Podcast 156. Paychecks and Profits with T.R. Smith

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni, and today's guest is T R Smith. So T R I am super excited to have this conversation with you today. The last time we tried to do this, we had some technical difficulties on my end here. My internet just completely died out on me. It was really bad, but I'm glad we were able to reschedule this and make it happen. So thank you again for taking the time to talk with me today.

T R Smith:
0:23

Thank you, Mike. Yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Average Joe Finances:
0:25

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I'm gonna kick things off the same way I kick off every episode, and we wanna know more about you, so if you could share a little bit about yourself, share your story. Who is T R Smith?

T R Smith:
0:36

Yeah, thanks for that. And obviously I just put my new book out, paychecks and Profits and the book is a lot about my own personal finance journey of coming out to college, getting my first real job, getting that first real paycheck and thinking, wow, this is less than what I thought I was gonna be taking home and that sort of kickstarting this journey of saying, okay, I got to really make some time to understand, not just how to make more money, but. Maybe pay less in taxes if I can. How to really understand the benefits that my employer is offering and how to maximize that and make a profit off of some of those benefits. And, it took a long time for me to figure that stuff out. It took several jobs of different benefits packages to really feel like I understood, what was happening and what were the costs and benefits of different programs.. And, as I figured all these things out, I realized that a lot of my coworkers and friends had not really figured these things out. And so I thought, wow, this could be a great opening for a book because, I love all the personal finance books that are out there. If you name a best seller, I've probably read it. But, I it just dawned on me that no one else has really talking about how to really manage your own paycheck how to really capitalize on things that, in a lot of cases are gonna give you, a better profit. What you're gonna get, out on your own, even with a good investment. And for instance, in the book, I go through a couple examples of, what do we think of as a typical low risk or risk free investment, right? That could be a government bond or a savings account of 1% or 3%. We think about stock market returns can be 10 or 12%. And it's good to have those benchmarks in mind because then in the book I try and walk people through examples where Hey, what if you could make a quick profit of 15% or 30% or more with, little to no risk. And we will go through some examples of that. I'm not looking to sell anybody on any investment, but I just want people to understand what's available to them and how much they can make off of it. I got my MBA it's been about 15 years I guess now. So I've been out in the private sector for quite a while. And even in the MBA programs that you go to, they teach you a lot of valuable information about business, but there's not a ton of information about how to manage your own investments. How to think about taxes, how to reduce your taxes. And those things are hugely important for people who really want to not just save an invest, but really compound that money as best they can over time. And there's just so many, things available to people that the data tells us they're not taking advantage of it. And I hope that with my book and with this podcast, we'll reach more people who can now take advantage of more of that stuff.

Average Joe Finances:
3:03

Yeah, T R, I really appreciate that. And cause I found myself in a spot, while I was still in the Navy, that I was sitting in this financial seminar that they had offered us at this resiliency retreat that I was at and they were talking about the thrift savings plan. So that is a retirement tool or an investment tool for people in the military, or federal employees. One of the things I learned is, cause you know, at the time I had recently commissioned as an officer so my pay was steadily going up pretty nicely and I was getting myself into a new tax bracket, right? And then I learned that I can actually put more into my traditional thrift savings plan to lower my income, to put me back into that lower tax bracket while I'm still investing that money. And it's still. and I'm like, huh, okay. This is pretty cool, there's like little tips and tricks like that you can do to lower that tax burden. Because I think everybody gets that initial shell shock when you get your first job and you're like, oh, I make this much per hour. I worked, this many hours this week. I should be getting this. And then you open up that paycheck and you're like, what, everybody gets that shell shock. But, Uncle Sam's gonna take their cut. Any way that you can reduce and it's not anything illegal or anything. It's, it's working the tax code that's put in place to help people, be relieved of that burden. So I definitely appreciate that. Now can we dive a little bit more into you had mentioned like how to manage your paycheck. Can we talk about that a little bit.

T R Smith:
4:25

Yeah, absolutely. Part of it is just understanding, the basics of the taxes. And to go to your example of like people getting bumped up into different tax rates, even someone who makes, $50,000 per year for instance, they're paying about 22% federal income tax on that. And then if you layer in Social Security Medicare tax, it's a little bit more than seven and a half percent. So we'll round up and call it 8%. So just those two combines. 30% of every dollar you earn, or at least on a marginal basis, meaning, the first, X number of dollars you earn might be at a lower tax rate, but then now you're making above a certain threshold, you're paying 22% plus payroll tax. That's about 30%. And that is a lot, right? So anything you can do. that saves you 30% on those dollars is huge. Because, we just talked about the stock market. That might give you 10 or 12%, but if you can make 30% just by understanding in your case, maybe it was the TSP or we'll go through some more examples here in a minute. But, anything you can do to reduce that is helpful. And I give an example in the book or a quote in the book, I say, the IRS is your front of me. Okay and I think most people are familiar with that term, but basically it means, you typically, you have someone in your life who's like kind of a friend, but an enemy at the same time. It could be coworker or even a sibling, someone who's just in your life and you have to deal with them. I think of the IRS as the same way, right? Nobody loves paying tons of money in taxes, but if you begin to understand. The little loopholes and the little tips and tricks of, okay, if I reduce my taxable income and I do, jump through certain hoops I'm gonna come out better on the other side. And that's of course a big part of, how a lot of wealthy people make their money. They are able to, whether it's, real estate investing or other things that they do, they're able to find these, little avenues. Filtering their money and, just paying a lot less in taxes. And that's a big factor in growing your wealth over time.

Average Joe Finances:
6:21

Yeah, definitely. It's one of the things that I do to, lower my tax burden is invest in real estate as well. Okay, so you said you wanted to go through a couple of these strategies. So I definitely would love to talk about that. What are some of the things that you do besides real estate, right? Because I talk about that all the time on the podcast, but what are some other ways? Maybe to do that? That.

T R Smith:
6:39

Yeah, and maybe at the tail end we can get into a little bit of real estate talk. But yeah, most of my book is about so let's go through some of the basic stuff here. So 401k Plan right? A lot of people, roughly half of all workers are just not participating in their employer's 401k Plan, and the vast majority of those are. Plans that offer some kind of match on the employee contribution, which effectively means people are turning down free money, which is, one of the craziest things, right? So in, with a good plan, you're gonna get a dollar for dollar match up to a certain point. So if you contribute 5% of your income, a lot of employers will match that, dollar for dollar, or they'll match the first 3% and then maybe it's, 50 per half of what you contribute, meaning like 50 cents on the dollar of what you contribute up to a certain point. So if you put in 5%, your employer puts in 5%, or maybe you put in 6%, they put in 4%, but either. It's an incredible deal, cause no one else out there, no stockbroker, no realtor, no one's gonna give you, an automatic return of 50% or a hundred percent on new investments. So that could be the difference between retiring with $1 million or retiring with half a million dollars. And hopefully this is also educational for people who maybe they've turned down that corporate job because they think, oh, I don't want that particular type of job. And that might be okay, but they should also understand what are they actually giving up in terms of that, what am I not taking advantage of in terms of that 401k mush and the other programs that we'll talk about in a minute. But I encourage people in the book to also think, how does a Wall Street investor, how does a professional investor approach these decisions? If the stock market gives you 12%, and if you as an investor can earn 15% or 20% or something consistently above the market, you know that investor is gonna get rich. If they know what they're doing and if they have some clients that they work with that understand what they're doing. Here you have employers that are trying to give free money, trying to give you 50% or a 100% profit on the new contributions that you make. And a lot of people just aren't turning it down. I go through examples of that in the book and hopefully people. Are able to understand that, whenever someone's dangling free money out there, they should take it within reason. And, and for people who are worried about sealing this money off until retirement, even then, there are ways to sometimes access that money in an emergency or under certain circumstances. If somebody needs to do that, they should go talk to an accountant or some other professional that can help them with that because there can be penalties and whatnot. But again, If you're turning down a 100% profit because you're worried about some tax penalty down the road, I would say you got to rethink your priorities and be focused on how do I get that big profit now? And, you'll deal with the future as it comes. But, it's important to invest while you're young and take advantage of that compound interest, while you're young.

Average Joe Finances:
9:20

Yeah, the younger you start the better, which is why, have all different age groups that listen to my podcast, but when I see the numbers of the people that are between 18 and 24 that listen to the show that makes me happy because it's a large number. So that's who I want to target, especially with episodes like this to get them really understanding, the greatness of compound interest and how the younger you start the more better off you're gonna be in the future. Now it's funny cause like the military recently transitioned out of their pension plan to this new plan where they match their thrift savings plan. So similar to a 401K matching in a corporate job. And I look at this if they would've had this when I first joined and I had the knowledge that I have today, I probably wouldn't have done 20 years. I probably could have done 10 to 12 years and got out. Just doing it, smartly. So It's, there's a lot of opportunity out there, especially for now, newer, young servicemen and women right to go out there and really take advantage of this and take advantage of that employer match that they give. Yeah I definitely appreciate that. So now there's a whole bunch of different ways in the corporate world, to invest with employee options. So besides the 401k that we were talking about, there's also like employee stock purchase plans, right? So what does something like that look like, especially for a, I guess a newer startup company that, that's taking off.

T R Smith:
10:44

Sure startup companies can be a little bit different because they may be promising you equity or options. The example that I give in the book that probably applies to most people is this thing called the ESP or like you just said, employee stock purchase plan and what that means is your employer's allowing you to buy the company's stock at a discount. So this mostly applies to people who, work for a large. The stock is traded publicly, and again, what the surveys have found is roughly half of the people who are eligible for this just aren't taking advantage of it because they don't want to take on that short term pain of investing, or they may just not understand how the program works. But in my experience and in my research, I can tell you that most of these plans have very few restrictions on them. So you know, if you are able to buy. Typically, the way it works is you put aside a certain portion of your income, typically it can be up to 10% of your gross income. You can put that into a special account, and then typically on a quarterly basis, so about every three months in this account typically is E-Trade or some other brokerage account. They essentially buy the stock for you, but it's at a discount to what whatever the stock is trading at that. And then the stock is now in your account and you have a choice. Do you want to just sell the stock and say, I'm out and take your profit, or do you wanna hold onto it? and the sort of generic advice I give to people in the book is, look, don't be afraid to just take the money and run. Because you're not require if they're not requiring a holding period they're just giving you an amazing profit. So going back to that example of what do you expect on a typical investment? Maybe 10 or 12% on the stock market. But if you can get 15% in a quarter. Again, that's better than what anyone out there can promise you. It's a really great return on your investment. And if you think about, if I can just set aside this money and kind of just cycle through it every quarter, you're talking on an annualized basis, it's more like 60% or even 70% in some cases where people are making that profit again with very little risk, always wanna be careful not to say, oh. There's no risk at all. You could buy the stock and the stock could go down that day, but if they're offering you 5%, 10%, 15%. Count, the odds are pretty unlikely that you're gonna get hit. You know that hard where you would lose money on the transaction and even if it did, God forbid, happened like that one quarter, there's still the next quarter and the next quarter after that. So for people who are eligible for this it's a great program in the ESP of all the programs I talk about in my book. In a way, the ESP is almost my favorite because in my experience in most of these programs, it comes with the fewest like strings attached, right? It's not just set aside for retirement. It's not just set aside for, healthcare spending or something like that. It's literally stock that you can sell, and now the cash is yours again. Not sure if you've come across that in the past, but I can tell you there are millions of people that are eligible for this and a lot of them are just not taking advantage of it.

Average Joe Finances:
13:29

No I definitely have not, I served 20 years in the Navy that was not really an option for us. And can't really buy stock in the Navy, but.

T R Smith:
13:36

True.

Average Joe Finances:
13:36

However, this does remind me so my kids started watching The Simpsons, right? So I've been sitting down and watching it with them as they go through a couple of the seasons, and it reminds me of that one episode where every employees at the nuclear power plant, all of a sudden were rich because the stock options that they got for being an employee at the power plant, like the value just skyrocketed and they're all rich. And then it gives like a flashback to when Homers like, woo-hoo, I could sell this for $25, right? And then all of a sudden they see the news and everything and it's oh yeah, if you own this, portion of the the nuclear power plant, congratulations, you're a millionaire. And Marge and the family, and everybody's all excited and then homer's like dope.

T R Smith:
14:14

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
14:14

So a lot of times, so that, that example that you gave earlier where they say, after they purchased the stock and you can turn around and sell it right away, or you can turn around and hold onto it. You know that. Selling right away thing, always just just doesn't feel right to me. I feel like got to hold it for some amount of time and just watch it, watch it do its thing and let it do its thing, right? Because sure, it might go down pretty quickly as soon as you buy it. But it's gonna go back up, right? It generally always does. Now this is an individual stock versus the S&P-500 where all of them put together. But, generally if you're in a strong company, that is offering a program like this it's not likely to just decline. Right away. So now I wanted to ask you, like with that program, is it capped? At 10%? Or can employees maybe if they wanna contribute more or is 10% the minimum? Like how does that work? Yeah. In most cases, I've seen it capped at 10%. There could be some companies that are figuring out ways to do it differently, but in most cases it'll be 10% and the people just feel more comfortable. I'll put 5% in or something. It's at their discretion what they can do. And typically they can change it, once a year and one concession I would make to you. The holding it too. In general, if you do hold the stock for let's say a year or more typically you're gonna pay a lower sort of long-term capital gains tax on it too. So again, everyone can do their own homework about, what's right for them. If they wanna hold on to some, individual. Stock. But but certainly it is true if you feel like it's a good investment, you wanna hold onto it, then you might pay a lower tax rate down the road. And again it's, it is up to that employee to think okay, if this is 10% chunk of my money do I need that to live off of? Or do I not need to live off of it? On a day-to-day basis, if you can afford to just set it aside and forget it and say, Hey, I'm gonna wait, And see if the stock goes up. That could be a good strategy and obviously just depends on the individual risk profile at that point. Yeah. And the other thing is too, like you said, this is just like buying an individual stock. It's not it's not like the 401k. Like you don't have to wait until you're 59 and a half to take it out or anything like that. You can cash it out at any time. Okay, cool. Now there's some other ones I know you wanted to talk about as well. One of them being like the flexible spending account and that could be used. For healthcare dependent care how does that help you with your tax burden?

T R Smith:
16:27

Yeah, there's a couple of different FSA type programs. So let's talk about the healthcare FSA first. So I think in the introduction there, I was alluding to marginal tax rates. So let's go through an example of just again, so people can think about whatever marginal tax bracket they're in and they can go on the IRS website and just see, what is my highest marginal tax bracket, but let's say the average worker's making somewhere around 50,000, again, that means they're paying about 22% in federal income tax, roughly 8% in payroll tax. So basically it's this 30% you pay in taxes. What the flexible spending account program says is if you put dollars into this healthcare, FSA you, essentially, this is money you're putting in without paying any federal income or payroll tax on it. So if you put in a hundred bucks, you're getting 30 bucks back into your pocket, which again, pretty amazing deal. For anybody and I'll give you a quick side note. I think the first time I was eligible for this, somebody explained it to me as if you have certain healthcare expenses, you can use the FSA. And at the time I thought yeah, I was pretty young and healthy at the time, and I just thought, I didn't have any healthcare expenses last year. I'm just not gonna sign up for it, but what they didn't tell me was you can use this in general on your contact lenses, on your eyeglasses. You can use this for other stuff that might be on like fsastore.com or the Amazon FSA. And I don't get paid any money by them to say that, but is good for those, for anyone that's curious about this, go on those websites and figure out like what is it that I can spend these dollars on? And it's actually a huge range is everything from band-aids to, in some cases this wouldn't be on the website, but things like IVF treatments and fertility treatments, even stuff that an insurance company might not. Necessarily cover, sometimes you can still use those FSA dollars on it because it's part of the general healthcare spending. So again, I encourage everyone to do their own research to make sure that they're , not going overboard. So again, 30% return in some cases is more, if you're a high income earner, you could be making a lot more profit in terms of the tax code. And the other thing that people should also be aware of is When you use an FSA, the expectation is that you use it or lose it, right? So if you put a thousand dollars into your healthcare FSA, you need to actually use those dollars in that same year. So if you have money left over, there's a chance that you could lose those funds. So people just have to be actively managing that and budgeting for it. And then also be thinking in the back of your mind oh, I could also, maybe at the end of the year, I could go on to Amazon or some other website and just use it on FSA eligible items. And you could probably use up those dollars without too much trouble. So that's just one, one little thing to be aware of in terms of potential risk to you as an individual. But again, for most people, it's gonna be a great return on the investment or the dollars that they're cycling through the savings account.

Average Joe Finances:
19:09

That's great. And especially Depending on your healthcare coverage too. There's a lot of things that aren't covered and that you can use the, these FSA dollars to cover some of those other expenses. That's pretty awesome. And the fact that you're not paying those federal taxes or social security taxes on it right off the bat is huge. Now what about state taxes? That, is that still gonna come out.

T R Smith:
19:26

Yeah, I think it differs state by state.

Average Joe Finances:
19:27

Okay.

T R Smith:
19:28

So some states might choose to subsidize it in that way by saying, yeah, we like the FSA program. So folks can do their own research on that. But even if you're not getting that extra state benefit, the federal benefit is pretty huge.

Average Joe Finances:
19:39

Yeah, no, definitely. Definitely. Okay. Right on. Now what about like for dependent care is it, does it still fall into the realm or same rules or how does that work?

T R Smith:
19:49

Yeah, pretty similar rules. Now the FSA, going back to healthcare for a second, the cap, like this year is I believe the maximum contribution is about 2,850 for healthcare spending. What's nice about the Dependent Care program is the cap is typically around$5,000 for people that are eligible. So again, you're not paying taxes on that $5,000, so just using. 30% number again is about 1,480 bucks. And tax money back in your own pocket that you can spend. So just to go through the depending care example if you have a child, if you're eligible you can fund this FSA with every paycheck that you get, you opt into the program and then you're able to then spend those FSA dollars on whatever sort of dependent care or daycare provider you're using. So most of that would go to a daycare center or nursery school or preschool. And for most people, I think most parts of the country, you're gonna spend at least $5,000 per year. On that type of program. For most people it should be like a real slam dunk to say, wow, if I can, just get this FSA for kids that are already in the program, that's gonna be a huge win-win. I know going back to my own personal story the first year that our first child was born I didn't even realize that this program existed, , it's one of those weaknesses of companies that sometimes don't sell these programs all that well, because you might have, one of those Orientation meetings on your first day of the job or your first week on the job, and somebody tells you about this program. By the way, we have a dependent care FSA program, right? And if you're young and single and no kids, or even if you're married and you don't have kids, you're thinking, my brain does not need to hold onto that information, right? This is not, I got too much to worry about. And then sadly, no, nobody reminded me, flash forward, a year from them. And nobody bothered to remind me, oh, hey, you can sign up for this program now. So I went a whole year. So I lost out on like at least a thousand dollars of tax savings. But obviously once I figured it out, I signed up again. So this is my message to the world that don't make the same mistake that I did, and, really focus on these benefits.

Average Joe Finances:
21:43

Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, because it's funny because it, it reminds me of every time I transfer to a new command in the Navy, right? We always have this indoctrination where you learn about the command, you learn about the different programs and everything that's going on. But that's it's that little orientation that you get and then that's it there is no reminders. There is no, hey, I know a year ago we talked about A, B, C, and D. Here's your reminder that you can still do this. But yeah, you don't see that. And then the thing is too, like the way you described it is It's kinda like a wave top. They'll say, oh yeah, we have this program. But they don't explain it in depth. cause if they actually sat down and talked about it in depth and you're sitting there thinking I am married and I do plan on having kids. Maybe I should do this right. Maybe this is something I should keep in my back pocket. But when they only give you like that. Hey, we have this program, you're like, yeah, okay. Whatever. Dependent program. Cool. I'll worry about it when I have a dependent, right.

T R Smith:
22:27

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I think some, human resources people, most of them probably understand the programs pretty well. Some of them might not understand the program that well, and that's why they're not explaining it, really in depth or they just don't want to be out there, giving tax advice to people. And just for clarity I'm not a CPA, I'm not offering any tax advice or investment advice. These rules are out there for people to, read the rules, understand the rules, and again, people are on their own to figure these things out. And but I think the more time people spend on these issues, the more they realize that. The opportunity really is great to build wealth over time. And even if you're not looking to build wealth, you just wanna save on your taxes and then spend that money no one's gonna stop you from doing that either. So definitely people should, be focused on these things.

Average Joe Finances:
23:09

Yeah. Def a hundred percent. I wanna talk about the final one that you mentioned in your book, and that's the the health savings account and how this could be used as a triple tax advantage. So if you could explain that to us and how that works.

T R Smith:
23:21

Yeah. So the HSA and I think this is sometimes where it gets confusing. I think sometimes people they hear all these abbreviations and it becomes an alphabet soup, right? So the FSA that we just talked about is basically, Typically designed to work with most health insurance programs for whatever you might need to spend your money on. The HSA is a different program set up for people who are participating in like a high deductible health plan, or they call an HDHP just to give people more alphabet soup to keep track of. But if you're on a high deductible health plan there's a good chance you're eligible for an HSA or a Health Savings Account. And it provides, like you just said, a triple tax advantage, which means that you can put money in. So your contributions are tax free, which is great. The money grows every year without any kind of taxation on the annual growth. And the third part of it is then you're able to withdraw the money without paying taxes. And that's a little bit different from some 401k plans where maybe you get the tax benefit up upfront, but you're gonna pay for it down the road because eventually you'll get taxed on the withdrawal. But just putting that aside, so you know, the HSA, when you withdraw the money on from the HSA, it's meant to be used for eligible health expenses, right? So doctor Bills, prescription drugs, and all those sort of routine things. For, so right now, the people signing up for the HSA tend to be, wealthier individuals that want to take advantage of the compound growth and the tax benefit. But certainly there are a lot of lower income people that are eligible for it. In a lot of cases you don't even need to necessarily have an employer plan. You can be self-employed and depending on where you live and the type of plan you have, you could be on this as a self-employed person too. So it's great if you can invest the money and set it aside. There's also no requirement that you wait to use the dollars. So similar to the FSA, if you're just saying look, I think I'm gonna have, 500 bucks or a thousand dollars of health expense this year. I can put the money in and then I can still pull it out that same year. So it's a similar benefit. In that regard, but it does offer a little bit of a superior benefit just in terms of the long-term growth. People are able to keep the money in the plan. It rolls over year to year. There's no user or lose it provision on the HSA. And so for people that are comfortable with that, they may already be on the high deductible plan, then that's gonna be good. And the other benefit of the high deductible healthcare plan is that you are typically gonna have lower monthly premiums. So you're paying less on your paycheck every week. But then just be aware of the pros and cons that if you do get stuck with, like a big hospital bill, for instance, your deductible is generally gonna be higher. Hence the name. And you may have to pay more out of pocket that year. So again, go into this with your eyes open, but again, for people who are not expecting those big bills or that they know they can pay out of pocket up to a certain point this could provide another nice benefit to them.

Average Joe Finances:
26:11

Yeah, absolutely. That's like another good tax blanket, right? Because, if you have a good idea, there's routine things and you know that you got to pay a deductible or a certain fee that's not gonna be covered by your insurance, and you can kind of book that out and know how much you're gonna be paying that year, just putting that into the HSA and not paying taxes on that, that's fantastic.

T R Smith:
26:31

That's right.

Average Joe Finances:
26:31

And you're not getting hit when you take it out, so.

T R Smith:
26:33

That's right.

Average Joe Finances:
26:34

Yeah, I love that. Okay. Awesome. Hey, T R this has been phenomenal information. I'm really happy that you were able to share that with us. I'd like to transition this into something that we call the final round. It's where I'm gonna ask you the same four questions that I ask everybody that comes on the show. So if you're ready to go, we will get that party started.

T R Smith:
26:52

Okay. That's great.

Average Joe Finances:
26:53

All right. Right on. The first question is, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made in investing?

T R Smith:
26:59

Biggest mistake, I would say is, probably not. Aggressive enough when I was younger in terms of investing and the other thing that goes along with that is, don't sell when the market's down. Which I think a lot of us have made some version of that mistake when we were younger. I know when you're young and you've managed to scrape together some amount of money. Maybe you have $20,000 and you wake up and one day it's worth $10,000 and you think the world's ending. I'd say, look, just remember your long-term plan. Try to have investments that you don't have to tap into in the short term. And just plan to ride that out. The last 10 or 20 years have been a rollercoaster for a lot of investors. But hopefully, Everyone gets the message there to, don't be overly conservative when you're young. This is a chance to, invest in stocks that when you have a longer time horizon and, try to. And if you do sell when the market's down and you make a mistake by doing that, try to learn that lesson and then don't repeat the lesson as you get older.

Average Joe Finances:
27:49

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that transparency. I think that is a very common answer that I hear a lot is that, a lot of people wish that they really were more aggressive when they were younger. cause you know, you can recover from those risks. You can recover from that 50% loss that you described, right? Don't just freak out and sell cause you've got room. Just remember that, you have a plan and just stick to that plans. Definitely appreciate that. All right, so this next question kind of ties into this that last one T R and that is what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first started?

T R Smith:
28:19

Yeah, I think the other lesson along those lines would be, keep it simple., a lot of people have embraced the idea that, index funds can be a great way to go. The S&P-500 Index Fund can be a great place to be, even Warren Buffet has said that I think he's told some of his heirs that, look, you can hold on to my company stock if you want to, but ultimately your best bet is probably to have something like 90% of your wealth in the S&P-500 and 10% in like government bonds or something like that. And so again, for people that are young that are just trying to accumulate wealth if you're not super close to retirement age, I'd say keep it simple. Look at those index funds keep money in there for the long haul. And the other sort of lesson that goes along with that is don't be too focused on picking individual stocks. It's tempting to do it, and I'm not saying that nobody should ever do it, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you're gonna pick 10 stocks every year that, and they're gonna outperform the market. If you can, that's great. Maybe you should get a job on Wall Street and be paid a million bucks a year. But for most investors, it's very difficult to outsmart the market in that way.

Average Joe Finances:
29:22

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely appreciate that you shouldn't sit here and try to time the market. And keeping it simple. I like that acronym kiss, Keep It Simple, Stupid. Because it tell myself that all the time. Okay. When I'm looking at, oh, like maybe I should do this, maybe I should do that. No. Let's bring it back to the basics. Let's keep it simple and, ride it out with the plan that we have in place. Yeah. Awesome. All right, so the next question also ties into that, and that's gonna be, do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started today?

T R Smith:
29:49

Yeah, so just staying on the theme of my book, obviously there, there's a lot of great advice that's out there. Your podcast is great and whatnot. But just staying on the theme of my book, I would say that, really, set aside some time to understand your benefits. Understand the tax code. It's not the most exciting thing. It's probably not as exciting as reading about, cryptocurrency and NFTs and stuff like that. I'm sure that stuff can be, really exciting to learn about. My, my hope is that the content that I'm putting out there will become like foundational knowledge, right? In the same way that people talk about the value of your 401k and your IRA and compound growth. That the next conversation is, oh, by the way, understand your. Your benefits. So that means, make friends with somebody in the HR office that can explain all these benefits to you. Make friends with a coworker that's been there for a while that can explain what these benefits really mean or, how not to get burned by, some restriction on the plan. So that's the advice that I would give for people that are just starting out now.

Average Joe Finances:
30:44

Yeah. That's fantastic. Great advice. All right, tr I'm going to ask you this last question and preface it with, besides your own cause we've been talking about your book this whole time and it is a fantastic book. But besides your own, do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast or both?

T R Smith:
31:01

Yeah, for, for people that want just a really good foundation on books about money Tony Robbins has put out a few different books about money. And even if you don't think Tony Robbins is like the most amazing individual person I think his books are pretty solid cause they just give a lot of excellent knowledge about. How to ride out the storms of the market ups and downs. So I think his first one was called Money Master The Game. He had a shorter one he put out called Unshakeable. That was really good too. And the other book this not tied to investing, but it just tied back to business in general. There's a book called the Common Path to Uncommon success. And for anyone that's, trying to start a business or going into content creation, I think there's a lot of great practical advice in there for people to, to focus on.

Average Joe Finances:
31:43

Yeah, no, that's, those are great recommendations. Definitely appreciate that. Okay. Now T R, this has been an absolutely awesome conversation. That is it for the final round. But this interview was absolutely amazing. I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. I know it was, Hectic and having to reschedule everything. But I appreciate your flexibility cause this worked out perfectly, I think. And I think my audience is gonna get a lot of value out of this conversation that we had.

T R Smith:
32:09

Well, that's awesome. Yeah. I'm so glad it worked out. Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
32:12

But I do have one more question for you, and it's the most important question of all. And that's gonna be, so again, like I just described, we had an amazing conversation. So my audience is gonna say, Hey, I wanna know more about T R, I wanna know more about his book. Where can I find it? All that good juicy stuff. So if you could share that with us. Do you have a website you could share social media that people could follow? And where can we find your book?

T R Smith:
32:34

Yeah, the the website is paychecksandprofits.com. You can find me on most of the social media platforms, especially Instagram and TikTok. I'm the most active on there. My name on there is @TRSmithInvests. The book is available wherever you wanna find books. Amazon's typically the best place, if you love it, leave a review. And that's the most I can hope for but yeah, I would love to get, Engage with people on social media. Send me a message. I try to read and respond to any messages that I get.

Average Joe Finances:
33:01

Awesome. Fantastic. I'm gonna make sure I have all of those links in the show notes to make it easier for the listeners. So you guys can just go and copy and paste or click away. Just don't do it while you're driving. T R, again thank you so much for joining me today.

T R Smith:
33:14

Thanks, mike. This was great.

Average Joe Finances:
33:15

Awesome. And hey, to my listeners, thank you so much for joining me and our special guest, T R Smith on the Average Joe Finances podcast. Go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked about today's episode with T R Aloha from Hawaii and have a great rest of your day.