know if we didn't have an estate plan who would raise these kids if we weren't around? I have two brothers, she has two sisters I don't trust either of my brothers to raise my kids her older sister, not a chance but her younger sister is like the greatest would be is the greatest person ever to raise our two kids and her fiance but they're not great with money and so the person that you name as a guardian for your children may not be the person who you appoint as somebody who is the guardian of your finances basically so And there are benefits also just a separation of powers, checks and balances to having those be different people I think too I think so, yeah Dan are there lessons from behavioral finance that would help me, any of us actually carry through on all these things that we need to do there are things that are sort of fun to focus on in personal finance and the things that are just chores what can I do to help myself get everything done? Well, they're great things so my favorite is what's called temptation bundling which is that, and I sort of doing this before I knew there's a term for it when I was in college I would go into the library when I had to study for a test and on the way in I would buy myself four York peppermint patties and I'm allowed a York, I put them in front of me and I was allowed one of them once I had studied for 45 minutes I didn't smoke cigarettes, but I would go outside and I would eat a York peppermint patty it was exactly like the commercial so refreshing So it's been simple, but like, you know, like set this up so that it is bundled with a reward me and my wife have a thing we have it regularly in the calendar we usually have date nights and I think it's like once a quarter we have admin night and we go out and we have a beer and we look at spreadsheets together and we talk about like what's right what's not right, you know, like are we thinking about everything okay and that night is a nice thing because at the end of it I'm allowed to go to the really fancy silly hipster cocktail bar and get a nice drink and say like I've done my job now I get a reward for it use technology for like planning it out doing it regularly if you're thinking about it if you're doing it ad hoc I'm probably not going to do it but when I have number one it in the calendar and into the calendar with someone else that we can go do it together you can do this even if it's you know you're not going to go to the bar and go over finances with your buddy but you can both go to the bar and say we're going to do this thing at the end of it we'll be able to chat do it with somebody else make it something that's a recurring activity with somebody else so that you kind of hold each other accountable just like going to the gym. Thank you. Thinking about bundling not quite your peppermint patties maybe Nick tell us about your is it the two times rule? Do I have that right? That's the two X rule but basically I think this is really relevant for Bogleheads because I was just having lunch with some people I met and the big problem for all of us is we talk about most Americans don't have $400 to meet some random expense that's not the problem for people in this room people in that room it's for most of us it's going to be like spending down our money and so I think the real issue and the stuff I kind of write about is like people are disciplined they're saving money over time it's like how do you spend money without kill and a lot of people especially if you're really good at saving you're by definition probably not great at spending I mean all is equal right?  You should save another $400, two X and take that other $400 and invest it in something you know S&P 500 index or income producing assets of some other sort or you could even donate the other $400 if you feel like oh I'm going to spend it instead of being selfish and just thinking about myself I'll donate the other $400 so it's these little simple rules I mean they're not anything crazy I have no data that shows that they work so I can't really back that but all I can say is like it's these little heuristics that I like to use and I know other people have found useful if you're trying to spend money so I'm just trying to get rid of spending guilt because I think there's a lot of people that have a lot of guilt around spending money especially in this community where we're very good at accumulating obviously but we're very good at guilt This is very true Nick said it in passing earlier but I think it's worth coming back to the vast majority of retirees don't spend down their balance because it feels bad to see it going down Vanguard actually has I believe it's called a managed payout fund that's a fund that's meant to act like an annuity you are meant to spend whatever payments you get from it and people take those payments and they reinvest about 25% of them back into the fund which is extremely frustrating for the fund manager who's like you are using my product wrong why are you doing this to me I don't want inflows stop it one of the things that we've seen so this is not a plug it's just an explanation at Betterment you can use goals and you can say like this is the thing that I want for this this is my like vacation fund this is my nice new car fund or a goal or whatever it is and bookmarking things is like this is the purpose of this money does a great deal to remove this kind of like guilt because it's like I saved up for a really common one as a Tesla for some reason and it's like I saved up for the Tesla and now I have all this money but it's in the Tesla the entire purpose of this money is to fulfill this real life thing it's not to just have the balance go up and so you know like do it however you want like set up a whole bunch of different savings accounts whatever it is it's a pain in the butt logistically but put labels on things so you say like when I spend this it's not gonna feel bad because the entire purpose of this account was my 10 year anniversary trip to wherever Randy how do you handle that with clients when clients are saving for multiple goals they're saving for buying a house they're saving for college they're saving for retirement they're saving for the home addition they're planning how do you recommend that they manage that? So what we do is we make sure that their emergency reserve is covered and then we also make sure that they're putting away enough for retirement and it's in very simple low cost investments but I remember one particular client who was her she was probably 31 at the time but she was gonna buy a home in the next five years and we made it very clear to her that like the growth of the portfolio is not so important anywhere near as important as the confidence you can have that those funds will be available in your in five years and Nick I think you mentioned this in your book right here's a plug a shameless plug for Nick's book but anyways like it was five years down the road she was putting money in on a monthly basis and we it also wasn't like something that she was dead set on it has to be bought in five years so she had some wiggle room but we just she was putting money in on a monthly basis we recommended the Vanguard Wellesley income fund but if it was something that they were going to use within two years or even less than three years we would quantify the value of it work the math backward assume a 0% if not a negative 1% or negative 2% return relative to inflation because that's the cost of short term safety and liquidity and then we just make sure that they managed to that goal basically one of the things that I wanna talk to you about sort of the flip side of feeling so guilty that you don't actually spend is lifestyle creep you know the shared apartments and the hostels on vacation are great when you're in your 20s but at some point down the road you probably wanna use your raises to have a bigger house live in a different lifestyle how do I figure out if I'm in a comfortable place not spending too much I mean how do I make sure I don't let my lifestyle get out of hand so I think a lot of personal finance experts and especially in you know Boglehead's community may say things like you know oh we don't want your lifestyle to creep just save all your raises et cetera I actually wanted to test that so I've written a blog post about this this is in the book as well basically long story short you have to save like half of your raises more or less and actually for people who are have a very high savings rate you actually have to save more of your raises to kind of end up at the same place you can imagine someone in equilibrium imagine you're saving now you know you're gonna retire at 65 you're saving whatever you're saving and then you get this positive shock to your income you'll get a raise it's a good thing if you want to spend the same amount of money through the rest of your life and in retirement remember you're already on your equilibrium path the question is when you get that extra money if you spend it all now when you hit retirement you have to drop your spending again so you can imagine that already so the question is like you obviously have to spend less of it to kind of you can raise your lifestyle a little bit but then you can save the rest and you can still retire at the same date right because if you spend you know all of it or more than all of it you'll have to retire later you can just think about that logically but long story short basically if you run all these simulations different savings rates and all this like you have to say basically half your raises which ironically fits really well with the two X rule so it's easy to remember I did the math just panned out that way I did not plan on that but yeah so that's what I would say like I've looked at it and I think you can do like half your so if you get a raise after tax income of $1,000 you can spend an extra $500 a month enjoy that but you have to save the other $500 to stay on track to whatever path you're on so I don't know what to say the only thing I throw in there is that there's a sort of if you go hard in the early parts of your career you can have a really easy ladder part of it meaning if you do like 75% of every raise up until the time you hit like 32, 33 number one all that money is going into the market earlier more time to grow, et cetera, et cetera it also keeps your lifestyle low up until that point in time generally right around then is when you are at very, very high risk for a certain set of liabilities called a family and your ability to save escalates without your ability to control it and you're like how did after school cost this much why does this happen? But once you like if you go hard in the beginning all of a sudden you'll find yourself in this middle zone you'll spend money on family and you'll come out of it let's say 18, 20 years later you'll feel okay and you'll know then that like because you went hard early you have an easy life now and you can adjust them that's the thing you're giving yourself the option to say I'm not gonna be stressed when I come out of the family liability situation if you go into it stressed you're probably gonna come out of it stressed you can always adjust later easily to say like I'm gonna spend more money because I have too much that's a very good problem to have the other way is not a very good problem to have so go hard when you're younger it'll make later life easier Most people when they say that they're not actually talking about saving but let's talk a little bit about real estate and home ownership because you will have people in the accumulator stage who may be making that first home purchase what do you advise people when in looking at the real estate market how do I decide if this is the time to buy and how do I do it smartly? So one of the biggest things here I think is try and figure out where your private values most diverge from public values by which I mean you are investing in something that is your home you will live in this thing it is like where you will spend most of your non-waking hours and a fair share of your waking hours the important thing like everybody there's like a common price for a house it's like how much is this price worth that's what it's worth to some sort of median person you will find the best house for you by thinking about how am I different than most people how am I different than the median person what matters to me that doesn't matter to them and what doesn't matter to me that does matter to them real quick example the apartment that me and my wife ended up with is not near a subway in New York City that is fine we love biking we live near the river we're able to come up and say like there's a lot of stuff about this apartment it doesn't have a washer dryer in it that's not a problem for us when you're looking at a home the most important thing is again to say like this is my house let me try and go out and find a house that is most undervalued to me in the market and that means looking at a house that is gonna be not cookie cutter not sort of conventional in some way it should be different and that different is gonna be right for you yeah I love that answer only thing I'd add is I actually don't think it's as much of a trust me it's a huge financial decision but I think it's much more of a personal decision like is this the right time for me to do this should I be you know is your professional life kind of settled or mostly settled and is your personal life settled right if you're single do you want to be buying a house to then sell it in a couple of years and then have to go out and you know buy another one right it's just you don't want to pay those transaction costs right it's usually like what's six percent I mean you include all the fees and everything so that's the one thing I would say there and in terms of right now with with how things are with the rates as high as they are so like payments are a lot higher so unless home prices come down you're not gonna be able to get the same payment that you could have got a year ago for the same size house right so it's gonna be interesting to see what happens in the next year and I can say I agree that if you buy a house you don't buy it for financial reasons you buy it because you want to plant your roots there I specifically and my wife specifically we're looking for a tall trees fat squirrels neighborhood that looks like it had been there a long time our house is 103 years old which brings up a whole other set of issues but these is so and this is gonna tie back to the emergency reserve or just having cash on hand we finally decided to replace seven windows in our house and they cost everybody knows windows are ridiculously expensive so it cost us $18,000 which we had prepared for but what we did not prepare for was our AC unit going out on the hottest day of August that year and then our hot water our tankless hot water heater went out so we all together that was a $29,000 burden that we 18,000 of which we planned for 29 the extra 11,000 we did not plan for but we had a buffer so and that's something that an example we use with we have an individual that a couple that we worked with a few years ago who only one of them was working they were living they were renting and they just felt like they were 31 and 30 years old and they just wanted to no longer rent and we said well why so first of all they didn't have any savings they would have had she was a veterinarian's technician or whatever she would qualify for a doctor's loan which allowed her to put only like however much down a very small down payment and then she didn't have to pay private mortgage insurance and we just said no do not do that what if your furnace breaks so we talked them out of it thankfully but that's a big big concern too renting is fine I have one more thing interesting nobody thinks about it the right way you generally don't want to be the least well-off person in your neighborhood you will be unhappy there because you will be constantly comparing yourself to your neighbors it's tricky because that's usually associated with but I want to get my kid into the good school something like that there are other factors but do you think about like the neighborhood that I am buying a house in am I going to feel good living here or am I going to feel unwelcome or like I am not as you know I'm not spending as well and like just drive around what kind of cars are people apart are they displaying their cars out there you know like what do the houses look like being aware of what it's going to feel like to live in a neighborhood in terms of what the houses and it feels like money-wise is actually important be at the upper end of that not the lower end because also if you're at the lower end and you are very aware of that that's another thing that's the other lifestyle creep pressure and it's not even fun it's that pressure to keep up with the Joneses absolutely one thing we haven't talked about yet is debt so there will be some people in the accumulator audience who maybe early in their careers may actually be earning substantial salaries but are starting from a point of having significant debt as well from their education Randy what do you how do you work with those clients or what are some of their particular issues well so being an hourly based firm we do cater to a lot of recent college graduates who are buried in college debt still haven't saved up for a sufficient amount in an emergency reserve they want to save for a down payment on a house they also are you know they want to save for retirement because what's the most precious commodity that any young saver has versus everybody in that room is time so I think we help people prioritize and definitely if you have high interest credit card debt if you're paying 19% that's not doing any good so pay off the credit cards first but I'd say like the debt pay down versus saving for a down payment on a new home and then we have like student with student forgiveness loan forgiveness I think that's a pretty complex complex answer that's gonna be very specific to each individual but we would prioritize at least saving to your 401k up to the company match and then pay off any high credit card debt because again paying interest in the teens is I mean it's basically getting a 15% return once that's down or paid off but I don't have a specific answer because everything we do is very much case study specific to each individual I think we'll take a moment now and see if people in the audience have questions they'd like to ask the panelists I'll bring our microphone down or I'll let Rick bring the microphone down I've got a question that might be a bit of a mathma to the crowd here but what are your thoughts of sort of platforms like seed invest, we funder that allow people to invest small amounts of money to private companies and also the proliferation of ads at least of fractional art, fractional cars and all that kind of stuff as an asset class So I've done some of these things I've done something with the we funder and I've also I do own some art I have a partnership with them so I will not mention the name of the company but you can probably guess what it is so I think that should be a very small portion of your portfolio I think like 90% of your assets should be in income producing assets I don't see art or wine or crypto or gold as income producing because there's no cash flows and so because of that even we funder which is private companies you're like well that's a business isn't that cash flow producing well right now it probably isn't so I would say for all practical purposes those are like the high risk like non-income producing I keep that 10% of my portfolio I don't know what other people do but that's just kind of how I look at it I think those are sometimes they're actually hobbies masquerading as investments and I think I expect to lose money on my hobbies I spend money on equipment I spend money on fees of various kinds I love it it's worth it I'm gonna do it anyway but I don't expect to make money on my rock climbing and I think a lot of that's similar like enjoy it get into the community this is your spare time don't expect to make money on it just enjoy it I had a question about estate planning you know it's something I always know I need to do but I've always postponed it because in my mind I'm thinking okay if I don't have at least two million or three million do I really want to do estate planning so I guess my question is is there really the right time when you should be doing estate planning and is there really a certain threshold or dollar amount that it makes sense to start doing estate planning? I can't say much about that I'm gonna hand it off to you there's one me and my wife said oh my God we have a kid we need to have this done just so it's clear what's going on the worst thing you can do to espouse or significant other is to have them deal with the loss of you and all this stuff at the same time and I've seen that play out multiple times so just if somebody else is effectively dependent on you in some fashion or it's gonna be a big pain in the butt to deal with do it ahead of time again when you're cool and calm and collected it's a lot better way to do it we used a site online called Trust and Will I don't think it's just trustandwill.com it was fantastic it was like easy to get through we don't have an estate we're not landed gentry but it was very good for like the 98% I'll reference the CFP exam which I took probably 12 years ago but there was one question and I think in Alex you had it on your exam too they gave just like four just insane things that no prudent investor or consumer would ever do it said like oh this person has $30,000 in credit card debt all of their retirements tied up in one stock they have no savings account and they don't have an estate plan what should this person do and in the practice exams I said oh you know what they should pay off the credit card debt you know whatever I can't remember but the answer was get an estate plan because you never like Dan just said you never want to be a burden to somebody else and even if you don't have any assets or you don't feel like you have $2 million as you said well who is going to make the decisions if God forbid you end up in a hospital and somebody has to determine do we pull the plug on this person or you know give her treatment so it's not the nice thing about not having a complex estate means you're not going to pay that much for a good estate plan so I think that question is appropriate given my circumstances I've been widowed for eight years my husband dropped dead on me and I would say that that advice I would hope that everybody takes that to heart because had he not had that in place I think it would have been considerably worse than my situation is have a two year old and a six year old when he died and now they're 10 and 15 so we're still trying to make our way through things I had two comments one of them was this is a very male heavy crowd here and there make sure that your partners are aware of where your money is the greatest thing my husband did for me was teaching me about keeping track of the money keeping track of the accounts all that stuff we didn't have the big book that the Bogle had to talk about but I had everything in in Quicken so when he died and two months later I had to file taxes I filed taxes in two hours because everything was right there the next year it was a mess but so I would say at a minimum even if your spouses are not really into it the chances are you're gonna men are gonna die before women and to the extent that you can encourage your partners to at least know a little bit about where your puts and takes are that's super helpful as as I can attest one suggestion I just came to my mind was when you have a power of attorney for your finances consider something that I did having it be valid right now and because when I brought this up to my attorney I said you know how can I trust somebody if there's a valid power of attorney she could clean me out and her response to me was well why would you trust somebody when you're you know half dead you know half brain dead in the hospital it should be somebody that you could trust while you're you know compass mantis and non compass mantis so I just throw that out there too my my question though is what advice do you give to your clients about the reality about returning to the workforce after being out for a period of time first of all sorry for your loss um I I don't know I don't really have a great answer to that um if you so what advice would we give to somebody who's been out of the workforce yeah so first of all that would be very admirable because and it's unfortunate because you it sounds like you did have to take time off because of your husband passing I mean I would think the best thing I would do is just stay very active on the LinkedIn community stay closely connected to wherever it is you were working make sure your your resume stays fresh I don't really have a great answer to that though anybody this is um like not necessary for everybody this this came up um we were looking at um the stats around the impact of women staying home to take care of kids uh especially in the first four years and there's a great report that was done on it that was like the biggest financial hit is not that they are not earning money and it is not that they are not saving it is that when they come back to the workforce their marketable skills have gone down and people are like oh we're going to pay you less in real terms than when you were here last um so I think the key thing there is uh take whatever time you can to keep some evidence based skill up that you're like I have been doing this um I have been volunteering to do taxes down here I have been doing some professional thing so that it is and you know like it's if you haven't lifted weights for four years and you come back the first time you do it is horrific um whereas if you just go every once in a while it's not that bad so I think a little bit of um continuing to do something to keep those muffles there and keep it evidence like it can be one day a week whatever it's just keep your foot in the game just a little bit um and I would also flip it and say this is a opportunity to think about changing careers if you haven't again not for everybody my wife went through this she went from being a public school teacher to being a software engineer she learned how to program did all that stuff and ended up coming out of it much happier so it is you know you can go into the chrysalis and metamorphosis and come out the other side something new thank you all I think we're gonna have to cut it off now sorry um thank you to a tremendous panel it is been my honor to be with you meet you all of Rick tell us where we're going now we're going back to the next room for your conversation with Bert Malkiel is that right okay thank you all


Guys, write this down, 280 is the intermediate double bottom right now. Is it possible? Welcome to Access a Trader, the number one community for those who are committed to taking control of their trading in order to achieve success, profitability, and longevity. Thank you for joining us. Here's Dan Shapiro to help you find your edge, master your process, and own your future. Hey guys, good evening everybody. Welcome to another edition of TheAxisTrader.com, a nightly update show. I hope everybody is doing well. I hope everybody had a good trading day. We'll get into the particulars in a second. If you are new to the channel, welcome aboard. If you could be so kind, subscribe so you know exactly when our videos are uploaded. Like the video to always help out the channel so we can try to help you in a non-unbiased way. And that's kind of what we try to accomplish every day. So let's talk about the tape, right? Last night we talked about the jobs number, yesterday's move. We lost basically half the jobs number, excuse me, not the jobs number, it's getting a little late in the day, sorry about that. We gave back half the drone power rally, right? The drone power rally on November the 30th had this whole big move in Gulf two weeks worth of selling, to follow through, to lose its range, to go back yesterday in half a bar. So what happened today? If you watched last night's video, and again we'll get to the individual pivots in a second, very, very strong day, we were ready for the sell off, right? We were ready for the sell off, something just felt, you know, something just felt not good, right? That's the best way of saying it. It didn't feel good. We lost yesterday the 10-day moving average on the Q's. When we looked at the spies yesterday, we lost the 10-day moving average on the spies. And now we are pretty much, we gave back pretty much about 90, 95% of the power rally. And now the question is, what happens next? So this is where we, you know, this is where we put on our logical hats, right? We put on our logic hats, and we see, and we let the market dictate to us what happens next. So here's the levels that we have to watch, right? The bottom of the power, prior to the power rally, was this 279 area. You see the lows from November the 29th, right? It was 279 on the Q's. The next day it was 280, right? Today we doubled bottomed off that 280. Everybody see it? Today's low is 280 and a quarter. The power low was 280, right? So 280 becomes intermediate pretty strong area that the bulls need to defend, right? So far today, they challenged that 280. And again, if you look at the indexes today, again, you got some pretty big moves. That lost 500 yesterday, lost another 350 today. NASDAQ lost 200 yesterday, lost another 200 today. So it's not pretty, right? It's definitely not feeling good. Three days ago we were feeling a lot better when the bulls kind of negated the strong jobs number, right? But now we're kind of faced with the reality of what potentially could happen next. So guys, write this down, 280 is the intermediate double bottom right now. Is it possible? Is it possible? We have a dead cat bounce tomorrow, of course. Anything's possible. That tends to happen once in a while when there's a double bottom, especially faced with an event, right? An engulfing event. Here's also a flip side, right? If we start confirming down below this 280 level, right? If there's 280 level here and take down this 279, then we're going to be in the crosshairs, right? Of getting a measured potential move to the 50 day moving average. This is where, and again, I don't want to kind of jump the gun and talk about what potentially could happen after the 50 day moving average. But you guys already know, if you've been watching this broadcast for a long time, you could see what happens after, you know, when you lose the 50 day moving average. Here's you lost the 50 day moving average, you're going to go a lot lower. So if we start losing this 280, 279 area, we're going to go down to this 277, do or die area for the bulls and any close low, the 50 day moving average, it's not going to be a pretty thing. And again, for all you guys who lived through the last, you know, 8, 9, 10 months that we've been primarily underneath the 50 day moving average, you kind of know.  Sure, there'll be days that the market will go higher and there'll be multiple days that will move higher. And you can see by the illustration here below, right? You have multiple days up, ultimately go down, multiple days up, multiple days down, ultimately go to the bottom of the range here. So before that happens and before we have a completely different conversation below the 50 day moving average, we already know what's facing us, right? So if we hold again the 280 level, we might start rallying tomorrow. If we start losing the 279, we are going to be faced with a 277 reality of a back test to the 50 day moving average. Now, does the market usually break the first time it tests the 50 day moving average? No, it doesn't. Usually you'll have one attempt and then the market will be bought generally off that test, especially retest of the 50 day moving average, but then it's almost like putting a bandaid on the severed head, right? And we already know there's a potential casualty up ahead, but the most important part is, you know, at least you'll have some time, especially if you're an investor and you're watching this for the first time. Remember above the 50 day generally is good, right? Below the 50 day, there's nothing good about it. So before that happens, let's worry about the 279, 280 level. And if there is a wash, we'll definitely be prepared for tomorrow's action, right? Primarily, you know, again, it's very, very tough for me to turn around. Just like I said yesterday, right, you know, 99% of my game plan going into today was to the sell side. Again, even that I'm aware that we potentially could have a dead cat bounce, 100%, right? 100% of my game plan for tomorrow is, you know, possibly taking down this 279 level and going into the 50 day moving average. We'll see. Again, you know, I'm not naive. I understand the market doesn't have to go straight down. The market doesn't have to do anything. That's the whole point. As we say every single night, we're just trying to put ourselves in a position that we are aware that we're not caught with our pants below our ankles and surprised what's going to happen, right? We know there was a double bottom taste. So we know if we test that double bottom again and trap shorts and go red to green, yeah, I think the market will rally. But again, like I said a few minutes ago, there's a flip side. We start taking down this 282, 79. We should get a test to the 50 day moving average. So that's kind of where how my thinking is going into tomorrow. Now the worst thing in my opinion, right? Especially after a three day, no, especially two day sell off is the last thing the bulls want to do. And it happened again today, right? If you guys remember, you know, the future is gapped up a little bit. That's the last thing you want to do. Any reversals or intermediate reversals you want to see is for fear, right? It's for fear. It's for carnage. It's for anxiety. It's emotional baggage, right? We don't have that yet. None of that is ever going to happen if the NASDAQ, you know, gaps up 40, 50 handles. You need a reversal of a bottom level. The only reversal I could see possible is having off this 277, 50 day moving average. We'll see about that. So going into tomorrow, let's see how the market plays out. I'm going to give the bears probably two hours, right? Maybe not even. I'm going to give the bears the benefit of the doubt in the first hour. If we start seeing that the market can't crack today's bottom ranges and anything that's acting strong that's having some deep out of the money, especially weekly calls, we'll start to pay attention back to the upside. But at least, again, for tomorrow, I want to give the bears the benefit of the doubt. My game plan is for the sell side. If it plays out the right way, hopefully we'll be having a conversation at this 277 level. We'll see, right? We'll see. Again, I don't care about being right. All I care about is that you should is being prepared on all type of scenarios and being prepared for your game plan to be confirmed, or maybe it doesn't, but that's the whole point of trading, being prepared and being more prepared than the person on the other side of your trade. So, again, as you can imagine, like we talked about last night, Amazon, Apple, right, Tesla, I mean, everything got hit today, right? Everything got hit. We talked about Goldman Sachs. We're going to talk about the financials, right? How crappy the financials were. Again, we'll get to individual pivots in a second, but this is not a great sign. It really is not that everything is getting hit. The leaders are getting hit, but more important, Apple got hit today, right? And it's very, very tough. It's really, really tough to turn around and look at a market strength if the leader arguably, right? Think of an argument that the leader for the last, you know, 10, 20 years has been Apple, right? You know, financially, product-wise, cult status, it all boils out to Apple. Apple today lost the 50-day moving averages. Again, we say all the time that 50-day breakdown is super duper important. You can see here, 50-day breakdown only a few days ago before the Powell candle had two days worth of selling. Here was the first day. It's tomorrow, part two. Again, they came with a lot of 140 weekly puts. A lot of 135 weekly puts. So we're definitely watching there. So let's talk about today's action. Again, as you can possibly tell, even from last night's video, yeah, we were sell-bys. That's the whole point. We were prepared for it. We got our pivots. We got our, you know, it was really, it was pretty strong. I mean, that's the best way of saying it. I'm not, I don't sit there and do a whole touchdown dance. The pivots are the pivots. And if you believe in technical analysis, you know, every, you know, we were prepared. I mean, that's the most important part. So let's talk about this. CRM. Yesterday broke down below that 142 earnings low. Today's confirmation was 132.88. If it confirms, can flush more. Ironically, and again, you can make a case that, hey, yesterday went down 10 and it did. If you caught the trade today, you know, it went down, you know, not a lot.  Here's the break here below this 32.88 went down to 130.90.  Tesla, again, it's just a beautiful, beautiful thing. Didn't close like I thought, but nice, really nice trade. So yesterday broke down 187.50, 187. If it builds welcome flush. Today's pivot. And this is kind of what we talked about last night, 180 and a half and 179 held twice. Buyers were coming in for the 175, 170 weekly puts. And here is Tesla, right? Here is Tesla. You're a nice move here. Took out the 80, took out the 79, right? Took out the 80, took out the 79. The range we talked about in the last night's video went down to 75. You know, I'd like to see maybe Tesla go sideways for maybe a day or two and see if that, if today's channel could get confirmed for more downside. We'll see, we'll see. But today was definitely a really, really solid move on Tesla. Apple got smashed and they also forgot what the news was, man. It was so, I feel like this day was so long as far as like news and stuff like that. But Apple 145.65 is the 50-day support. Again, there's no bigger support on intermediate timeframes. If it builds below, it can flush. Here was Apple, right? We talked about Apple. Here is Apple. It took down this channel right here, this 145.65 went all the way down to a little under 42. I think it has more downside to go. Goldman Sachs, we talked about last night in the video, got absolutely manhandled. I'm sure the rest of the financials did, but there's no reason to look at all of them. All you just need is one. Goldman 369.30, 369, if it builds below, can flush. Here is Goldman Sachs, right? Took down the 369.30 and went all the way down to the 360. If they confirm one more day, it'll see 355. Target, not a big move. Yesterday Target got smashed 154.75 if it builds below. Lost the 50-day yesterday, not a big move on Target. At least until I logged off. Yeah, not a big move. It took down 74, took down 74. I'm sorry, I got the wrong chart, it is getting late. Yeah, not a big move. It took down the 54.79, went down to like 53 and changed and rallied back. But again, Target looks lower as well. Zeus, not Zeus, I called Zeus. ZS 119, if it builds below, can flush. Again, part of that cloud space. Again, it took out the 19, went all the way down to 115, which is the lower Bollinger Band. This thing is one day away from losing macro. Matter of fact, guys, let's set an alert. Let's set an alert for the bottom channel here. As you can see here, I love setting alerts. Let's set an alert on this thing. First of all, to today's lows. But if it starts losing this bottom channel here, if it starts losing this bottom channel here, you could have a macro leg done. So big, big moves. Big moves everywhere. Netflix 310, if it builds below, can flush. Again, you kind of get the picture, right? Netflix lost the 310 little range here. The five day moving average went down to 303. If the market goes lower, I still like Netflix for one more day. Qs, right? Qs. ETF players, 286, if it builds below. I thought the initial move was gonna be the 284.50s, right? That's where the trade was. And then next thing I know, it just kept going on lower and lower and lower just everything I've destroyed. And the Qs went all the way down to 280. And again, we talked about the line and the sand for the Qs. And Amazon, definitely one of the better ones today as well. Amazon, we talked about this last time in the video as well. 9080, 9060, the last two areas of daily support, if it builds below, can flush. Here is Amazon. They were coming for the 90. They were coming for the 87 weeklies went all the way down to 8790. Guys, this thing is close, very, very close from a macro breakdown as well. So it's definitely keep an eye and continue to keep an eye on Amazon. And I believe that was it, right? I believe that was it. Yeah, that was it. So listen, good day, good solid session. And guess what? It's over, right? It's absolutely over tomorrow. You don't know if we need a dead cat bounce. You don't know if tomorrow is going to be another move lower. But again, at the end of the day, like I say all the time, be prepared, that don't come at all, right? If you don't come strong, right? If you don't come correct, don't come at all. And that's what she said. Guys, have a great night everybody.  God bless and I will see you all tomorrow. Take care.


And just because you enjoyed it doesn't mean you're not straight. Just stop worrying about it. I'm hard right now. Welcome back! Season 3! Season 3, we did it! Wow, episode 81. So many millions of people listening right now.  I don't even know... I don't even know where to begin right now. There's just so much to talk about. We had a fun little break.  We went on the boys' trip. It was a lovely place. Matt was there. Yeah. Tell us some highlights, Matt. Can we tell everyone that you did drugs on the boys' trip, Matt? Or would you prefer that we leave that out? Very good. Very good. So much excitement. Yeah, we went on the boys' trip. We had a night on... Look, we aren't... On the diesels.   It wasn't a full night. Half-night. Half-night? Yeah, it wasn't like a proper heart-out raging. Yeah, we did stop on the bloke pretty early. But we were up to, like, 6 a.m. On the first night? At 5, 4 a.m. Yeah, we're up pretty late. Yeah, that's right.  The library, we call it. The library or the reading room. But then the other nights, we just watched movies and tried to smoke weed and... The place was amazing. Yeah, the cinema room. Let me tell you, man, that place, right, was good.  That was a good house. You can put it in the good house category. I played a bit of video games. Yeah, Matt finished... Started and finished the UFC career on the UFC game. And what else are we? We played a lot of golf during our holiday. Other than the boys' show, what else do we do? Wasn't there something else that we did? I am here. I went away with my gopher and asked her for a little bit.  Yeah, great purchase. What are you up to now? I'm about halfway through first season.  It's not as good. Surely it gets better, though. Surely it gets better. Yeah, I'm sure it does, but I'm finding it hard. It's like... What?! Yeah. Bravo, dude. Whoa. Yeah, it's not as good as I remember it. Like, it's like anything. When you're a kid, it's better.  Anyway, pretty fun holidays. So much shame. No, that was beautiful, dude. Are you sure? Yeah. Because I don't know all about it, eh? No, it's very true. Sometimes I think it's really gross and disgusting. No! I don't know whether I should do that anymore. It's special.  I don't know about my future. No, yeah, don't worry about it. Futures for the future. Okay, all right, I trust you, boys. All right, I trust you with that. I'll keep doing it, okay? Yeah, good boy. It hurts a lot. Yeah, it's okay.    You were there, Matt.   We're filming a series this year, right? We're upping the quality. Production. Everything about social, we'll still put out weekly social media videos, but at the moment we're working on a one to 10 episode series called Which Sport is the scariest, right? And we do, we pick, we've picked the 10 most violent sports and then we pick, we contact a ex-athlete or ex-professional or current professional in that sport and get them to do a video with us, all right? Now, I don't want to say too much, but we've got Anthony Mundine for the boxing episode and Michael broke his rib because we had, I don't know if, if anyone watches rugby union. Sayah Fahinga. Sayah Fahinga. How do you really say it? Sayah Fahinga.  Sayah Fahinga. He's a spirit.    He's pretty big. He's big. He's definitely like a hundred and 15 killers, but looking at him I was like, oh, okay. It's not so bad, huh? It's not so bad. I knew it was going to be bad.  You hear it. One hit. Clean little snap. And yeah, it was, it's great footage and I fully bitched out. I fully bitched out after seeing that. No, it's hard to go second.  Yeah, for the Gridiron episode, the dude weighed 160 kilos. That's double, more than double my weight. So that would be like the equivalent of like us having like Bosley run at us, like on his hind legs. Like a little eight year old.  That's what it would have been like for him. Oh, anyway, also you may have noticed, some of you may have noticed we've started another Instagram account called quadruplem, right? And we will be marketing medicinal marijuana products on there and there's more to come in that space, all right? So just follow that martinmichaelunderscoremm on Instagram. We've gone from science to medicine. And so we're scientific doctors now. We have a little piece of paper that says that. Scientific doctor. Yeah, or scientific stunt doctors. We're still working title, right? We'll figure it out. Also guys, we've also started an Instagram specifically for the podcast, martinmicrofliactual. So I'm going to give that a follow.   Oh, that's pretty. This is pretty. The sponsorships. Oh, let's be honest. It's kind of, it's a bit boring. Most people are switching off their eyes and ears. These sponsors are some to stick around for. Phew, here we go. Martin Michael, this episode, we're sponsored by Manscaped, all right?   Now this ball trimmer is waterproof. I used it the other night. It doesn't cut at all. I had no breathing. He was trying to, he was trying to cut his wrists with them. No, on your balls, they don't even cut. Look, look at this. I'm putting it against my wrist and nothing. So if you're suicidal, don't buy them.   No, I'm kidding. New Zealand you're in as well. You get ball toner. You get ball deodorant. Yeah, let's have a look at this. It smells nice after.  You know what I mean? Cause you get it for cheaper. It's a great product. And here's a ball mop. They got little mops for your testicles. Can I use one? Yeah, of course you can. And helping them helps the podcast. That's exactly right, Matthew Brown. That is exactly right. So that's sponsor one. So go and help yourself to some manscape products. All right. All right, the second sponsor. Oh, Michael's really getting in there. God. Is it nice? That is distracting. That is sickening. Does it feel nice? Oh yeah. I was hot. Stop it.  Matthew Brown. What's the underwear they put in there as well? Oh yeah, you get free undies. Or not free.   Toot, toot, toot. A little bit of a, what's this, eh? What do we got in here? Oh, it's the charger.  All right. You got a little, a little toiletry bag. Look at that.   All right. So they'll continue to sponsor the podcast.  Manscape.com discount code fully actual.  The last one was 40 minutes long. So this is like our entire week. We film bits every day and we put it all together for an entire week. So you get to see behind the scenes of everything. We include extended cuts of all our social media videos.   It's not bad now.  And like the episodes now, Julian's- They're just a dancer of fuckery.  He does a good job.  You can sign up for free and have a look to see if you like it.   Help us out by subscribing to that. Okay, and that is, that is all we'll say about that. All right?  Yeah, no, yeah. We demand it. And help our manscape friends out. Anyway, enjoy the podcast from now on. All right guys, that's the end of episode one.  I'll imagine that cut.   Well, let's explain what we're gonna do for the episode, man. Let's let everyone know so that everyone doesn't want to leave. Can we move this please? Yeah. All right, we'll move it. We'll leave some of the products out here.   All right, so for this episode we've got a few new segments. We're gonna trial them, see how we go. Gone with the flow, man. We're trying to be much cooler this season. Yeah, look, we've changed the letters from rainbow to like a slick black with lights in it. And we've removed most things from the table.  Yeah, we're gonna, for new season, you start. Gone with the flow. Hang tent. We've also got a segment where I aggressively read German phrases. Can't wait. That was sent in by Nikki, one of our fans. That's right. That is correct, Matthew Brown. Look how many she did. That would have taken ages. We also have some cool shit sent via the PO box during our break, which we'll open a few things today. And the rest, we got Arnold Fun making a return on the prank call. He's gonna try and buy a house.  We got fucking, it's just a big, oh, and our brand new segment, which I can't wait to get into, it's a new segment called The Hunt. Oh yeah. And that's fucking, you wait. I'm not even gonna explain that. You have to stick around. Sorry, mate. Sorry. It's good. Be cool, man. Be cool, remember?  Is it, Matt?  Am I really shiny on camera, Matt? No, you're good. Okay. Well, I'm sweating a lot. Look at that. It's from the wig, Mr. Clank, huh? The wig, the hot lights. Hello, I'm Dr. Warren. I'm taking this wig off. Oh, it's so good. Just like that. Yes, I liked it better before. Now it's like an emo blonde fringe. Yeah. Remember emos? Yeah, they're still kicking. Remember that emo you followed home and put his dog in a potato sack and beat it against the tree because you didn't like emos? What? Yeah. Yep. Anyway, what's next? Ah, we're up to on this day. On this day! It has returned. It has returned.     This is stuff from years ago, some of it. Oh, really? Oh, man. Dark web research. There you go. Wow, you have access to that. Well, there's ways. Dude, that's hot. All right, this first one is actually quite sad. So we might just have a moment of silence after it, but and this is the first I've ever read about this. I had no idea this place even existed, but on this day in 2014, so seven years ago today, we remember the victims of the Fahala massacre when 19 people were fucked to death by seven massive African bodybuilders. They were high on a concoction of meth and extra strong viagra and stormed a special needs facility after a night of partying.  How old were they? They were ranging in ages, but let's just have a moment of silence. How old was the youngest? Just really picture it. Picture that happening. Well, okay, I need the ages. Shh, come on, just think of the... No, no, no, don't go away. Don't go away with me. Disgusting people. There's some really, it's just sad that that happened still. Well, fuck, has it happened since then? Well, you know, it was only seven years ago, but like, man. How many years did they go away? What are you building in general?  You know, it's not... Stormed a special needs facility. Well, like, did they go for life? Or... You're asking the wrong person. I'd never even heard of it. Matt researched all this. Did you... was there footage of it? Can we watch any footage? Hard to find. Dark web. Right. We'll take the word from that. We're not going to put that on. Come on. We don't want to do that to people. I mean for us to watch. On this day in 2018, Morgan Freeman battled for his life when a stray cat entered his house.   In fact, it probably made sounds a lot like this. And he says here, Matt, to demonstrate the sounds of the cat. So, what would... What would the sounds be like of a burning cat? Meow. Oh, come on, Matt. Fucking... You wouldn't have... You wouldn't have written that at the end unless you had something you actually really wanted to demonstrate.  You've... I heard you practicing outside. What? Come on! Do the sounds of a burning cat, Matt. Come on! Hey, I'm just going to picture a burning cat. Yeah, that's it.  Run around the house on fire. Meow. Come on. Yeah! That's pretty good. Truly, truly. You've done that.  Are you Morgan Freeman? Next. On this day in 2019, Sylvester Stallone ran a full marathon on his knees to raise awareness for autistic apes. He dragged his knees along roads for 42 kilometers, which resulted in his kneecaps being completely worn off. He now uses those Jew hats as kneecaps and said if he had his time over again, he would not have done it.  No, it's just... I don't know. What are you asking me for? Matt? It's a very weird thing to do, don't you think, Matt? He must have been on the old thing. And Jew hats for kneecaps? Like, are they hard? I've never touched one, but they are, like, perfect kneecaps. They look comfy. Yeah, they're probably... You can get different sort of... You can get different sizes too, I bet you that. Yeah, for big heads for small heads. I bet you that for free. On this day... On this day in 2015, Kim Kardashian connected a car battery to her electric toothbrush. The bristles spun at such a velocity that they shattered her teeth and grated her tongue. The fast-spinning bristles even created a small black hole which leads to a spot back in time before she was married to Kanye. She visits that time quite frequently and sometimes stays there for days at a time when Kanye's Alzheimer's flares up and makes him difficult to love.  Man, that's like science, man.  Are they getting divorced? Roderanema! Yeah, I'll fax it. Are they getting divorced? I wouldn't surprise you. I heard a rumour. It's Kanye's Alzheimer's is really out of control. I was reading Woman's Day, but...  Oh, look, they're better than a current affair. Damn. And the Daily Mail. I don't mind the Daily Mail now after they said one nice thing out of 50 about us. Oh, really? Have they done a story on us? Yeah, the coin car. The coin car, the nice thing. They said about a nice thing, no more. By the way, everyone has been seeing the coin car around. Man, the coin car is just... I just literally had an email today from the Korean Mail. They're doing a story on it.  You know how we parked at Gasworks the other day? Yeah. That got... Someone took a photo, put it in, like, a new farm Facebook group. Went nuts again. We've got to leave the sign on top when we park it. Yeah. 100%. But it's scary because people might take it off. You might just have to have it when you're driving around.  Well, we can liquid nails it on. That solves everything. Yeah, but I don't like driving around it on my street.  Oh, Michael, you... Michael is very particular about the reputation he has on this street. No. He has the neighbors thinking and anything poorly of him. No, I just...   He just pisses facing my neighbor's house. It's your... It's our... It's kids' next door.  Can't...  Can't control what your kids are looking at, your dog can't...   But yeah, I just try and make sure that everyone's comfortable because we went from fucking, you know... That is not arrogant. Having our sign on top of the coin car, it is a work of art and people need to know who made it. Okay. I should have a story about the coin car.    I heard a group of police officers came up from Canberra for training and saw the coin car and got photos in front of it. You're lying. True story. Who told you that, Matt?     Where are you going?  I'm shutting your doors. Oh, yeah, smart.  See what I mean?  Basically, right now, all my neighbors can probably hear this because the doors were open, with the windows open. Thank you, Matt, for shutting the doors. I don't know how I feel about that.  So I'm just trying to make it a little bit more chill in this neighborhood. No, you're trying to make it much more chill than the old neighborhood. That's what you're doing. Much more chill. Yeah, which is fine. I guess. Okay. So we'll come to a happy medium. We will half liquid nails. Why don't you just put a sign on it?  As I'm driving. Because I seriously think someone has to do that sign. No, no, no. Okay, how about we do this? We judge the feeling we have in our gut and the suburb. Okay. So we park the car.  It's Tuesday in the valley.  If you're in New Farm or New Market, sorry, Gasworks, very posh shops, those, we'll leave it on. We even got some, we got numbers that day. What about the people listening now know that you can remove the sign? Yeah, you've destroyed everything. So, oh yeah. Yeah, we'll probably cut it. Michael, so let's liquid nails it on. All right? Yeah. The sign is settled. It's settled, liquid nails. As soon as this podcast is done, we'll liquid nails that thing down. We've got to do the bindings first.  We do actually have that. Yeah, they're inside the five cent coin. Don't even bother trying. We can see it right now. Like seriously, I can see the car from here. We can. The next segment is called The Haunt. And this is a segment where we try and achieve a goal week by week by week. Every week we try and achieve said goal in a different way until we achieve the goal. Now, it's sort of based around hunting for someone. And you know, we've had a sneaking suspicion. You guys, especially our Australian fans, you know who Hamish and Andy are, right?  If you're not from Australia, look them up. Everyone always says, oh, you guys are like the Wish version of Hamish and Andy. Don't they?  You know, Wish. It's quite an insult. Oh yeah. But I get it, okay? They're very, very good. But then I started thinking, are they too good? And I set Michael out with a task of finding out what they are. And we both do it. And when they are. And Michael comes back to me and says, look man, no one we know has ever seen them. I did say that. Right? He said that to me. And I said, well, hang on. Come to think of it. Hang on. Here we go. I haven't ever seen them either. And guess what? Neither has Michael or Matt, okay? Which leads us to believe we sat down. We did, got the algorithms out. We had a whiteboard.  Like that. Yeah. All over and over. The whole time. And we concluded that Hamish and Andy may not be real people. And like. Do you know what I mean? Matt, are you following? You've been seeing the technology we have. It's crazy.  It looks like the real thing. They made a hologram of Tupac. I feel like years ago, like 10 years ago and made it look like he was performing on stage. Who knows if Tupac was even real? 10 years ago. So imagine now.  Do we, Matt? No. Do we? So we thought we need to prove or disprove our theory.  So this is what we've going. This is our goal. This is our plan on the hunt. We're going to send them two T-shirts and that's gonna say we are real people. We're gonna send them that to them. And if they put the T-shirt on and send us a video saying, hey guys, yes, we are real people. Whilst wearing the shirts, then we will believe that they are real people because holograms cannot wear shirts. It just falls straight off. And like straight down. Photo, they send us a photo maybe, but there's such thing as Photoshop. So we don't want a photo, we prefer a video. So you're probably all thinking, how do we go about doing this?  Well, I'll tell you how. All right, today we ordered the shirts. Okay, so they're coming. Today also we took the first step in contacting them. I've emailed Andy's personal Instagram account. Hamish's personal Instagram account and their main Instagram account. Hamish and Andy. All right, so I messaged this to Hamish. He hasn't seen it yet. Hey Hamish, we're Marty and Michael and we're a comedy duo from Brisbane. We often get referred to as the wish version of Hamish and Andy by our audience. We have come to realise that we don't even think you guys are real people and are in fact holograms. No one we know has ever even seen you guys in real life and come to think of it, we have never seen you guys in real life either. If we send you a shirt with the text, we are real on it, would you be willing to wear it and send us a video of you guys confirming that you are in fact real people? Holograms cannot wear shirts which would prove your existence. No reply to this will add further speculation that you are both in fact holograms invented by Roeve McManus. Do you understand what I'm saying? This has been The Hunt. That was good. That's a great introduction to that part of the show. You might have a case here because if you look up their bio, it says they're radio hosts. They're... Siri could be a radio host. Yeah, they're television hosts. So I've already debunked that now. They're not radios. And it says they're television hosts. What?  You can't fucking... A TV sits in the lounge room. But it doesn't say they're real. Exactly, man. That's what I'm saying. So we may not be the wish version of Hamish and Andy. We may be.   That's what I'm saying, man. You've got to climb the stairs. Oh, my God. You've got to climb the stairs of knowledge. You've got to climb the stairs. For the rest of the episode, you're Hamish. I'm Andy. And Matt is And. No, you can...  Oh, my ribs! Okay, back to reality. All right, Hamish, what's the next segment? And... It's questions.  Questions, you dogs! If you want your question answered, comment your question on this video on YouTube. Even if you're listening on Spotify, sorry, I know you can't send in questions. Go to Marty, Michael, fully actual YouTube channel and comment your question there. And Matt will pick a few, okay? Matt will pick a few and we'll answer them the following week. Do you understand how it works? So we're going to answer questions from the season finale. Season finale from last year when we had ducks nons. So we're going to answer some questions there. Should we invite questions to be asked on the Instagram page as well? Yeah, they get lost a little bit, don't they? Yeah. Like, would you rather... Because it's better to just go to one. Like, would you rather go to both or just... It'd be easy to go to one, but I guess if they end up there, I'll pull them. Okay, yeah. If you want to... Everyone's got YouTube. Yeah, follow Marty, Michael, fully actual on Instagram. Send them that way. Matt does that. Oh, yeah, well, that's right. We've got the Instagram account. You can send them to that Instagram account. I can monitor that. Yeah, don't send them to Marty and Michael. Matt will be running that, guys. So feel free to send whatever you want to that account as well. You can send, like, yeah.  No! No, wait, wait. Hang on. Hang on. This is the fully actual podcast Instagram. And I don't want anything of mine. Last time you said that, the world turned into a very dark, dark place.  Stop. There were behemoths. We don't talk about it. So these are the questions coming in. All right. Question one. Why don't you guys buy an aircon unit and put it on the table for the next set? That is a wish that we did. Because it's too loud. A wish. Yeah. We tried to have the fan on. It's like... It's not too loud today. Yeah. It's getting cooler.  And yeah. I'm struggling.  Yeah. You've got aircon at yours. This came from a DOMA... Oh, I'm going to say this wrong. DOMA's Burles. Burles? No, that's exactly how you say it. Yeah. Three times. But the reason we don't have an aircon is because it would mess with our sound. And so the boys won't sound very well. And it's going to cool down eventually. So hopefully in a month's time it won't be a sweat dude. Oh, I can't wait to sweat, dude. The winter's going to be so hot. And we can cuddle up together. Oh, snuggly. Yes. Ben Jovova. Oh. Mm-hmm. Question number two from It's Cheesy. How does Jackson O'Dowey just roll in and look more professional than Marty and Michael on their own podcast? That's probably because we don't know what that means. Yeah, we don't really act that professionally either. Um, yeah, look, um, yeah, Jackson's like, he's a seasoned veteran, man. And we're fucking... Actually, I think I can answer this question. We actually asked him a fair few serious questions. I think I did as well. And so instead of being in a bit more of a comedic sense, he went a little bit serious with us. Jackson's coming home, by the way. He's fucking... So hot. He's in America right now. He's coming home. And we're going to do some videos together. So, yeah. Break that down, man. Break that down on your pants. Next question is from El Barro Torres. Um, if you could live on any planet where you could thrive and survive, what planet would it be? Earth? Good God.  So if it couldn't be Earth, where would it be? I'd probably go fucking... Michael would be on the Sun. A solar system with a planet like Earth. There's a few of them out there. There's plenty out there. Definitely. And I'd want like...  I don't know. There are aliens. Like, fuck...  It's... We wholeheartedly believe this. And we're going to try and prove it this year.  You probably think I'm being sarcastic. Well, let me tell you something right now. There's some hotspots in Australia. They built pyramids.  Trust me. I've already seen one. But you guys didn't believe me. Whatever. Next question. Would either of you ever consider bringing your girlfriends on the podcast for an episode? Yeah, we've talked about it.  I don't know. I guess we could... She could come on for a quick interview and then we'd just ask her what it's like to be with me. I'm scared of her responses, though. Next question is from Daneem. Daneem. When are we going to see Shami and Jaden appear on the podcast? Tonight. We've asked them a few times. We haven't linked up. Yeah, they were going to come down. They're very busy boys. And it's only an hour and a bit away from each other.  It's like, yeah, it's difficult because you come up. You do an hour podcast and you got to go back down. We had something planned properly up here, like a proper vid. But we normally go down to the Gold Coast when we film. They just had a massive increase in workload with opening up their... Yeah, they got their bar now. Yeah. So we're going to this Friday. Really?  We're going there this Friday. Oh, no, this Thursday. I think I said to Jaden. Yeah, this Thursday, midday.  Matt? Next question. And? Next question is from Taylor Dow. When fans approach you in public, is there a certain pet peeve that happens commonly? What's that mean? So is there something that commonly happens all the time that's quite a noisy when people approach you in public? They've got their phone out. They want to ask for a photo, but they don't. So then you're sort of left having this conversation waiting for them to ask for the photo, but then they don't. So the conversation goes on for too long and there's awkward silences.  If leaning for a kiss. And sometimes they're young, so it's awkward. Yeah, that. So if you see us, just come and get it. Just come and say hi, get a phone out. Straight up.  I'm never going to say no to you dogs. Tell them that. Yeah. And more, I guess this isn't fans, but it's like the awkwardness when you're in a room and pet your friends, like the group are talking about you and they want to come up, but they don't. So you're sort of like left there hearing the discussion about them coming up or trying to get a friend to come up. I'm looking at you. And then you're like just sort of left there awkward while you're waiting for your food or something. Oh. And that is the difference between Michael and myself. Did I hear that correctly on the episode? Jackson said he killed someone. Yeah. Yep. Jackson has in fact murdered like two people, I think. You can pay for it in Eastern Europe. Yeah.  Yeah, I've seen this. What's that movie called? Romania. In Eastern Europe, they have like a place. Hostel. Hostel. They find homeless people and they're taking them to the hostel. And yeah. No, you can get babes as well, dude. Like you put, yeah.  And kill them. You can do whatever you want. We think this is all unconfirmed, but just where we're thinking out loud here. But yeah, you can. Next question. Also from Taylor. Yes, Taylor. Yes. Put two in there. He's asking, how's he engaged on this podcast? So low, you boys are the best. We're slowly getting there. It takes time.  So it's getting there. And the difference between season one and season two, it was pretty big.  This, this guy, these guys are like on it. Yeah, they're like Hamish and Andy. Yeah, they're like Hamish and Andy. Also, yeah, spread it around to your friends. Spread it like Corona. Yeah, if you just want to support us. But yeah, like, you know, it's, it's a slow grind. It's a podcast. It's not for everyone. And look at that. We built our fan base on quick three minute prank compilations.  So I got a question from Shannon Murray. It's more of a comment than a question, but she basically, basically saying that she suffers pretty bad from anxiety. And I see a lot of comments from, from people saying that the same thing and how they feel about it. But she summed it up pretty well. But she's basically saying that I'm watching you guys helps her get through a day pretty well. And I see that from a lot of people. So I think she fucking, she basically says thank you. That's what we do.  We're here to heal people. And that's why we're dipping our toe into the medical marijuana as well. Because the healing properties, let me tell you, they are beyond what humans previously thought to be possible. So just stay, stick around and we'll show you. We've actually got some weed facts on our Instagram for that as well. Yeah. Follow. Did we say that at the start? Yeah. And we'll also be selling some weed merch on this. Soon. So get on there, man. But yeah. Thank you. Any questions? Send them in. Thank you to that girl for leaving that lovely comment. It's what we do. What we do. It makes all worthwhile. Tell them, man. It does help. See. See. Can you fart again? Come on, man. You're out. You shouldn't have wasted it. He did one just before we started. I was so grumpy at him. It doesn't, it's not, it doesn't work like that. No.   And he's in my blood. And this comes out of my breath. Yeah. I have to push it out of the stink smell body up. Yeah. It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, I get it.    That is the truth. Is it, Matt? I find out. Hmm.  Your and. And what is it? So cut maybe the big explanation, but it is possible.  Just cut here into that. Cut the big explanation, but it is possible. Just cut everything I said.  We got a next segment, man. It's a newie. It's German phrases. It's German phrases. Yes. Tracy. So one of our fans sent in like fucking, what are you having?  I think there's three. Oh, I don't know. There'll be a lot. A lot of German phrases. I'm going to read them out and explain what they mean. There's some of these are slang, so they won't translate literally. Just, yeah, you get it. I'll do what? Four? Four? You want me to do four? Yeah. Three is a good number. I'll go for that. I can do this all day.  It's speaking in German.  But all right. Here we go. The first phrase. Used by Germans. Typically used in arguments. And they disagreeing this one. Or when someone's annoying them.   Which means which translates literally to you go me on the cookie. But it means you're getting on my nerves. Oh my God.   You wanted this huh? You wanted this. Yeah, okay. But I can still be mad at it. What's cookie in German? Kicks. I finished the German phrase number two. Get ahead of yourself. That's past of kind of cool out. That's past of kind of cool out.     Yeah, okay.  It's a little offensive.  You have saved the day. This is the best entertainment ever It's just German phrases everyone and that's how you say them. That's how we all talk to each other. It's ridiculous Thank you. I can ridiculous. It's it's it's another language and it'd be nice if you respected that culture oh Anyway, let's move right along here. We've got two more segments left The first is you guys were busy sent us some shit during the holidays. We appreciate that so it's time for the All right, so we got sent this first was sent Last year from season two. We just didn't get it and waited for you Sorry if this letter is late.  It's massive to my Aussie Cobbers allow me to introduce myself. I'm 21 from the UK.  Yeah, we we loved law growing up.  It's nearly like Rodney Mullin your mate.  Hey and lastly What advice would you give to others if they would like to start their own job or business?   We're gonna leave this right here ham Tom thank you ham.    Is he getting colon damage? Yeah, you know my heart rate is like probably a hundred and twenty now I have to push so hard. Yeah, dude.  This is exciting. It could be anything in there. It could be something very harmful Could be drugs Have a little super my ginger beer everyone not a brand deal.  It's a present Within a present Many presents within a present. It's a little box. There's a little Matthew really this one's to you. Yeah, I'll have that.  I need socks. I've got socks.  I can socks What socks I get pigs? Oh Pigs are not fine, huh? Thank you for I'm Matthew Gregory Brown from wholesome. He makes a lot of concrete. I'm gonna Open Julian's we got a letter here too. I'm gonna open Julian's cuz he's not here Julian got a little pack of skittles man. I can't read cursive Julian got a little pack of skittles. What'd you get Matt? I've got little sheeps.  Oh socks as well Julian. I'm having your present later when I'm stoned Well, very nice. Wow. Hey, my favorite legends. I just want to say how thankful I am for you guys and your content You make me laugh so much and it makes all of my days better all of us in 2021 all the way from Estonia Estonia no Well the socks are made in Slovakia It's Slovakia.  Not juicy fruit. No at the underscore juicy fruit if you want to say thank you on our behalf Thank you very much Is that what you guys should do these letter? Oh, sorry should you um should you have? Marty and Michael Pitches of your heads on them.   Yeah. Yeah, we'll think about it. All right, which brings us to our final segment.  I don't know how this is gonna go guys. Okay. Now. I'm going to call a real estate agent as Arnold fun and I'm going to start inquiring about houses to buy I Don't really know where this is gonna go. I don't know what we're doing But I'm going to I don't know if this will continue either I might try and think of something else if this doesn't work very well. No one knows anything. We're all in this together Just have fun.  I leave North Brisbane renting at the moment and I'm looking to buy house over the next Maybe two three month Hello, sorry. Yeah, sorry. Where are you looking to buy house? Sorry North North Brisbane area and up North Brisbane Maybe how you say us play you write that down as clear charm side. Maybe maybe a little further. Maybe And yeah, I need a house with Land I have a Small small pig collection. I breed pig. Okay.  No with this. Oh the current my car in the house.  So we can't redo this prank call, but just know They'll get better that that man He started a war there with our phone because that that that is not that is not on and and I will be speaking to his superiors I Know where he works So watch this space because I'm gonna get that guy fired. He sounded lovely He hung up on me man He did he had a kid in the background.    Don't worry. Okay. I'm gonna it's gonna get crazy.  Tell your dad tell your uncle. We're back Watch come back next week.   Why because we are the best