Welcome to Bogle Heads on Investing, podcast number 35. Today our special guest is Ron Lieber. Ron is a New York Times award-winning columnist and the author of a new book, The Price You Pay for College. And today, that's what our discussion is all about. Hi everyone, my name is Rick Ferri and I'm the host of Bogle Heads on Investing. This episode, as with all episodes, is brought to you by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a 501C3 nonprofit organization that you can find at BogleCenter.net. Your tax-deductible contribution to help expand financial literacy are greatly appreciated. Today our special guest is Ron Lieber, New York Times award-winning columnist and the author of a new book, The Price You Pay for College, an entirely new roadmap for the biggest financial decision your family will ever make. I recently interviewed Ron for the Bogle Heads speaker series in a live interview that is available on the BogleCenter.net website. This is the audio from that video. What I learned after reading Ron's book and interviewing him was that picking the right college, getting into that college, and paying for that college is not nearly as clear-cut as we would like it to be. There's an awful lot that goes on behind the scenes. This is a wonderful interview if you have children who will be going to college or grandchildren who will be going to college, or perhaps you will be going to college. There's something to learn for everyone. So here we go. With no further ado, let's welcome Ron Lieber. Thank you, Rick. It is an honor here to be among, you know, sort of my fellow personal finance nerds. I know there are few people living and walking and breathing in the United States or in the world who care more about beating the system, winning the details, and getting it right than this crew. And it's a special honor to be here with Mr. Asset Allocation himself doing the grilling for the next 60 minutes. So I look forward to it. Lay it on me. Ron, we'll start out with you. Over the past decade, your writing has shifted to focus on family finances, but particularly raising children, teaching children about money, and now sending those children to college. So I think I can guess this, but what sparked your interest in doing a book on the price you paid for college? Sure. Well, some of this is born of my own personal experience. I grew up in Chicago. You know, my family was well off enough to, you know, afford three private school of tuition, you know, back in the day in the 70s and 80s and when that didn't cost quite as much as it does today. And I had a couple of things happen in there that kind of changed everything for me. So my parents split up. If any of you are divorced or the children of divorce, you know that that is a calamitous financial event among others, right? You know, one household you turn it into two, they're just going to be more expenses. And then right about the same time, my father, my late father lost his job and he did not earn, you know, much income to speak of for the next couple of years, except through some occasional consulting jobs. And it was about a decade really until my family was back to where it had been financially. Anyway, we were sort of thrust into the, you know, private school financial aid system for K to 12, such as it exists, you know, it basically consisted of a board of directors at our school in Chicago deciding whether the labor kids were going to be evicted for lack of ability to pay. And thank God we weren't it's still the most generous thing that anybody's ever done for me and those kids who I grew up with, you know, became my family and are still my closest friends to the state. So I got to stay there at the Francis Parker school, but when it came time to apply to college, we did not have enough money for the places that I wanted to attend. Luckily, our college counselor there knew the name of a guy to see the guy in the Chicago land area, you who you would go to for help with with applying for financial aid. And we called him up he gave us an address he said we were to you know show up at 5pm the following Tuesday at this place in Evanston. And we were going to, you know, we're supposed to bring him $50 in cash and he said to go through the side door. So we thought okay, and we show up at this address and turns out it's the Office of Financial Aid at Northwestern University. And it turns out that we were there to see the assistant director who had this incredible side hustle going on, where every day during the fall at 5pm. He would usher in these needy families and you would pay him a little money which he presumably would not report to the IRS or certainly to his employer. And then he would proceed to explain to you all of the secrets of the financial aid system. And it turned out to this guy knew exactly what he was talking about and I got into Amherst College early decision I got a great financial aid package. And I learned a couple of important things from that, namely that you know the grown up world was filled just chock full of complex systems involving money and they were totally made to be hacked. He wasn't encouraging us to break the law right, but there was this guy out there who knew the answers and for very little money, you know we could get a hold of him and he could tell us what to do. And the lesson stayed with me right so it's not any big surprise really that I grew up to be the person whose beat is beating the system in the newspaper that's always the way that I thought of my personal finance work at the Wall Street Journal and now at the New York time, but basically anything and everything that hits you in the wallet, you know particularly items that have large costs or large potential costs and then involve a lot of emotions and feelings are the things that I care the most about. So of course I became a dad in 2005 for the first time I now have two kids a 15 year old and a five year old. I became a little bit obsessed with 529 plans back then I was at the Wall Street Journal and there were still a fair bit to say about you know the investment choices and the high fees and, and you know the various limitations and the complexity. As most of the people on this call probably know we have largely although not completely solved for the, you know generalized mediocrity of these 529 plans. So you know to a certain point I moved on in my writing to write about how to pay for college instead of how to save for college because we were starting to hear about all these people coming out of undergraduate with just you know piles of student loans, particularly, you know 15 years ago when you could still get the so called private loans not the federal loans that are capped private loans without any adult cosine. So I started, you know, been into that area and I'm still writing, you know sort of sporadically about those very complex systems involving that we have not yet solved for in the New York Times. But what started to happen as time went on is that I would hear from readers and from, you know, colleagues and friends who were super confused, not so much about how to save and not so much about how to pay. They were asking value questions they would come to me and they'd say Ron you know my kid, you know, got got into the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana and that's going to be maybe $125,000 because we don't qualify for any need based state. My kid also got into Kenyon College because they're interested in English being a writer and that's a really great small liberal arts college in Ohio, and they gave us a bunch of discounts, even though we don't qualify for any need based financially that's going to be $200,000. And then my kid shot the lights out and got into Northwest right so that's going to be $300,000. Where in your library of big data sets that you keep track of over there is the data set that tells me why you know Northwestern is $200,000 better than the University of Illinois and we're going to get into that. We're going to get into that. We're going to get into that. Right. So I thought, I thought, wow. I need to start thinking about value. I need to start thinking about what to pay for college to. And so that was sort of my journey to becoming obsessed with, you know, the college question it was from personal experience as a student. It was from personal experience as an investor with one and then two kids living in New York City, a high cost area. And then it was from professional experience with this like avalanche of incredibly confused people asking questions about value that I did not know how to answer. Well, your book starts with a discussion that contrasts the advertised cost of college by those institutions with the price of college. So I'm going to show a chart and this chart is the price of the cost of college from 1980 through 2000. Now 1980 is a really important period date for me because it's when I graduated college and I went back and I looked I actually paid room and board tuition and everything else. $10,000 for four year degree at the University of Rhode Island. That's what it costs. Now this shows this chart is showing the cost of college over the next 40 years going up by 1200% and during that same period of time the cost of inflation going up by 236. So here's what I did I went back to my old alma mater, the University of Rhode Island, and I said, if I paid $10,000 back in 1980 and it was the cost of inflation was 236%, I would pay $36,600 for the same education today. Turns out though, I actually looked at the data that I got off the administration of the website from the University of Rhode Island, and it came out exactly to $128,000. This chart is very accurate. Now, my question to you Ron is, why does this chart exist? What happened here? Yeah. So I guess let's start by making sure we label this chart correctly, right? Because what we were looking at there was list prices. And I assume at some point sooner rather than later in the hour we'll get to net prices and discounts, right? But there are plenty of people who pay the list prices, particularly at public institutions like URI that don't have a lot of institutional aid. And if you're a good bogelhead and you've subsaved effectively, you may have so many assets and so you may well pay the list price. So let's talk about those list prices. First of all, let's consider a public institution like the one that you attended or any flagship state university. And on there, more than anything that's caused that line to be so steep is a decrease in the amount of subsidy that the state legislatures give to the schools, right? I mean, to the extent that the price of those institutions are quote unquote artificially low, that they don't cover the cost of actually maintaining the buildings and paying all the professors and providing programming for the students is because the state uses tax or other revenue and just hands it over to the university to keep tuition costs down, right? So back in the day, this was thought to be a useful enterprise, a good investment. A well-trained workforce grows up to be more productive, pays higher taxes because it's earning more, and that money just sort of comes back to the state and it gets a return on investment. But back in the last big recession in particular 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, these states were so hammered by a loss of tax revenue in that enormous recession back then that they had to make some difficult choices. And one really easy thing to do politically, right, is just to sort of stick it to the state university system, right? And force the, you know, the chancellor and the board to make difficult decisions about whether they're going to raise prices or whether they're going to cut services or cut programs, right? And those schools felt like, well, we can raise prices because what it really means is that, you know, these students and these families will probably just have to borrow a little bit more, you know, maybe $1,000 extra per year, you know, they can afford it, right? Because this was already a subsidized education in particular. But, you know, if that thinking continues to feed on itself over time, that's how you get a chart like this with public institutions. Now, if you're looking at the chart for private institutions, still pretty steep, far outpacing inflation, maybe not, you know, but starting from a higher price, which is why the angle of the slope is not as high as it would be for publics. With the privates, the private institutions need to justify their higher prices with, you know, more faculty, better services, shinier buildings, you know, they're in competition with the state university systems, right? But the other thing they have going on is that as time has gone on, both market demand and regulatory requirements have meant that these institutions have either needed to or felt like they really had no choice, but to add a whole bunch of administrators, right? We've got all sorts of new laws that require equality on the playing field for our daughters, right? Title IX, you know, diversity and equal access in areas outside of gender. We have, you know, ever higher technology budgets at these institutions. There are parents who demand bigger and better career centers, right? Kids have become accustomed to living in a certain manner, and if your dorms don't have air conditioning, well, you know, people may not choose your school, right? And so there are all these market pressures, regulatory pressures, which has led to there being a much higher number of administrators at these schools. Administrators don't come cheap. They're reasonably well trained, they're experienced, and I think if you get right down to it, right, as a parent, if you've got a child who's going to college and they've got a medium grade mental health challenge, right? You don't want a 23-year-old grad student working in the counseling center using your child as their guinea pig, right? You want a 43-year-old PhD psychologist working in the mental health center to take care of your precious child who you've pushed off into the world for the first time, right? And you multiply that times all sorts of different parents with all sorts of different needs, and pretty soon you have a lot more administrators than you used to, and that's got to be paid for some way. And for the private institutions, if they don't have a big endowment, that comes from tuition. So that's how the list price goes up there. Well, the second thing is, you know, the books, I noticed the books have increased with the rate of that original inflation, the cost. Books have gone up about 1200% over the last 40 years, too. So they have far outpaced the cost of just buying a regular book. In fact, if you bought a regular book, the cost has actually come down. It's basically been lower than the inflation rate. So tell me if you will, if you know this, what's going on with textbooks, college textbooks? Why are they so expensive? Yeah. So I know a little bit about this only because I helped some friends of mine run a campus-based used bookstore back in the late 80s and early 90s. And look, some industries have higher profit margins than others, and textbook publishers really rake it in. Why didn't they do that? Well, first of all, I can tell you the how. If you put out a slightly changed, really just like repaginated, or you change the font size of the edition of your textbook every 18 months, then you can just sync the used textbook market altogether. And if you want to do well in the class and don't want to be checking the book out from the library, you've got no choice but to buy this thing. And the books back in the day would only be available at the campus bookstore, and you paid the list price, and that was that. And there's a reasonably high barrier to entry for these things because the professors themselves have high standards. They want the textbook to be excellent. And it turns out it takes a couple of years to write a really great, thoughtful textbook for organic chemistry or for Psych 101 or for Econ. And so they do this because they can. I mean, it's not an incredibly large piece of the budgetary pie, but it's just high enough that it really bugs people.  And, you know, people, the professors in particular have sort of ingrained habits and it's tough on the crack. So let me ask a question since college is getting to be so expensive, as we've seen, and we'll get into what people actually pay as opposed to what the advertised cost is here in a little bit but tell me whether it's still worth it to pay all of this money to go to a four year college. Did you go to college anymore, or four year college? Are you going to get a better job? And what's the data show? Well, so, I mean, let's start with the baseline economic data.  So that million dollar difference is between people who finish and people who don't or who never go in the first place. Right. So that's a lot of money over time. But that's just an average, right. So of course, all of our kids are above average.  I ask people to consider a different question, right, because not everybody goes to college for the same reason in the first place. So trying to figure out, you know, what's worth it and how much it's worth gets to the very definition of what college is in the first place.  And I'm like, surely you've thought about the point of the exercise if you're about to maybe spend $300,000 on this thing, right. And they, and then they, their faces crunch up and they're like, yeah, I guess we should do that, right. And so I get them talking, right. And it really just comes down to three things. You know, college first and foremost, not foremost, foremost for some people first college first is about the education, right.  Right.  So that's the first part. You know, the second part of college for for many people is the kinship. Right. You go to college to find the people that you never could have imagined existing in the world. Right.  These are the also the people who will form, you know, the beginnings of your career network. And it's not just peers by the way it's also grown ups right is the professors, it is, you know, the deans or, you know, other people you encounter along the way who will become your mentor, so and who will sort of drag you into a bigger and better version of yourself. So that's number two college about people. And then number three college is also of course at least for most people about the credential, right, and maybe that's a credential that allows you to take a kind of quantum leap up the social class ladder and into a, you know, middle class career where there is a reasonable amount of job security, you know, because you've gotten a bachelor's in nursing or a bachelor's in accounting or something like that, or you're going to go to med school. Or perhaps you're getting that credential because you know that, you know, the degree from Princeton when you're coming from rural Wisconsin will open doors for you into industries and companies that never would have been open to you otherwise, you know, with the sort of social capital and the snobbery and elitism and all of it, you know, that comes with a fancy name plated degree. So those are the three things that are college are about and there's no right answer to the question. Some people think all three are of equal importance. Then there's some people who are only going for the kinship and I make no judgments about that. And I only make judgments about the people who never stop to ask themselves the question in the first place, because if you don't do that. How do you know what you're shopping for. We're going to go to college, the children of the grandchildren are going to go to college now we have to figure out well which college, and then how to get into that college, and then how to pay for that college. Let's start out with selecting the right school. You list three unhelpful feelings you call them the three unhelpful feelings of fear guilt and snobbery and elitism. Can you explain why these are unhealthy. Well, I guess where you start right is you always want to be checking yourself right and this is a, this is not going to be any news to Bogle heads right. You know the Bogle head community has become used to over decades, resisting flashiness, resisting so called expertise, resisting the smart man and the smart woman who are supposedly the end all be all of you know investing prowess right. So, you know what are what are the things that that can cause you, you know, to spend more than you need to and I think, you know, those those emotions and those answers supply equally well the colleges that they do to to mutual funds or ETFs right first of all calls fear, right, fear that if you don't spend money fear that if you don't believe that you'll get what you pay for and the more you pay you'll more you'll get that if the fear that if you do it wrong if you if you cheap out that in this way your kids will go tumbling down the social class ladder from wherever it is that you've managed to clamber up to because you were too cheap, essentially, and that there's something wrong with you as a parent or as a grandparent. If you're not ponying up for the most expensive version of whatever it is that you know that your kid actually needs right college is not a want for many families it's it's a given. So this is actually a need it's just a question of you know how much you're going to pay for it so there's that fear right then there's guilt. guilt that we have not saved enough to provide whatever it is our kid wants in this category of need. guilt that guilt that we do not earn enough guilt that we chose the wrong profession that does not allow us to write a $300,000 check after taxes out of current income. guilt that we cannot do what our parents did for us, even though ricks parents in 1980 if they did pay for any of it. It looks like they didn't but you know had had they wanted to or been able to you know the final price tag for you. As you just explained at the top of the hour doesn't look anything like the $128,000 price tag, you know the 17 Kingston or Cranston or Providence would be looking at right now. Right. And so you know we get ourselves all hung up on what our parents did for us without really understanding that the world has changed entirely, or maybe we get all hung up on what our parents did not do for us right and we either deeply resent that they had the ability but not the willingness to or we know how much we struggled because they did not have enough money through no faults of their own, and we wanted to be exactly the opposite for our kids we want them never to have to worry about money during college for a second no matter how much it costs right, and if we haven't accomplished that if we haven't satisfied that goal then we're doing it wrong right so it's like guilt guilt guilt. We get ourselves on so many guilt trips about the stuff and I'm trying people trying to, you know, get people off those guilt trips, and then the fear in the snobbery is about the subconscious or maybe the conscious sense that where our kid goes to school, where we can afford to send our kid where they are able to get in is all some kind of final exam on parenting that the results of with blade in public to the public through like you know the Facebook and Instagram sweatshirt reveals and the bumper sticker in the window right and you want that that college to be as prestigious or fancy as possible otherwise you did it wrong otherwise you know you've got to see minus as a parent. Right, or even if we managed to kind of get over that and step outside of ourselves, we're worried about other people's snobbery.  Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, or you know a couple of other Wall Street firms.    You know, these are, these are relatively limited circumstances, but, you know, as a parent, right, I can see how if you have the means or the ability to borrow, right, you want to do everything you possibly can or you're tempted to not to close off any avenues to your whatever and that is how people end up spending $300,000 or borrowing to do so and sometimes it's for, you know, a reasonably good reason, and sometimes it's because people are confused. You talk a lot in the book about value, and you know are you getting the value out of your education or so forth so how do you separate for each individual of course it's different. So how do you separate value and how do you find value in the college system. Sure, so I mean to begin with trying to figure out what it is that you're going to school for right so let's forget about the 16 year old investment banker for a minute. Let's think about 16 year old who wants nothing more than to be a marine biologist right and this isn't you know the eight year old who like loves the dolphins this is the 16 year old who's like shooting the lights out in an AP bio and it's done an internship and is reasonably sure that they want to go not just to college but to graduate school right. So you're thinking about a lot of things there right but probably the first thing you're thinking about hopefully is you're thinking about the quality of the education but what what you're also thinking about is the quality of the mentorship, because you know that you can't get into one of these you know teeny tiny very competitive marine biology PhD programs or you figure this out with a little bit of research you can't do that without just a glowing lights out recommendation from your undergraduate you know faculty advisor right so how are you going to find somebody in an institution who's going to actually get to know your kid well enough to be able to write that kind of recommendation and what sort of environment or circumstances are going to need to exist is there a better chance of that happening if they're in you know biology 101 with 800 other people including 300 people who want to go to medical school, or is there a better chance of that happening if they go to a small liberal arts college that happens to have a really great biology program right. So you know you start thinking about size, you start thinking about faculty content. Again, if you're, you know, up there in northern Wisconsin and you've got that that buddy marine biologist on your hands wants to do it someplace other than you know Lake superior. You know maybe you're going to send them to Madison or to Wisconsin Whitewater, but there may be a lot of adjunct professors there or part-timers aren't even going to be around two or three years later. So if they go to Lawrence University, you know smaller school, you know if they go to Knox College if they if they go to one of the, you know smaller colleges in Minnesota, they're going to have a better shot at making that kind of contact right. And then you can go looking for data which actually does exist that will tell you which undergraduate institutions the PhD students at the biggest biology programs for PhD students, you know where the undergraduates actually come from right. The state is out there so you know you start looking for whatever data or evidence you can exist you can that exists that might give you some sense of whether an institution that costs more than your state university might actually be worth it if it stands the chance of raising the odds of helping your whatever it is that they want to do. So there are a number of problems with this right. First of all, to the extent that the colleges have good data on outcomes, they're not always so great about sharing, right, because if everybody shared standardized data, then there would be even more ways to compare and rank the schools, and this is not in their interest. And so, you know there's not always great data, it isn't easy to find I spent years, you know, sort of hoovering up resources and trying to spit them out in the book but I was not ultimately satisfied with what I was able to put together and, and it's the schools fault. And then there's the not so small matter of the fact that we are dealing with children, right, for reasons lost to history but that make absolutely no sense whatsoever. We spend all this money on teenagers right we don't send them off to serve in the US Armed Forces on a mandatory basis we don't send them off to do non military national service we don't encourage them for the most part to take a year or two off before going to college. So we've got these 18 year olds who've never done a darn thing in the world except you know scoop ice cream and work at a day camp and you know sit and sit in high school, going to college and we're making these six figure decisions investments based on what we think their teachers are, but some of them have no earthly idea what they want to do, and then many of the rest who are absolutely certain about Wall Street or marine biology, change their minds. Once they get into a really good college classroom and get exposed to you know bigger and better ideas. So the whole thing is fundamentally flawed and deeply dissatisfied. They're going to help people, you know, walk through a reasonably dysfunctional system with their heads screwed on, reasonably straight. Okay, so at the end of this journey, you're going to pick out a few schools and you're going to have to apply to get into those schools. So now we need to get in. And with that in mind, the big thing see these days seems to be diversity. I was listening to some entrance experts, if you will, former admissions experts, and they were talking about diversity, diversity, diversity, not just race and religion, but athletics, anything that sets you apart from others. So how do you use diversity to get into the school you want to get into. Sure. So, I mean, let's, let's just, you know, talk briefly and bluntly about about how this works at, you know, the, the, the rejective schools right the schools that reject the highest percentage of applicants.  You're at an advantage if you're rich, because you can donate building, right. And it tends to be way more affluent and way whiter people who benefit from what's known as, what's known as a legacy preference, right, where your grades can be lower and your scores can be lower, as long as your dad or both or like four generations of cabbets, you know, or eight generations, you know, went to Harvard or Amherst or Stanford, those people tend to be disproportionately affluent and white. When it comes to athletic preference, which gives you even a bigger edge than a legacy preference does, you know, many of those sports, although not all, but you know, the majority of them are sports that require a great deal of investment and nurturing to, you know, get you to a place through the private tutoring, through the kind of elite level clubs for it's right, that will get you ready to swim or play golf or play tennis or play lacrosse or play hockey at an institution that will give you a preference right so there to being wealthy gives you the bigger advantage and more often than not the people who are wealthy are white. Same thing through with testing tutoring on academics. And then there are preferences based on race, which are the ones that get the most attention, but may have a little bit less to do with who gets in, then, you know, the total number of people who get in via legacy preference, or via athletic preference specifically in the rich white sports. So all of that is like a, you know, big kind of toxic stew that generates a lot of attention. But what I think people miss a lot of the time is that like a step below there at some still like really excellent high quality schools that you know reject way more applicants that they could than they can take. You know, a huge advantage to being able to pay full price, because they get 50 or 75% of the way through the number of admissions they have to hand out, and then they start running out of financial aid. Right. And then the packages get weaker, or they just start rejecting people who need a right so if you are a Boglehead, and you, you know, have those compound interest charts imprinted in your brain which I do thanks to my dad, and the USA a magazine, sending me one when I was when I was 23 years old, I knew good and well right that I didn't want money to be a factor. And it's why I just started saving for college for my kids, like well they were still in you do it. Right. So money does provide a really sizable, and sometimes measurable admissions advantage there too. So, you know, in many of these institutions, the parents would be proud to send their kids to it's good to be rich. You know, it's complicated and it becomes politicized. But the fact of the matter is that they're all sorts of people of all sorts of skin tones and backgrounds, benefiting from a certain amount of admissions preference. And that makes it harder, you know, in many instances and most instances for people who do not have any sort of a hook. But we shouldn't forget that there are hundreds and hundreds of, you know, essentially open access undergraduate institutions out there, where more or less anybody can go you know if you can fog a mirror and you know and there's a lot of dedicated instructors at those places too. And, you know, I don't want to discount the worth of those institutions. So I was reading in the book that we were talking about the advertised price of college and the two reasons why colleges put these very high prices on their website number one, because some people will pay it. And number two is because if they don't put the high price on their people don't think they're getting good value for their money. So with that in mind, how do we pay for college. First of all, let's talk about discounting. It was enlightening to me and reading your book that internally admissions people call it discounting, but externally, they call it scholarships. Go into discounting. I mean, what should you pay? Not what the price is, but what should you pay? Right. Well, gosh, where do we start here? I mean, there's a couple of different ways that these discounts happen. And, you know, we'll use the terms interchangeably, but what you want to be thinking about as a parent, as a shopper, right? Like, what is the, you know, what is my actual cost of attendance going to be? And if I get, you know, an offer of, you know, financial aid, am I 100% sure I understand which these discounts or scholarships that we're not going to have to pay back? And that, you know, we understand how much the school is asking us to actually pay out of pocket and or what is telling us to borrow, right?  Most of the financial aid that was offered was offered based on need, right? So my family had to kind of lay ourselves bare in terms of our income and our assets. And then Amherst College decided what they thought we could afford to pay.  What's changed now is that that need-based aid system still exists, you know, at the 100 or so, you know, most well-resourced private institutions in America. State systems are a little different, but, you know, at the private ones, it still kind of looks like that. But, you know, starting around in the 90s, this whole separate system hived off has become known as Merit Aid. And Merit Aid was originally designed to help, like, fourth-tier institutions improve to the third or second tier by swiping kids who were qualified for second or even first-tier institutions by throwing money at them and making them feel good, right? So if you got this unsolicited, you know, offer in the mail after you took your PSAT test and you've done well from a school that you've never heard of, you know, the letter would say, hey, we have our eye on you and we're not going to charge you any application fee.  And that worked so well.  And over the course of 10 or 15 or 20 years, it just kind of moved, you know, farther and farther up the food chain, where now, you know, it's really only 30 or 40 schools that aren't forced to offer some kind of discount. And let's be clear, too, this merit aid discounting, it has nothing to do with your ability to pay and kind of everything to do with your willingness, right? So there are all sorts of super rich families who are being offered 10, 20, $30,000 off the year or even a full ride if the school has decided that their kids are attractive, whether because of their actual academic or extracurricular merit or just because they're throwing money around to, you know, try and get people to come. So, you know, think about it this way, right? If you're Kenyan College, right, in Ohio or Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, if you are McAllister College in St. Paul, Minnesota. You know, excellent schools that they have slipped enough in terms of marketplace perception that even a certain number of people with the ability to pay $75,000 a year are lacking the willingness to do so, right? But if you are McAllister and your cost to educate a student is $42,000 a year, right? You're charging a list price of $70,000, right? If you throw an $18,000 merit aid package at an affluent family, that family is going to feel really good about what it has accomplished, right? Because they're going to get $18,000, $36,000, $54,000, $72,000 off over the course of four years. Their cost of attendance in any given year is $52,000, right? But if McAllister only needs $40,000 to educate that kid, that's still a $12,000 profit, right? And they can take that profit and they can toss it out a lower income family and help them too, right? So, in theory, everybody wins. But it's a real weird look to be throwing scholarships at millionaires, which is essentially what's going on. And so, as a parent, as a shopper, it is not at all clear that this is going on, the extent to which it's going on, nor is it predictable in many instances how much you will get, right? And so, for somebody with like a Boglehead mindset, the temptation and the desire, once you understand what's going on behind the curtain, is to crack the code, right, to try and beat the system. And so, I did my level best in the book to show people exactly where the data is that can give them some level of predictability about what kind of meridian might be offered. But the fact of the matter is that the schools kind of change their goals each year, in part, depending on their own institutional priorities, and also based on what's going on in the market around them. And especially in the last couple of years with the pandemic, you know, whatever algorithms they're using to try and decide like what prices to offer, you know, which students, which is another revelation for people. A lot of these meridian offers are delivered by robots, by software, not by humans, right? These algorithms can't predict how people are going to behave during a pandemic. And so, you're getting all sorts of wacky results where, you know, people are getting no discounts or, you know, they're deciding to apply to 22 schools just because it's also unpredictable and they're only getting into four and, you know, it's all a real hash. I do hope that things will have kind of leveled out and they'll be making more sense by next year. You know, it's not always predictable. So, you know, the best we can do sometimes is just to attempt to explain how the system works, even if we can't predict, you know, precisely what kind of offer it's going to make in any given year. Let's get on to a couple of other ways of saving. And that is the most popular one is a 529 plan. And a lot of people use 529 plans, parents use them, grandparents use them, some states give tax breaks, some don't. A lot of people ask the most common question I get about 529s is how much is enough? How much should I put in? What, you know, what should I put in every year and what do I need to get to by age 18 when my son or daughter goes to college? Sure. As I think most of the people in this crowd probably know, you know, the nice thing about 529s is that they come with some sizable tax benefits, right? In 30-some states you get some kind of a tax break for putting money in the first place. And then for everybody, you get a huge tax break on the way out. As long as you take the money and use it for some, you know, higher educational purpose, you don't pay any capital gains taxes on the earnings. And so if you started age zero and, you know, you get the kind of market that we've had the last 15 or 20 years, you're going to have a lot of capital gains that you're not paying taxes on. So, you know, yay for being in the system, right? So the downside is, you know, there's a bit of complexity. Every state has their own plan. You know, the rules tend to be different, different investment lineups. Sometimes, although with increasing, you know, like less frequency, you know, your plan may not have an index fund for, you know, every asset class that you want to be in, although that's mostly gone now. It was definitely the case 10 or 15 years ago. Thankfully, Vanguard is in, you know, and others who index, you know, are running or providing investments for most of these plans. So how much should you save? Well, you know, save as much as you reasonably can, right? Everybody's different. But here's something to anchor to that might make you not freak out, because, you know, I talked to a lot of parents of young kids and, you know, if they can do any kind of inflation math in their head, they're thinking, wow, if I want my kid to go to the institutions that we went to, it's going to be $500,000, you know, by the time they're 18. And that's insane, right? Like, I'm still paying off my student loan debt. We haven't bought our forever home yet. We want to have, you know, seven figures in retirement savings. How am I going to do this, right? So many years ago, I had a conversation with a financial planner in Wisconsin named Kevin McKinley, who came up with what I now refer to as the McKinley rule, which is just to think about it in fraction. You want to save a third of the money that they'll need for college, and maybe your goal is public or maybe your goal is private or maybe it's, you know, somewhere in between those two list prices as we've discussed, right? So you want to save a third? You want to pay for a third out of current income, right?  And then you borrow a third. Maybe the parents borrow half of that third and, you know, the kid borrows the other half, right? Although if your kid goes to a state university, the federal loan borrowing limit of $31,000 or so will almost cover that third all alone, right? So then this starts to feel reasonable, right? You know, if your goal is to end up with $50,000 of savings in today's dollars, you know, you can do that with 250 bucks a month or whatever it is, depending on your return assumptions. And that starts to feel a little more doable for families, right? Then you're not driving yourself crazy. Now that number is going to need to be higher if you want to have a third of a private college available to you 18 years from now. And if you have more than one kid, well, right, there you go, right? So what can you do? Well, you know, you can talk to grandparents about this, right?  Much better than all the plastic drinkets that they tend to show up with that, you know, end up underfoot and then in the garbage. And so those are the basics, right? There's an hour long debate we could have about whether you might be better off just saving a standard brokerage account for a whole variety of reasons. And that's fine if that's the way you want to go. I just urge, beg people to, you know, start early, save as much as you reasonably can. It is so rare that anybody regrets saving too much for college. That would be a high class problem. So let's talk about student loans for a couple of minutes. I mean, there are three types. The direct loans from the government, as you mentioned, then there's private loans. And then there's parent loans called direct PLU loans. Could you just briefly describe the three different types? Sure. It has worked different ways over the years, but the way it works today is that if you are borrowing from the federal government, there's no bank involved, right? And in most instances, if your kid is a dependent, they can borrow, you know, roughly $31,000 in change over the course of four years. And then what's known as a servicer will step in to start sort of collecting those payments. So those are how the undergraduate loans work. Then there are private loans from institutions like Sally May, Discover, maybe your credit union does some of this, you know, a few other companies may have heard of. And again, back in the day, undergraduates used to be able to get private loans on top of the federal loans or in lieu of the federal loans without any kind of, you know, parental grown up co-signer, and that is not the case anymore. If your kid is maxed out their federal loans and you want to borrow even more, which I would encourage you to think hard about whether that's smart or not, you will need to be a co-signer. There's going to be, you know, sort of complex dance afterwards where all of you will have to decide like who's making the payments and whose credit rating is getting messed up if the 22-year-old is making the payments and forgets, right? You know, and how much debt is too much.  Then there are those parent loans that you mentioned. There are the what's known as the plus loans that you can get from the federal government. Pretty high origination rate. Pretty high interest rate.  But parents are increasingly using them. And we actually know more about where this plus loan borrowing tends to be most persistent. And it is not, you know, as you would expect at private institutions that are not all that well resourced in terms of their financial aid offerings. And also historically black schools have a fair amount of parent borrowing there as well.  Well, last, last minute here you offer a message of hope for people. Can you just give us your message of hope? Sure. So, I mean, let me tell you about the opposite of hope. I mean, the opposite of hope is, you know, all these calls that I used to get in March and April from incredibly smart people who like help run institutions. They help run institutions in New York City that you that you have actually heard of, and they have gotten to the end of the process and realize that, you know, they had no idea that they weren't going to get any discounts, and that their kid had applied to all of the wrong schools. And they're just, you know, saying to me Ron is there's something you can do to help. And after too many of these calls, I thought, Wow, it is deeply problematic here that the system is so complicated. Well, I can't solve for that. I can certainly help pull the curtain back. So the people know, first of all, how the system works, the best ways to get, you know, discounts most effectively, and how to shop for these the sort of institutions that will give their kid everything that the kid needs and at least some of what they want. And for people to know that they don't have to spend $300,000 or anything close to that to accomplish those needs. And, you know, once you're going into the process with a head of steam and frankly, like a bobblehead style system beating question authority question everything mindset. It actually starts to starts to be fun again. And, you know, less about dread, and more about this incredible experience that you are going to be able to provide for your kid one way or the other, that will change their life. And as much as you may dread letting them go, you should also be excited and hopeful about the fact that you're able to provide it for them. So I don't want this to be a downer. I don't want to be angry by the end of the book. I want them to feel ready. Right. And I want them to feel excited and jealous, frankly, that their kid gets to do this amazing thing. Well, the name of the book is the price you pay for college and entirely new roadmap for the biggest financial decision your family will ever make by Ron Lieber. Ron, thank you so much for being a guest today. It's been a wonderful presentation and we've all learned a lot. It's a pleasure and an honor. And I'm easy to find at RonLieber.com. You know, if you have questions or observations or ideas for additional avenues of exploration, you know, those ideas are gold to me. So thank you. Thank you, Ron. This concludes Bogleheads on Investing, episode number 35. Join us each month as we have a new guest. In the meantime, visit Bogleheads.org, Boglecenter.net, the Bogleheads Wiki, get involved in your local Bogleheads chapter, or a virtual community, and tell others about it. Thanks for listening.


American Trail. The American Trail, Blazed in Blood, Defended in Blood. Chapter 1, Dispatch to New York. 1776. There is no longer room for hope. If we want to be free, we must fight. I repeat now, we must fight. And appeal to arms. And the God of Hosts is all that is left to us. In 1787, almost nine years later, a stage coach hurtled along the rough lanes that led from New York to Virginia. Inside the coach sat Tom Farrell, a newspaper reporter from New York City. As he sat there, he planned how he would write the story. He would soon send back to his newspaper. Dispatch to the New York packet. Stateline, March 18, 1787. Your humble servant, being considered by his batters, fit to report the events to occur in Philadelphia in May of this year, and having at his disposal a few weeks to spare, is now taking opportunity to travel by stage coach to Virginia, there to interview one Patrick Henry, an aggressive opponent of the new American Constitution. Sir, do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Patrick Henry? You do. I'm Tom Farrell, sir, a journalist from New York. New York, eh? Well, I can't blame you for wanting to come to Virginia. Sit down. Thank you, sir. And let me tell you something. I'm not an overly cautious man, so you'd best mind what you ask me and speak up while I pour a glass of cider. Sir, is it true that you oppose the signing of the Constitution? It is. Would you care to say why? Not at all. The 13 American colonies did not wage a bloody war to win their independence from a foreign king in order to calmly surrender that independence to a central government. It's this idea of one central government ruling all 13 states that I oppose. But, sir, Virginia would be represented in the central government? We want independence, not representation. And I'll oppose this Constitution with as much vigor as I oppose the royal crown. The Constitution had not yet been approved or signed. It was still just a piece of paper. And Patrick Henry in opposing it was asserting his right as a free man to express his own personal opinion of the most important issue of his day. On the way to Philadelphia, newspaper man Tom Farrell became friendly with one of the delegates who was also traveling to the convention where the Constitution would be debated and signed. Signed, that is, if a sufficient number of delegates approved it. Newspaper man, eh? Yes, sir. Well, what do you think about this Constitution? Well, I don't really know. No, of course you don't. Nor does anybody else in their right senses. Well, it's pretty much the first time in history that people have been able to assemble and decide for themselves what kind of government they want to live under. You can't deny that. Why do we need any government, eh? Don't you think we do? I'm from Western Pennsylvania. Why should we pay taxes to anyone outside Pennsylvania? Mark my words, there's going to be a stack of trouble in Philadelphia. There'll be blood spilled. There's some being spilled now. Listen. Men who, but a few short years ago, had fought shoulder to shoulder for independence were now shooting at each other across disputed state lines. Tom Farrell knew that America could not survive unless all the states were united under one central government. A few days later, Tom Farrell sat in one of the crowded taverns of Philadelphia with the delegate who had been his stagecoach companion. Look around, Mr. Farrell.  I was looking at faces. Grim faces, eh? Grim and serious, not a smiling face here. Keep your eyes on Yonder's table. See the fellow with one hand touching the hilt of his sword? I'd appreciate it if the gentlemen seated opposite me would repeat his previous statement. With extreme pleasure, sir. I'll repeat my statement and my intention if need be to defend it with my sword. It is my intention that the southern states have no business joining a union and that they should be separate and apart from your northern states. Defend yourself! A jewel. Tom Farrell watching the two men sat there horribly fascinated, two men slashing at each other with cold steel, fighting to the death over a piece of paper that the founding fathers' hope would bind together four million people. It was night. And Tom Farrell walked alone. He walked until he found himself in the ghostly silence of the Philadelphia Waterfront. He wanted to think and to be alone. Good evening, sir. Oh, good evening. A real bit of pleasure seen a living soul down here. Pleasure graveyard. Aye, lad, it's dead all rigged. Look for yourself. American ships, a good dozen of them lying there idle, empty a cargo and their timbers rotting. But why? Why aren't they loading cargo and sailing? You should know that, lad. Foreign countries will have nothing to do with this. In their eyes was not a proper nation. They didn't recognize this. Now what is General Washington going to do about that, sir? I don't know. I wish I did. What about those other fellows? Madison, Monroe, Hamilton, all the rest of them. What are they going to do about American ships laying idle? Yes. What were they going to do? These men who would frame the new Constitution. In early May, Farrell was granted an interview with a very old but a very great man who had seen more of the world than any other living American statesman of his time. So you write for a newspaper, eh, boy? Yes, sir, the New York packet. Well, I do little writing myself.  Thank you, sir. And make yourself comfortable, Tom. Sir, I was just reflecting. When I'm married and have children, it'll be something for me to talk about tea with the great Benjamin Franklin. Oh, you better keep it to yourself. They're calling me an old fool, saying I'm in my second childhood. They say I'm too old to know what I'm doing. Can't found me, Tom. I'm not a day over, 80. Pardon, sir? Well, let's say 81. You look just fine, Mr. Franklin. I do, don't I? Now look at this new coat of mine. Tailored in Paris. First time I've worn it since I came back from Europe. Elegant, sir. Extremely elegant. Well, now you have some questions, I suppose. Fire away. Sir, are you satisfied with the Constitution in its present form? After all, it isn't the way you originally drafted it. No, no it isn't. I must confess there are several parts of it that I don't approve. But a document of that sort cannot please everybody. When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their combined wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men all their prejudices, their mistaken opinions, their local interests, and sometimes selfish viewpoints. That's very true, sir. But you know, Tom, it astonishes me to find this Constitution with all its margins for error so near to perfection. I believe we can build a fine nation if we follow this charter. And we must. The rest of the world is watching us. Still not everybody seems to want it. No, it has its enemies. But the will of the majority of people must be served. The majority, not the minority, must rule this land of ours. But the will of the majority of the people did not concern the minorities who fought tooth and nail against the American Constitution. Just as today, when wicked groups in America would wreck our way of life, so in those days there were those who were prepared to use any methods they could find to prevent the Constitution becoming law. And Tom Farrell, sitting in a tavern a few days later, was scared. Scared because all about him were men who plotted the downfall of the United States before they were united. And with him was one of these very men, the delegate he had met on the stagecoach. I have something to tell you, Mr. Farrell. Well, look who's here and just about to leave. Alexander Hamilton mixing with the common people. Stop him and ask him what he thinks about the Constitution. Excuse me. Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton. Can I be of help to you? Questions are at all mine. I am Farrell of the New York packet. Ah, yes. What can I do for you, Mr. Farrell? Tell me, sir, do you think you'll get enough votes to make the Constitution law? I don't know. But I know this. If you're able to win support for it, America will again become a colony and be ruled over by an English viceroy. Is there anything else? No, sir, nothing. Thank you, Mr. Hamilton. Well, it's a fine story that fellow Hamilton would have us believe. You were going to tell me something. All right. Listen to me. Me and those who think like me, we found a way to prevent the Constitution from being signed. The Constitution cannot be signed until the vote has been taken to approve what it says.  I understand. Now, as you doubtless know, the vote cannot be taken unless, mind you, unless 45 members of the convention are present on the floor. I see. Yes, I think I understand. It's simple. Enough of us intend to stay away from the convention just to make sure there will never be 45 members present. So no vote will ever be taken. The Constitution will have to be passed out. You look impressed, Mr. Farrell. I hear you. Hold on.  What? To oppose the Constitution is your right, but it's not your right to sabotage it. It's not your right to prevent other men from expressing themselves.  Your place is at the convention, and I'll be one to see you go there. I'll see you here. You're at the convention. Now, who's with me? Grab every delegate here in this place and drag them to the convention hall. You'll not drag me anywhere. You'll not ram this Constitution down our throat. You'll be there. I'd like to see you lay your hands on me, sir. You'll be there, sir. There was a score of divided opinions in that term, but the majority of the men wanted to see the Constitution voted on. They took hold of the rebel delegates there and dragged them all the way to the convention hall to make sure the required 45 delegates were present. Enough to take a vote one way or another. The Constitution faced life or death. For the first time in many long weeks, there was a silence at the convention. In General Washington, the man who had led American troops to victory in the Revolutionary War faced the assembly. We who are gathered here must now determine by a vote once and for all, whether or not this doctor whether or not this document called by us, the American Constitution shall decide for this generation and all those to follow. A way of life dedicated to individual liberty and the security of all the states. We who have planned it have full knowledge that it may contain mistakes and we have accordingly left the way open for future generations to rectify any of these mistakes to suit the time in which they live. A few hours later, Tom Farrell wrote the final paragraphs of the story he would send to New York. September 17, 1787, Dateline, Philadelphia. Dispatch to the New York packet. Your humble servant, having witnessed the conclusion of the events in this city, is able to report that the American Constitution has been approved by a majority of the delegates in 13 states. All that is now left to do is for the states themselves to ratify and make the Constitution the law of the land.  He did not seem to know what was going on about him at the last. He stared straight ahead and one knew what he wanted. Will this Constitution succeed in uniting this country? Will it prevail? You and I know it did. We fought without further warfare and human misery, but it did prevail. We are living proof of it. We who breathe the fresh air of liberty whose fathers in every generation have stood ready to defend with their blood what we have in this country of ours. And we too stand ready. I, ready. And so you've heard the first chapter in the story of the American nation brought to you by the ladies auxiliary to the veterans of foreign wars. Take country of ours as we follow the American trail.


Suppose we have a surface z equals f of x, y. At any point x0, y0, z0, we can talk about the tangent line. Actually, we can't. There's an infinite number of tangent lines. But let's think about this. If a one-dimensional curve has a one-dimensional tangent line, then we should expect that a two-dimensional surface should have a two-dimensional tangent plane. And so the question you've got to ask yourself is, how do we find it? Let's think about this a little bit more. Suppose we take the surface z equals f of x, y, and find the tangent plane at a point. Now, if we intersect this plane with the plane, say, x equals x0, well, that's the intersection of two planes, and that will give us a straight line. Meanwhile, if we intersect the surface with the plane x equals x0, we get some sort of curve in the plane, and that curve will have a tangent line. So what if we require they be the same line? Well, let's try it out. Find the equation of the line tangent to the curve formed by the intersection of z equals x cubed minus y cubed, and the plane x equals 2 at y equals 3. So to clarify the geometry here, we have some sort of surface, and we're going to cut this surface with a plane, and that'll give us a one-dimensional curve. And I'm interested in finding the tangent line to that curve at a particular value of y. So to begin with, let's figure out where our point actually is. We're on the plane x equals 2. We want to know when y equals 3. So the only thing we don't know is the value of z. If only there was some formula that we had that would give us the value of z. Oh, wait. OK, here we have it. And so we find that z is equal to negative 19. And so we're at the point 2 because we're on the plane x equals 2, 3 because we want y equal to 3, and z equal negative 19 because that's where our z value is for x equals 2, y equals 3. And so our tangent line goes through the point 2, 3, negative 19. And so our equation of the line, well, first, we'll navigate to the point 2, 3, negative 19. So we're on the plane x equals 2. And so that means x will always equal 2. And one of the things you might remember from single variable calculus is if a value doesn't change, then we can use it before we do any calculus. So since x is always equal to 2, our equation then becomes. And this is an equation in two variables. So there's a curve. And I could talk about the line tangent to this curve. And the derivative will be, now, y is actually a variable. y could take on many different values, but we only care about what happens when y equals 3. And so we find our derivative. Now, remember, we're actually working in three dimensions. So let's think about this. The derivative dz dy equals negative 27, or negative 27 divided by 1. So remember that the derivative tells us how the variable z is changing as y changes. And negative 27 divided by 1 means that to move along the tangent line, we increase our y values by 1 unit while we decrease our z values by 27 units. Again, we're in three-dimensional space, so we know what happens to y and to z. What about x? And again, it's useful to remember, since we're in the plane x equals 2, x is always equal to 2, and so x doesn't change at all. And so to go from a point on the tangent line to another point on the tangent line, we'll follow along the vector, don't change x, increase y by 1, decrease z by 27 units. And so our tangent line goes to the direction 0, 1, negative 27, and we can go any scalar multiple of that direction vector. What if we considered intersecting the surface with the plane y equals 3? Well, in that case, we get a different tangent line. Let's take a look at that. So again, same curve, and we want x equals 2, y equals 3, z equals negative 19 still, but this time, instead of taking the plane x equals 2, we'll take the plane y equals 3, and that allows x and z to change, and so we'll want to know what happens at x equal to 2. So again, as long as we're staying on the plane y equals 3, y is always equal to 3. It's a constant, and we can replace it in our equation. We can differentiate. At x equals 2, we find dz dx is equal to, and remember the derivative is the rate of change, in this case of z with respect to x. So to stay on the line with dz dx equal 12 or 12 divided by 1 in the plane y equals 3, we need to increase x by 1 while we increase z by 12 and leave y unchanged, and so that means we're going to move along the vector 1, 0, 12. So remember, our tangent line will go through the 0.2, 3, negative 19, and it will go in the direction of the vector 1, 0, 12, so its equation will be. So let's think about what we've done so far. We have a line formed by the intersection of the tangent plane and a plane parallel to the yz plane. We also found a line formed by the intersection of the tangent plane and a plane parallel to the xz plane, and we want to find the equation of the plane that includes both lines. But we know the vector is giving the direction of both lines and the vector perpendicular to both will be orthogonal to the plane and we can find this vector using the cross product. So let's actually find that plane. So we know the equations of both lines. So since the vectors 0, 1, negative 27 and 1, 0, 12 are in the plane, a vector orthogonal to the plane is going to be the cross product. So we find the cross product. So if x, y, z is a point on the plane, then we'll want the vector from 2, 3, negative 19, that's one point in the plane, to the other will be orthogonal to our vector. And so we have the dot product equal to 0 and that gives us the equation of the tangent plane.


and 24 hours, now we're gonna let this money shower. Are y'all ready for the Vetticini, baby? I'ma give you the before. When the sun is out, baby, when it's hot and shine, cause we only go out until the end of time. Give me a thumbs up, put the money back in the comment section, do something, baby. But I hope you guys enjoyed the video, make sure you smash that subscribe button, give me a thumbs up, and do not skip those ads also. Lock in tomorrow, cause we gettin' back to that bag. We go on, we go on, we floor, you already know it, it's EDK, and I'm on my way. There, it even shone more colors. Out here, it definitely looks gray. Straight gray. You know, like a little bit ahead of it. Just right there on the driver's side door right there. It looks straight gray. It's like the right color gray. It looks good.


Welcome back another product review and today I'm going to take a look at the not only the Wacom Cintiq but also the Intuos Pro and it's going to be kind of a comparison kind of a face off or kind of a pro and con what to use use both or just one and I'm going to throw in an unboxing in there as well. So let's get to the unboxing first after the break. Today I'm going to take a look at the Wacom Cintiq 16 creative pen display. It's a huge all in here. There you go. As always there will be chapters so you can skip forward if you don't want to see unboxing. First I want to take a look at the Wacom Cintiq but there is a bonus. There's the express key remote. There you go. That is the box. That is bonus one. The Wacom Pro Pen Slim. That is the box here and at the end. Handle with care. The Wacom adjustable stand. There you go. A lot to do. Let's start with the display. All right. Let's see. Where are we? Massive box. Let's cut this open nicely here. That was a very short cut here. Let's take this out. I have no idea what's in here. Okay. You got a description. We have a power cable. Then let's open this here. I see. So we have another pen here. This is the pro pen but this is the bigger one. Can't wait to open up the smaller one. We have a manual. This let's open this clumsily. There you go. That is for the power. More cables here. That goes into here. That's for your power. USB and HDMI. All of that. Tricky tech. Of course the spoiled cable management person here goes just should be one cable but you know I don't know how this tech works so this is just me saying something. It's not really a complaint or a suggestion. This is the ignorant comment but that's that in terms of cables and that is that in terms of the box. Back is empty. Put here. Slightly sticky here. Let's open this up. I see. I see. There you go. That is your Cintiq. Got your label here. That is the top. That is the back. You can see here the sides. It's all very thin. Nicely done. This is to put your pen inside. Let's go to the back again. You have your adjustable feet. Curious if I can do the same trick as with the Wacom one but I might not have to because I have that adjustable stand. And in here you will see more connections. Close this again. Looks like you got ventilation jets. All right. That's that. It's awesome. I love it already. Put your pen. There's this protective plastic over it. I'm a lefty. This is how I would do this. You got your power and then you can put your pen in there. I mean as you can see there's nothing dramatic about this. It's a fairly fast specific cut. Some parts out here. Fast unboxing. You got the product. You got to plug it in. They got to test it out but I like that there's not much to assemble or any trickiness. It's right there. So far I already like it. Let's unbox the extra things. Next up is the Express remote. That is the box here. Very excited about this one. I do love my hotkeys and it'll be interesting to see how I'm going to use this to supplement my stream deck to replace potential couple things. Very curious how this is going to change my workflow. There you go. That is that. Open up this here. That looks like your USB dongle. Let's right open this up. And in here we have more manuals. Every time I say more I just want to say more lambas bread. But you might have caught that in a different video. And on here it seems to be the charging cable. That's the length. And then in here we have the remote all angles branding. It's very nice. Cool design. Actually heavier than I thought. Clicky buttons. You got all your buttons here. But it's nice. And you also have that rubbery cushion. So it doesn't it doesn't slide around.  I never had this in my hands before. I'm really surprised by that's a surprise. I've been walking this really good stuff but I did not expect something this sturdy and nice feeling in terms of a remote probably says more about me than the company. Well anyway that is that. Again excited to try all of this out. Let's put this back. Next up we got the walking pro pen slim. Put your box fairly simple here. You think it would be fast opening up this pen box but this took longer than I wanted. All right that's interesting. You got this here probably manuals and things underneath. There we go. That is what you get in here. There's nothing hidden and that's it box wise. In here protective plastic wrap. That is the case branding here for the pen. This off you can see the nibs. Yes my favorite the nibs and you pull this out gently. I'm afraid of breaking this. I've never opened this. I don't know if this comes out completely. I don't think so. This stops here. And in here you have the pen. Cool. I like this protective case especially when you travel around. Oh yes I like this. I wasn't too sure if I was going to prefer the bigger one or the smaller one here but after having used the Wacom one I'm just very used to the smaller pen it's just the way it handles the feel the weight and everything. I form an opinion after all this time and I do prefer the slimmer one. So once again thank you so much for Wacom for providing me with the slimmer one. It's very kind of them. They listened to watch the review and heard this and said we'll send you a small one. So I do prefer it. I have to say I do still like the feel of the big one in terms of the front. The squishiness it has something also nice in terms of just because of the compression the squishiness it doesn't hurt. It's now uncomfortable and the buttons are nicely accessible. There's just something about the smaller one the handling I just kind of prefer it so I'm glad I have both and the cool thing is given that they are the same tech they will work across the Intuos Pro and the Cinti. So I'm excited to not have to switch pens. You can only use one there shall only be one and that's very cool and if you want to compare definitely smaller. All right so many goodies last but not least it's not that heavy. Handle with care the Wacom adjustable stand. We have this protective here adjustable stand the plates for the back tiny screws more tiny screws. Plastic thing is here I actually don't even know what that is I will find out and here's a stand. Ooh heavy nice and hold on let's always double check that's it nothing in here to the mechanism in the back but that is the content in case you're interested in what is going on in this package a little on screws but that's that for the hardware so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to take this assemble it put the display on there put on my desk I got a new swivel arm for my monitor the whole setup will be totally different so I'm going to snap my fingers and then we're going to fast forward to see how everything ended up being awesome or not probably very awesome and then I'll give you my subjective two cents. All right we are in the future now and I've used all of these for quite some time now and as you can see my general hair and everything at times have changed here's way way way in the future and I have used the interest pro and the Wacom Sintiq 16 for quite some time now and I have changed a bunch of stuff first thing that I have actually not used anymore is this let's just tape on it because so the screws don't fall out but I don't use that anymore so let's go straight into the review pros and cons and everything so at first the Sintiq 16 this stands as you can use it here you can set it on your table wherever you are right for your setup and then you can bring it up and you bring it down what I have noticed in my setup is I'm fairly picky in terms of sitting the posture standing I got the you know the electronic standing desk here that this setup was too low so when I had it up it wasn't it was something where I still had to crouch over and especially when it's flat on the table it definitely works but it was a bit I was concerned about my posture and I started to have some back issues where I was just not not sitting the way I wanted to sit so the first thing that I did then was look into a swivel arm and you can see this here that is the arm that goes up and down turn it here and bring it back now which one was that I can blend in here this is the amazon basic single monitor stand lift engine blah blah blah all of this here it's currently not available and my review is that I don't like it so I've installed it I actually had it on the right side but then I got a new monitor and I moved my mic around and it's this is my current setup that I'm somewhat okay with I would still prefer this mic on the left so I gotta look at other things here but going to the tablet it is for me much easier to have it on the side bring it in and then put it back out because what I love about a Cintiq is that it serves as an external monitor so in my general setup the way I have it now is that I'm actually using the Intuos Pro and the Cintiq at the same time it's not either or as you can see in this view I have an extra tablet that is for my second computer so I have like a gaming computer setup that have an extensive work setup where I use the tablet a lot so what I do is I can grab this bring it down for the critiques and because it's so small I still have room for my keyboard which brings me actually to the second thing I actually use I don't use anymore which is a shocker and that is this I was super pumped and as you saw in the unboxing the material is all very solid I like the setup and all the keys you can have you got the dial here you got a ton of extra buttons it's there's a lot you can map on this and I thought it's going to be something I'll be using where I put it maybe on here as I do my critiques but it's fairly small and it slides down it's not something that's magnetic that immediately went out the window like I can I won't use that here because I do need a keyboard as a critique because I want to flip through and use my hotkeys and so on so I thought this would be perfect and at the end because it's set up like this I have access to my keyboard and I can go on here I can draw I can scrub through this you can make this a bit bigger I can scrub through this here I can go back and forth I can draw the the hotkey on and off I have everything here that I need in terms of hotkeys and when I need to write all I need to do is lift it go back to my bigger setup and I can go over all the screens and I can still type and I can go back and then still draw and do my critiques so that has actually been the biggest surprise that after the whole setup of the express keys which let me show you you have here in your desktop center you got all my devices here I need some updates but I can go to the remote here express key settings I can bring this into this and you can see that after everything I've done it's back to being a default because I try different things I reinstalled some stuff and I thought I'm going to do like a crazy awesome setup and at the end I ended up not using it now I'm still hanging on to it because here a couple things as much as I love this setup with this antique it's great for critiques because I do my critiques at 720p and I upload them on youtube at 720p and this is a 1080p display so I can still zoom in I can do a bunch of stuff and that's that's okay all works for this as I have started my work at a new company I'm doing a lot more drawovers in terms of poses and just I can't say too much but it's generally I use photoshop a lot on this display and I've noticed that the 1080p to me doesn't work anymore where I have to bring in all the tools and the shelves and I sometimes I use photoshop on a bigger screen move things around I got some hotkeys like I got some like workspaces safe but ultimately within this setup photoshop gets very small so now that I have everything set up and I'm comfortable with my eyes already going towards a bigger cintiq this could be the pro the 22 like I don't know I have to look at what's out there and I have a feeling that because of my setup at work I'm going to switch to a bigger cintiq which also means that I'm going to change this arm because again I don't like this arm the arm is it's fine for this and it's fine for that but then this and I try to loosen the screws it's just it's kind of clunky I'm not a fan of this arm other arms are also really expensive so I gotta do a lot more research and do some googling in terms of what are good arms like what are people recommending it works for what I have now like I can do a bunch of stuff with this but I would love for it to be slightly smoother maybe other arms are not smoother I don't know but that's my current setup so going back to express keys if you have a bigger cintiq this it would take up a lot of space which means I wouldn't have access to my keyboard still I would have the setup where I can quickly lift it and access whatever I'm on my table but it'll be I think as a setup much more difficult and if you look at the bigger ones they do have this where they're attached on the side again you do some research how to do this but then I would for sure use it and this is why I haven't returned it again thank you walking forward for providing this but I want to hang on to this because I can see how it's absolutely necessary with the bigger display right now with the smaller one there are no buttons on this except the on off button so I do need this for the keyboard and like I said in my setup I have access to the keyboard it's totally fine maybe comment let me know if you're using a bigger display which one and why I gotta dig into all that setup they're very curious hanging on to this because I still do like it what I have noticed though and this is more on the con side is that it's as you saw in the unboxing it's very it's very clicky and that's fine in terms of feedback I know I clicked something but what happens and it's turned off by right is when nothing's happening when I do critiques and I I use this at first to flip through images and like my keyframes and my bookmarks everything ended up being loud with my microphone the mic picked up all the clicking and that was actually one of the first things like ooh that's kind of too loud it's a bit distracting in the recordings so that's one of the things if you have this and you're recording stuff watch out you can hear the clickiness but as a tool it works for my current setup not so much but I'm gonna use it for later but let's bring this back up here and go back to the top of properties here so here in the remote you have all the outer keys and there's a ton of stuff you can do here you can set up all your clicks keyboard keystrokes modifiers navigation a ton of stuff different applications you have so much here this is for all of these but you also have the inner keys and then you also have the ring keys so there's a ton of stuff you can do again the cintiq has nothing that's just my pen setup so for this I have regular clicks obviously you know navigation stuff using this then I have the middle mouse for me is this one so middle mouse click is this so I use this to drag things around to open up tabs in a browser but for sure because of Maya because I need that middle mouse clicking and then the right click right there that's just right clicking for you know the menus and context stuff and just like did my general setup and you would think that that's the eraser but I actually don't have this mapped as an eraser I have still mapped opening of folders to this so when I do this I can just do that and that opens up the folder it's much faster I love it of course in Photoshop I would map it to eraser like there's different things that I use in my general setup because I use folders so much I open up folders all the time and move things around a lot that I have now used this as my primary and it's kind of like a very satisfying flick of the pen so that the folder opens so that's what I have for the backside of the button so I think you can you can tweak a bunch of stuff and it's great for interest pro as well I everything is there set up and you have all kinds of different functions so definitely check this out I'm probably going to do a separate clip in terms of pen I'd say pen workflow from Maya someone else has asked me about a pen workflow it's really just this that's the your main button middle mouse basically main button middle mouse and in the right side that's my setup in Maya now in terms of hotkeys and things I had a setup at the beginning with the express keys and then I went to other third party there I mentioned stream deck and now loop deck so I'm testing a bunch of stuff so that kind of workflow is changing a lot so which one would I recommend that's kind of tricky to answer because I'm using both my case is just I like using both because I'm not always drawing I do like having a regular setup with just the tablet and the keyboard with all the stuff that I'm doing there and it's also for posture I like all of this this has worked out as I'm moving this over to draw a little bit I don't really have any problems I have it fairly set up where I get closer bring it down and it's fairly low and I can do all my stuff here and then it's lifted a little bit to do something else and bring it down it's a fairly good setup and I'm I really like having the Cintiq and the tablet at the same time I always had a walk in tablet and never Cintiq for me it was always the tablet computer and it's just it's for me in terms of animating and using something for a long period of time it's much more comfortable to use for me this again I had a different review about an ergonomic mouse I'm still using the tablets and the pen as I haven't gone back to a mouse unless it's from other separate things and even though my second computer can see this here it's a it's an older tablet from Wacom like I've always had a Wacom tablet now with this edition I really prefer doing drawovers and critiques on a screen that I can draw directly on so that I wouldn't get rid of this I would not be able I already have a hard time drawing and drawing just on a tablet looking here it's even worse so I definitely use the Cintiq other than that the setup is great and I love that this functions as a separate monitor so if I don't use it to draw I mean it's overkill I got four monitors but it's really a setup that I'm currently using where this is my main work drawovers something else even if I record because I have it right below I can have a window open with notes so I can talk quickly look and then keep on talking that's been a great setup as well the biggest screen there is for watching things lectures things to do is like what I'm we'll have to do next like a reminder screen and for me dailies like I like watching things on the big screen just to review animation and then the other screen here is just for my own email and work email and bunch of stuff where I need to see chats and stuff like that it's a crazy setup but I have to say I really like it and in terms of workflow I like little things like flicking my pen to open up a window I know it sounds silly but anything that I do repetitively I want to have either shortcut or something where I don't have to spend a lot of time sounds really like a massive first problem but trust me if you do a lot of repetitive tasks throughout the day and I do them every day Monday Friday it's just there's something where you just get into a really nice habit and it's also in terms of if any of you have any hardware gadgets and tools with knobs and buttons there's also a certain workflow again where it gets very satisfying in terms of doing something flicking the pen like this very satisfying so in terms of my preference I use both in general workflow and just working without doing any drawings Intuos Pro is great I like a smaller tablet like this I don't know because it's just again I have a lot of stuff on my desk and just I don't need more it's it's enough ergonomically it also works really well I don't think I would go bigger with a regular tablet cintiq wise I think for me it's really great to do drawers and if you can afford a stand where like a movable arm that to me would be the preferred setup if you have to do on the side or if you set up behind you personally wouldn't go back to the stand that flips back down because then it takes up a lot of room and I still need my keyboard so in terms of personal preference I prefer a swivel arm just because I can move it out of the way so I can use the tablets and the keyboard and just use this as a second screen now if you do have an express key and you want to set things up and have this in the description all the links in terms of setup when you want to do proc links if you want to check it out the only other thing I want to mention in terms of cons which is it might just be me but I found that and you can see this on the screen it says right now in just pro 93% it's because it's cabled and when I take the cable off because this is a bluetooth wireless tablet right I can take this off and you could technically work on this it's I haven't set it up because I always have it plugged in now why do I have it always plugged in it's because after a day battery is dead I don't know if that's me maybe it's the amount of usage or I don't know I found that after a day it's dead and then I gotta charge it overnight and since I'm not moving around and moving my tablet in place somewhere else I don't know I have found you just I'm just gonna leave it plugged in so the wireless aspect is not something I'm gonna use and since I need to plug it in every night anyway to charge it I'm just gonna leave it plugged in all the time that's just something I want to know I know what happens to you let me know in the comments I don't know if you have a longer day usage or is it something that I have or too many things plugged in I don't know and the other thing I wanted to mention which I've mentioned with the Wacom one as well is just a cable setup to be honest I'm just not a massive fan of the cable setup where as this comes out it's a massive cable but then that splits into power in usb and display and everything then I wish that and again this is something where I don't know how to take works and how complicated it is but I would love for this just to be one usbc cable that's my biggest if Wacom is watching this please please please consider this they're probably going yeah we have you you know you don't know what you're talking about I really don't know what I'm talking about but that's my biggest gripe it's just the cable that's kind of that I don't know I'm really happy with this setup the responsiveness on on the screen for drawing is great all that needs to be improved is is me my drawing skills they're horrible so that's what I need to do I'm curious what you think maybe I missed something you know me like maybe there's something where like well if you do this it would be so much easier so let me know in the comments maybe you're using this antique you got some tips and tricks maybe tips on the different arm that's better in the different interest pro maybe you have maybe different size something else that you prefer I don't know I'm very curious about people set up this is my absolutely bonkers setup that I use that I'm really happy with right now and that's that I don't know hope that's helpful if you like it subscribe if you don't miss any of my uploads you know I gotta you know sneak in sneak in it's not really sneaky it's right over it's my pitch from my channel so like and subscribe the usual that you gotta say but it helps my channel grow so thank you and it's also a longer clip it's very long actually so thank you for still watching it's very patient of you and that's that thank you and I will see you in my next clip


Excellencies, distinguished representatives, colleagues and friends, I am honored to provide this message to you on International Day of Family Remittances. In 2020, there were 281 million international migrants, of which an estimated 200 million migrant workers sent back 540 billion to low and middle income countries. Only 1.6% lower than in 2019. During the COVID-19 pandemic, remittances to these countries continue to surpass foreign direct investment and official development assistance. Remittances form a significant percentage of the gross domestic product in some developing countries. And despite being disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants made efforts and sacrifices to ensure that remittances kept reaching their loved ones back home. Remittances are a financial lifeline for countless migrant families, enabling them to pay for basic needs in their education, health services and housing, improve household living conditions, and reduce vulnerability of family members in times of crisis. This is yet another reminder that these funds, while private, help individuals, families and communities to combat poverty, improve access to education and health, and achieve other sustainable development goals. But beyond these numbers are the people and the communities who generate, receive and leverage these flows. Migrants are more, much more than remittance senders. They are important agents of change and development and rights bearers. Migrants engaged in labor markets create jobs and support the tech space as entrepreneurs. They stimulate foreign direct investment, international trade and skills transfer. They engage in philanthropy and share ideas, knowledge, values and cultures across boundaries. In doing so, migrants and diaspora groups contribute to their own and host communities far beyond merely financial means. This pandemic has also reminded us that migrants are often essential workers, be it in healthcare, food, systems or logistics, and are significant members of our own communities. Yet, not only as the virus adversely affected migrant workers and their families, but also economies and livelihoods, as mobility came to a halt and jobs dried up. The pandemic, as I like it, the precariousness of our collective safety and security, including financial security. As governments consider fiscal stimulus packages in recovery efforts, they must also ensure a financial, economic and social ecosystem geared to address the needs of migrants and of their families. On the financial side, this means their inclusion in financial services, including savings accounts, insurance product mortgages, investment products, portfolio investment and real estate purchases. On the economic side, it means enabling migrants and diaspora to contribute in commercial areas like entrepreneurship and trade. On the social side, it means ensuring decent work and doing more to include migrants in our communities, including ensuring their access to portable social protection. During COVID-19, the international community, government and the private sector, worked intensively to measure the impacts of remittance flows on development and formulate appropriate responses, including through the Remittance Community Task Force, led by the International Fund for Agricultural Development. We must continue our efforts to monitor developments related to remittances and migrants, and work together to address COVID-19's economic and social fallout to our societies, remittance and migrants. I wish you a productive and stimulating discussion during this Global Forum.