June 2021 – Your Financial Pharmacist

YFP 209: Three Real Estate Investing Lessons Learned from Fellow Pharmacists

Posted on June 24, 2021November 2, 2022 by yfpadmin

Three Real Estate Investing Lessons Learned from Fellow Pharmacists

On this episode, sponsored by Insuring Income, Nate Hedrick and David Bright discuss the growing interest in real estate investing among pharmacists, common barriers that pharmacists face that may prevent them from getting started, and three real estate investing lessons learned from fellow pharmacists who shared their stories and journeys on the YFP Real Estate Investing Podcast.

Summary

Cohosts of the YFP Real Estate Investing Podcast, Nate Hedrick and David Bright, return to the show, sharing some of the lessons they have already learned from their new podcast in the short time since its inception. Nate and David discuss three stories, in particular, lessons learned about real estate investing from those pharmacists featured on the show and running themes in the YFP Real Estate Investing Podcast that listeners will notice and can anticipate in the future.

As a guest on the YFP Real Estate Investing Podcast, in episode two, Jared Wonders shared his real estate investing story and how a foundation of financial strength enabled him to make investments by reducing financial risk. In episode three, Zac Hendricks and Blake Johnson provided insight on streamlining your real estate investing and rehab process for investment properties. Blake and Zac further highlight the power of partnerships and networking, leveraging their network to help turn difficult situations around and grow exponentially as investors. The third pharmacist investor story shared was from episode five, featuring Jenny and Myke White. Jenny and Myke’s journey demonstrates the power behind education in real estate, but equally important to learning is taking the leap and buying your first property. The jump from none to one can be intimidating, but having a great team around you will help reduce risks.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Nate and David, welcome to the show.

Nate Hedrick: Thanks. Great to be here.

David Bright: Hey, thanks.

Tim Ulbrich: Well I appreciate you guys taking time. I know you’ve been busy with your own show, with the YFP Real Estate Investing podcast. And really excited about the momentum that we have there and an opportunity here to talk about some of the lessons that I have heard as a listener of that show, some of the lessons that we’re hearing from fellow pharmacists around real estate investing and hopeful that some of these items we talk about tonight will be things that folks can take away, whether they’re thinking about investing, just getting started, or looking to continue to build out their portfolio. So I know that you’re just a handful of episodes into the YFP Real Estate Investing podcast, but very excited to see the interest from folks that we have in the community, activity that we have in the YFP Real Estate Investing Facebook group, and it’s really affirming of the initial thought that we had of the thirst that is out there for pharmacists to learn more about this topic. So Nate, why do you think we are seeing that growing interest among pharmacists that are interested in real estate investing?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think it’s probably a couple different things. One is probably just an awareness bias. Right? Like we are interested in, and so now all of a sudden more people are coming out of the woodwork. And I find that that’s the case because I’m talking to people that are 28, 29 units deep and they’ve been doing it for 10 years and it’s not like I thought of it first and just found them. They’ve clearly been doing this a lot longer. So I think some of it is that. The other thing is that I think as pharmacists start to get their feet under them financially, they get their student loans kind of in a good spot, they get a really steady job, really steady income, they start to pay down some of that bad debt, they start to look at well, what are my other opportunities for growing my finances and building wealth? And a lot of them are starting to turn to real estate as a great opportunity to do that. And so I think that’s part of where we’re seeing that community kind of flexing from.

Tim Ulbrich: It’s interesting to think of, you know, the time that you guys launched this podcast, so you know, mid-April, arguably we’re in one of the wildest real estate markets that many of us have seen, at least in our recent memory. And so not necessarily the easiest time to jump into real estate investing. And so the fact that we continue to see pharmacists that are active in their investing, pharmacists that are wanting to just get started or even use this season as an opportunity just to learn more, right, and absorb information and perhaps act when the time is right for them and their personal plan. David, with that in mind, you know, in terms of the interest that we’re seeing, growing interest among pharmacists, there are certainly barriers that pharmacists are facing as well that might be preventing them from getting started. One of them I mentioned might be the market right now. What else comes to mind for you?

David Bright: Yeah, I think the market is an interesting one because we haven’t talked about that as much on the podcast, but I know it’s certainly come up on the Facebook group. And I think that’s kind of a head-scratcher for a lot of people because you could look to almost any season and say, if you were to think back to like 2004-2005, ‘Oh, the market’s rising really fast. I don’t know if this is a good time.’ You could look at it in like 2010 and say, ‘The market just crashed. I don’t know if this is a good time.’ Like you could be suspicious of just about any market, and so I think that some of that is just market hesitation. Part of that is just kind of getting through that and knowing that you can never really time the market just like with stock market investing. So I think that timing is one factor that causes a lot of heartburn. I think another one is just time in general to learn about real estate investing, to feel like you’ve got enough confidence, particularly for pharmacists that spend a ton of time in school and a ton of time learning about our trade. And as we get good at what we do, it almost feels like you’ve got to put that much time into real estate investing to know what to do. But I think we’ve had a lot of guests on that have showed that you can get started a lot faster than that. It’s maybe not quite that complicated. And I’d say money or at least a plan with money is another barrier as people are looking at trying to save up for a down payment or something like that with a house, that does take a plan, and it does take some effort. And then once you’ve worked to save up that money, that can also cause some hesitation. So there’s a lot of these common hesitation pieces, but one of the things that I really enjoyed about the first few episodes is we got a chance to talk with several investors who were a little bit newer and all had taken that plunge, and so that was really, really fun to see folks that had just said, ‘You know what, I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to dive in.’

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think that Nate and David, both of you have I think taught me this either directly or indirectly. But so much of this feels like momentum, momentum to get started. And one of the things I’ve heard among the guests was the importance of that first move, right? And we’re going to talk more about that as we highlight one of the episodes here in a moment. But I think one of the things I love about what you guys have done with this show as well as what we’re seeing in the YFP Real Estate Investing Facebook group is really holding true to the mission that you guys had for the show, which is pharmacist first, real estate investing second to that and making sure that we’re able to develop a plan around the careers that we love and around the careers that we invested a lot of time and money to do and obviously to be able to serve the patients that they serve as pharmacists. And I think the stories that you’ve featured — and we’ll talk about a couple of them here on this episode — of pharmacists that aren’t necessarily way off in the distance of massive portfolios but that took that first step or maybe that second step, and it wasn’t all perfect, and there was some learning and some growth and some development, and I think that makes it relatable. Right? That makes it to me as a pharmacist listening that is saying, ‘You know, I’m interested in this,’ to Nate’s point, ‘I’ve tidied up certain parts of my financial plan. I may be ready to dabble in this thing of real estate that really excites me for a variety of reasons.’ And hearing other pharmacists that I can see myself in their shoes and really see myself in their position where yeah, there’s some excitement, but there’s also some anxiety and some fear and some unknown. But at the end of the day, there’s a lot of learning to be had through the process. So kudos to you guys for I think a great start to this show and really holding true to the mission that you guys set out before you even recorded Episode 01. So I want to spend our time on this episode really highlighting three lessons that I have heard come through the show from fellow pharmacists that have been guests. And you know, I shared with both of you guys before I hit record, we hit record, and I meant it, like I’ve become a fan of the show. And I’ve been listening, taking away some key points and information as I suspect many of our listeners have as well. And so I wanted to hit some of the main themes and key points and use some of the stories that we’ve heard thus far on the show to highlight those key points. First one I want to talk about here is Episode 02. And I had the opportunity to interview Jared Wonders on the YFP podcast, you had him on Episode 02 of the YFP Real Estate Investing podcast where he talked about long-term versus short-term rental property investing and his perspective. Nate, give us a quick summary of Jared, his story, what him and Jess are doing, as well as what you guys talked about on the show.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, so Jared was our first true guest. And I thought he’d be a great target just because of the diversity of real estate that he’s involved in, right? He has a partner, and they own a multifamily together. He has a single-family that him and his wife bought by themselves. He just bought his first short-term rental. So like he’s dabbled in all these different areas that really highlight the various ways that you can get into real estate investing as a pharmacist. And so Jared is just a really great guy when it comes to explaining what’s going on, and he’s very eager to share that education with others. So he was a natural target for Episode 02 and just bringing on that first guest. He was great.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I really like what he shared, Nate, about — I had the chance to meet him and Jess when they were here in Columbus at a Buckeye football game and really could see the passion that they have for this topic and also their appreciation for the work that they do as pharmacists. But I think he said maybe three times on that show at least — I’d have to go back and listen — the importance of getting on the same page with your significant other or spouse, right? And I thought he did such a nice job of articulating that, and I know that’s something, Nate, that you’ve articulated as well, right? I mean, how important is that?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I never would have been able to pull the trigger on that first property without Kristen being on board and being able to talk through that. And still to this day, like we don’t do a deal without talking it through together. You know, I tend to be the overly excited one. I see a deal and I’m like, ‘Oh, we can totally make this work.’ And Kristen is the one that sits back and looks at the numbers and says, ‘Well, but hold on. The numbers don’t work and here’s why.’ So we need each other to balance each other out, and again, I agree. Jared talked a lot about how him and Jess do that together and how that makes them more successful, which is really cool.

Tim Ulbrich: The other thing I really appreciate about Jared — and I’ve had a chance to know him a little bit more on a personal level — is I feel like he very much has a passion and a heart for teaching others and helping others. And so that came through on the show, you know, in terms of his desire to help other pharmacists in this area and really appreciate the contributions he has made to the Facebook group and excited to see where his portfolio goes in the future. David, one of the things — when I listened to that episode, and I think you penned you guys right away, I also messaged Jared when I heard it because it resonated with me thinking about the financial plan and where this fits in — and this is our first lesson learned — is he talked I thought so profoundly about the importance of being able to make moves, speaking of real estate investing, from a position of financial strength. Tell us more about what he was trying to communicate there and why in your experience as well as what we heard from Jared, that is so important when it comes to real estate investing.

David Bright: Yeah, I think one of the things that we’ve seen in talking with a lot of different pharmacists, pharmacists are inherently wired to play it safe and in doing that, one of the best ways to invest with greater safety is to invest from a position of financial strength. And he talked a lot about that, how having cash reserves and having a plan for debt and all of that figured out just makes it so much less stressful so that when a water heater goes out or when there’s a roof leak or when there’s an eviction or when something happens, you handle it. You’ve got a plan in place. And doing that from a position of financial strength rather than I hope there’s margin left on the credit card or something like that. And so that can be really, really helpful and help particularly pharmacists sleep better at night in their investing. I think the other piece of that is investing from a position of financial strength, when you have your finances cleaned up and in order, pharmacists tend to have a much more solid W2 income, and that can be a real piece of strength for when you go to borrow money with a conventional lender for a mortgage. And so that can be a real just critical piece of purchasing property and having it go much, much more smoothly.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I know, David, our planning team here will be very happy to hear Jared’s advice and some of your comments here because one of the things I say on the show all the time is that every part of the financial plan has value and that it’s so important when you’re making a financial decision that you’re not making that decision in a silo, right? So here, we’re talking about investing as one part of the financial plan. We’ve got debt management, we’ve got insurance, we’ve got obviously a whole host of other parts of the financial plan. And within investing, we’re talking about one subset of investing, which is real estate investing. And I think that’s a theme I’ve heard from many guests and knowing the folks and their individual stories of you know, thinking about things like the emergency fund. Where is that at? What’s the game plan for that? What’s the debt position? You know, Nate, you and I talked about this recently on an episode related to buying a home with student loans is it doesn’t necessarily mean there is no debt. Obviously that’s an individual decision. But what’s the plan around that debt, right, in terms of being able to put this piece of the puzzle around that? And then the other thing I would add here that I heard loud and clear, guys, throughout all of the episodes we’ll speak about this evening as well as others is really having a purpose and a vision and a why for what you’re trying to accomplish when it comes to real estate investing. You know, what is the motivation? What’s the goal? Not necessarily because you heard a coworker or you heard it on the show and it sounds interesting. Hopefully it does. But what does that mean individually for you and your financial plan? And how does this ultimately fit into what you’re trying to accomplish with the rest of the financial plan? So that’s Lesson No. 1, which is really being able to make a move when it comes to real estate investing from a position of financial strength. And I think Jared did such a nice job with talking about that in Episode 02. Next one I want to move to is Episode 03, which was Blake Johnson and Zach Hendricks, two great guys. We’ve had them on the YFP podcast as well talking about some of their real estate investing journey. You guys did a nice job building upon that. They talked about in Episode 03 running the rental numbers and really digging deep into their individual roles and the partnership that they have. So David, give us a quick summary of Blake and Zach and their show. And what were some of the takeaways that you had being able to interview them for that show?
David Bright: I really had a great time talking with Blake and Zach that night. I know Nate and I ended up staying on after we turned off the record button, we stayed on to talk to them for awhile too. They were just a lot of fun to talk to. And you can tell that they are just, they’re just loving life as they’re doing this. This isn’t creating some major stress where they can’t sleep or anything like that. Like they’re just enjoying this. And so I thought that was just really encouraging to kick off with. But they talked about kind of how they get started, some different projects they’re working on, even with running the numbers, one of the things that impressed me so much as they were talking about running their numbers is they just have a really simple way of doing it. They’re doing advanced calculus pharmacokinetic kind of stuff. Like they just figured out some pretty simple math. And even when Nate and I threw some questions of thinking about it in a slightly more complex way, they’re like, nah. It was just the beauty of simplicity, and I feel like that can help get past that analysis paralysis. And they just had a really, really great model there. And I think the other thing that they hit on well is clearly, they have a partnership in doing this, which for their goals since you talked about that purpose and vision and why, for achieving their goals, they knew that they wanted to go bigger than just having one or two rental properties each. They wanted more than that. And so it just reminds me of that quote of, “If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together,” how they just really found a great partnership opportunity and leveraged that in order to achieve their goals.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and David, the other thing that stands out as you speak about partnership is how clearly defined their roles are. Right? So I remember Blake talking about really his value in being able to analyze the properties, find those that may be a good investment, and Zach really plays a significant role because of his background and what he does and a lot of the rehab, estimating those costs as well as overseeing that part of the project. So yeah, I think the value of their partnership stood out. I thought the clear purpose and vision and why behind their investing was a strength and certainly appreciate the comment you made on the value of that partnership. Nate, the other thing that I want to spend a few moments here on, which is the second lesson I want to talk about this evening that came out from this episode was the power of networking. And I remember Blake talking about this when we had him on the YFP podcast. He talked about it again on this show. It really seemed like they have been intentional in building relationships. Now, they’ve got a couple things going for them, right? They’re in a small town in Arkansas, Blake’s got some great relationships that are coming from his role of working with an independent pharmacy. But it seems like those relationships and the intentionality of building those and also conducting their business in a high integrity way that furthers those relationships really have played a big role in the success of their investing. Tell us more about the power of networking and what you took away from this episode related to that.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, I agree. That’s a really powerful point for them that a lot of their deals, a lot of their — some of their best deals and some of their saves, things where it may not have been going right but they turned it around and kind of fixed it came because they had good networks and good individuals to speak with. You know, one of the main things they talked about was the first couple deals were MLS deals, meaning they were listed properties, anybody could see them. But as the market became tighter and tighter, they started finding new ways to find opportunities. And some of those simply became just because they knew somebody who knew somebody or they talked to the right person at the right time. And it just goes to show that truly building that network in advance and giving away things up front so that you can hopefully get back later in the future, it has really paid dividends for them. So again, they gave several examples on that episode, and I think again, like David said, after the fact we were chatting with them. It’s just incredible to hear the number of people that they interact with and how that helps their business.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I remember some of the relationships they talked about with agents, with obviously the lending and what that gave them in terms of they now have some of that smaller town relationship and being able to have some more flexibility and be nimble in some of those deals. David, I want to put you on the hot seat for a moment because this is one of the things I noticed when I started really getting into a little bit more about what you’re doing on the investing side of how valuable it was and is the team that you have built up around you. And I know this is a process that has taken time, but I think for somebody that is hearing whether it’s Blake and Zach’s episode or hearing stories such as yours or others that have really taken some time to build up these relationships, it can still feel overwhelming with like, where do I even start? Like is this a meetup of investors? Is this a Bigger Pockets type of thing or the YFP Real Estate Investing Facebook group? Like as you reflect back on your own journey where now you’ve got all these relationships with folks that you trust, that are looking out for you and your investing plan, like how did you get started with that? And what words of advice would you have for folks in this area of building up their team and then ultimately the power and value that comes from networking?

David Bright: Yeah, that’s such a good question because I agree, that’s a big thing that can get in people’s ways if I don’t have a trusted contractor, a trusted realtor, a trusted lender, like all these different people, that can be really stressful. For me, I know a lot of that started with a great referral to a great agent. And that agent knew great people who I was able to meet. From there, there was local networking with a meetup where I met more really good people. And so for me, it was a lot of just networking and trying to learn more from local people but all stemming out of some of those just natural first relationships.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ve talked a little bit about being able to make moves from a position of financial strength. We’ve talked about the power of networking. And I want to shift gears now and focus on Jenny and Myke White, awesome episode, Episode 05 that you guys had them on the show, “None to One: How to Get Your First Investment Property.” And shoutout to Jenny and Myke, I’ve known Jenny for a couple years. I had a chance to interview Jenny and Myke on the YFP podcast. Love what they’re doing in terms of their investing but also love their passion for helping others and love their willingness to be honest with how they got started, some of the mistakes that they made along the way, some of the things that they’ve been learning along the way. And I think for those that are just beginning to think about what might be the first move, I would highly recommend you check out Episode 05 as I thought it gave a great insight into some fellow individuals that may be in a similar path to what you’re looking for. So Nate, give us a quick overview of Jenny and Myke, their background, what they’re doing from an investing standpoint, and how they got started that you featured on Episode 05.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, what we realized early on, David and I just planning out some of the shows we wanted to have, we recognized that a lot of our audience is someone that has never invested in real estate before and may not have even thought about doing it up until this point. And so our thought was, you know, for both of us, one of the hardest things was getting that first property. And so how do you go from no properties at all to that very first one? And Jenny and Myke were in the perfect position to kind of share that because they had recently done it, and they have exactly one property. So they are about as relatable as you can possibly get while still being a real estate investor. And so Jenny and Myke’s story is amazing where they’ve really worked together as a couple to kind of figure out what is in their best interests. One of the things I love about their story is that Jenny talks about how it was kind of her idea first, this whole idea of real estate, and how she brought Myke along, which I think, again, a ton of people can resonate with where one spouse gets interested and then brings the other along for the ride and just how that worked and how they played that out. And again, I think overall, their story is about moving across country, relocating at where they were going to invest, and then leveraging their capital from that move into their first investment property and how that worked. It was a great story.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I agree. And I love their passion, Nate, for learning. I know Jenny hosts a real estate book club on Facebook, and she talks so much about the learning process and for those that have ever met Jenny — and a shoutout to her — like she’s one of those people you talk to in a half hour or 60 minutes and you feel motivated and inspired to like get after learning more because she’s just so on fire with learning and also wanting to provide value to other folks and the conversations and the interactions that she’s having. David, to the point of learning, do your homework, this really stands out to me as the third lesson that I heard across multiple episodes, but really highlighting the interview with Jenny and Myke, and that is do your homework and learn, learn, learn, keep learning, but at some point, you’ve got to jump even if you don’t have all the answers. So talk to us about how important that is, when folks might decide when they’re ready to actually make that move, and how they ultimately avoid becoming paralyzed through the analysis phase.

David Bright: Yeah, I think that they had a really good balance there where Jenny in particular was doing a lot of that homework and learning and reading and all of that. Myke created a lot of accountability there in that coming on board together, kind of approaching this as a team. And then when it came time for them to jump, one of the things that they did that I really liked is they didn’t try for like crazy advanced strategies of they got a realtor, and they went on the MLS, and they found a listed property, and they bought it. And so they didn’t — by just jumping in with something that’s a tried-and-true method that you can read a lot about, you can learn a lot about, and it’s probably something very similar to what most everyone that owns their own home has already done. You find a good realtor, you go on the MLS, you find a house, you buy it. So jumping became easier because they had a strategy that helped for that. And by learning through that, that kind of decreased the anxiety and I just really liked how they were able to do that by surrounding themselves with a really solid team and a really solid strategy.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, again, that was Episode 05, “None to One: How to Get Your First Investment Property.” None to one, I love that concept, Nate. I think you mentioned it as well, but we should do more of those into the future. I think highlighting more folks because that is the biggest barrier, right? It was for me, I suspect for you guys as well and others that are listening. And maybe you go none to one and you realize it’s not for you. That’s OK. Likely you go none to one and you realize alright, I’m still on my feet, I learned some things, could have done it better, and what does that mean for the next deal going forward and also being able to help others. So “None to One: How to Get Your First Investment Property,” that was Episode 05 with Jenny and Myke White.

Nate Hedrick: And yeah, I would agree. The none to one story I feel like is the most authentic, right? Those people, they come on the show, they have just done this recently, and again, they’re the most relatable investor we can possibly provide. So I really like those stories. And you’re right, I’m hoping to bring more of those to light here with David as we go forward.

Tim Ulbrich: One other theme, David and Nate, that I’ve heard from guests throughout the episodes that you guys have done already is the value of community and learning from others, the value of community and learning from others. You know, that provides accountability, obviously it provides support, being challenged, making connections. We talked about several of these key points here tonight. And I think this is an opportunity for folks, if you’re not already in and aware of what we’re doing with the YFP Real Estate Investing Facebook group, I hope you’ll join us. We’ve got a few hundred pharmacists already that are engaging with one another, sharing some pretty awesome stories, the good, bad, and the ugly, connecting with other pharmacist investors in their community. That’s really what this is all about, hopefully that we can educate, inspire, empower, and ultimately be able to connect you with other investors that are pharmacists and also an opportunity to learn from one another. David, speaking of getting started, I think one of the challenges here is that folks that come on the podcast, even though you guys have done a nice job of asking them questions that may highlight some of the challenges along the way, we’re probably hearing some of the best of the best in terms of their deal stories or examples that they’re providing when you’re asking them to provide an example. And that might not be necessarily something that everyone listening looks at and say, ‘That worked out so well, I’m still nervous that it may not work out for me.’ So tell us about why that’s important folks consider that as they’re hearing guests come on the show.

David Bright: Yeah, I definitely want to caution when you hear things that are just like, ‘Oh, that was an amazing deal. I don’t know how I could ever do that,’ like I don’t want that to be this intimidating thing by featuring some folks where this worked out. Like it definitely doesn’t work out in every situation. Blake and Zach had a nice story that kind of showed some of the other side of that of how things don’t always work out but also how they were able to turn that around and still prevent it from being a disaster. Jared had a very similar story as well. So one of the things that when you have a good team around you, again, since pharmacists are so wired for safety, when you have that good team around you, they help you to not really get super hurt. And so you mentioned a minute ago this ‘none to one’ concept, and that’s one of the nice things about real estate is if you ever go from one back to none, it’s kind of like when you sell the house you live in. You go get a realtor, you put it on the MLS, you sell the house. So if you buy $100,000 rental property and after a few years it’s not really working out for you, hopefully if you’ve surrounded yourself with a good team and bought well, it’s not going to hurt so bad. It’s different than if you would have put $100,000 on Blockbuster 20 years ago or something like that. You could really be in trouble now. So there’s a lot of safety in team and in real estate in general.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, great reminder, David. And I know you and Nate have done a great job and will continue to of featuring the good, bad, and the ugly, right? I think it’s important as we talk about this as one option of investing that pharmacists may consider in the context of their financial plan, really understanding what is the benefits, potential benefits, what are the risks, who might this be for and who may this not be for and really trying to present a fair perspective on real estate investing. So Nate, I know we’re just a handful of episodes in, but am I itching as I suspect our listeners are as well, like what’s ahead? What should we expect from the show coming forward?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, I think more of what we’ve already provided, right? I talked about sharing stories of people that are just getting started. We don’t want to move away from that because I think that is I think a lot of our audience. We’ve got some ideas coming away where we’re going to interview some members of those people’s teams. So property managers, contractors, maybe a real estate agent, financial planning, all the different pieces that go into supporting real estate investing. So taking some looks at that aspect. And then I think too, we’re just trying to share more stories of pharmacists doing this while being pharmacists. You know, that really was kind of the core mission that David and I looked at and making sure that our show was different and our show was relatable to specifically our audience. And so that is one of our big goals as we move forward is to keep sharing those stories of success as pharmacists but having that same success in the real estate side as well.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I hope you’ll join Nate and David each Saturday, new episode, what a better way to start the weekend, get a cup of coffee, put on the show. For those that are working weekends, you can listen to it on your car ride. Great opportunity to kick off the weekend. And if you have a question or story to share, feel free to reach out to [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you. Again, [email protected]. David and Nate, I’m going to put you guys a little bit on your own hot seat. So one of the things you do at the end of your episodes are some final infusion questions, which I love the pharmacy connection there. And a really cool opportunity to hear from folks about resources and things that are helpful among other things. Question I have for you guys — I do want to ask you for a resource or something that you’re finding value in right now — but first, I want to ask you, as you reflect on the journey thus far, you know, one of the things I share with folks is one of the greatest joys of doing this podcast has been able to meet so many different pharmacists and while I am helping to share their story, I feel like I leave each and every one of those learning something myself and hopefully finding an opportunity to improve. So as you reflect back on the journey thus far, David, we’ll start with you: One thing you’ve learned from the guests that have challenged or inspired you in your own real estate journey.

David Bright: Yeah, one of the things that has really hit me in the first several episodes that we’ve recorded is I’m realizing how most of my personal investing has really just been buy-and-hold investing, long-term rentals, kind of consistent and boring. And I like that because I’m able to do that without it interfering with my work as a pharmacist. One of the things that’s been inspiring to me is seeing pharmacists that leverage multiple strategies. Like I really thought I had to just do the one thing in order for it to be manageable. But seeing other pharmacists that are able to work multiple strategies at the same time and do short-term or medium-term rentals as well, and so it’s opened my brainstorming to maybe there’s other things that I could do, and if I follow in the footsteps of what some of these other investors have been doing, there’s got to be ways that I can also do that without distracting from my work as a pharmacist.

Tim Ulbrich: Very cool. And Nate, what about you?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah. To get really specific, I think it’s actually similar to David. I have not considered short-term rentals before as something that I wanted to get into. But after talking with both Jared and with Rachel, I thought immediately, like I’ve got to look into this more. This is something that I think is really interesting. You know, I’ve stayed at an Airbnb before, but I’ve never owned one. And so you know, again, taking that actual discussion and putting it into practice, right? Kristen and I within the last couple of weeks actually went out and looked at a property we were evaluating as a short-term rental. And that only happened because I had those conversations with Jared and with Rachel. And it was funny, an extra shoutout to Jared Wonders because I texted him the night before we were going to go look at a property, and I’m like, “Alright, man, I need to know everything about buying an STR like tonight.” And he was super helpful. He was like, “OK, well, what do you actually need?” And so he’s giving me all these great resources right over phone. So it’s just really cool to expand what I thought was possible and then have a community to go along with me for the ride. So again, it’s not like I have to go re-learn all this stuff from scratch. I can go right to people that are doing it, living it, and have a great relationship with me already and tap right into them, which is awesome.

Tim Ulbrich: And what a cool example there, Nate, right? I mean, that’s a great example of like going from textbook to application, right? I mean, you talk about short-term rentals, but you actually go out, you look at one, you run some numbers, you talk with somebody else about it, get another opinion. Like that makes it come alive, you know? So I think that’s a cool example of the value of making those connections. Another final infusion question you guys ask to your audience is, you know, what’s one resource, could be a podcast, could be a book, could be a guide, a quiz, a calculator, a form, whatever, that you’re currently drawing value from when it comes to your own journey as a real estate investor. So David?

David Bright: So one of the things that I think we keep making jokes about on the podcast because every week, at least once, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” gets mentioned, right, like if not multiple times. Like I don’t know, that book has changed so many people’s lives. And so kind of going through this, asking these questions and hearing that perpetually come up has actually caused my wife Heather and I to go back through that book —

Tim Ulbrich: Oh, cool.

David Bright: — as the two of us to just kind of talk through some of that, the fundamentals and foundations and mindset from that book because it is so good, and there’s a reason why everybody mentions it. So it’s one of those where I think you can go back and read it for the 13th time or whatever time you’re on, and some of that is just really helpful to continually get your mind in gear for where you’re trying to go.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, David, I think that’s one of those books — I haven’t read it 13 times yet, I think I’m only three times through — but it’s one of those books that hits you in a different place like where you are, you know, partly in probably your own personal investing journey mindset-wise. But I kind of have put that among some other books of like I need to revisit this book every couple years because it is that transformational. And I would even argue for those that are listening that are like, I’m not even sure the whole real estate investing thing is for me, I think it’s still that important of a resource just to get you thinking a little bit different in terms of mindset and money. Nate, what about you?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, the resource that I keep going back to — and I’m stealing from my first answer — is the other pharmacists that we get to talk with, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Nate Hedrick: It starts with David and I, like David has been a fantastic resource for me, but also the other pharmacists that we’re talking to. And just being able to tap into that network, learning from people that are doing this, you know, I’ve always had some sort of community with Bigger Pockets and with my real estate activities, there are other agents I can talk to, but it hasn’t felt like this level of fit where I can just go to those people and we immediately connect and it’s on a different level than I’ve had before. So that for me has been a big change, and it’s a resource that I am fully tapping into. So apologies to all those I’ve already texted and bothered with questions, but it’s a great way to learn and again, we come at this as experts in what we do. But there are so many things that we are not experts in yet, and there are so many ways that I can still learn. And so this has been really fun for me to tap into that and continue to grow and learn.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and the power of networking, right? We talked about it earlier on the show, but I believe that this is another great example, what you just said there, Nate, that there’s enough of this to go around, right, for folks that want to get — this is about other people helping each other, whether that’s in your own community, whether it’s in other communities, and we’re just a handful of episodes in, but I’m starting to see come to shape this concept of pharmacists connecting with other pharmacists in a variety of different ways, being able to encourage and motivate each other on their own journey and perhaps collaborate in some cases if that makes sense. So again, YFP Real Estate Investing podcast, each and every Saturday on this channel. If you have a question that you have for Nate and David or a story to share, please shoot us an email at [email protected]. And for those that are listening and thinking, where do I get started with real estate investing, Nate and David have written a great resource, “The Pharmacist’s Guide to Real Estate Investing.” It’s a quick read, a lot of tangible takeaways. You can get a copy of that for free at YFPRealEstate.com. Again, that’s “The Pharmacist’s Guide to Real Estate Investing.” You can grab a copy for free at YFPRealEstate.com. David and Nate, thank you so much for the contributions on the show as well as taking time this evening.

Nate Hedrick: Thanks, Tim.

David Bright: Thanks so much.

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7 Things to Consider Before Starting a 529 Plan

Posted on June 18, 2021March 12, 2024 by yfpadmin

The following is a guest post from Dr. Jeffrey Keimer. Dr. Keimer is a 2011 graduate of Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and pharmacy manager for a regional drugstore chain in Vermont. He and his wife Alex have been pursuing financial independence since 2016. Check out Jeff’s new book, FIRE Rx: The Pharmacist’s Guide to Financial Independence to learn how to create an actionable plan to reach financial independence.

Let’s face it, paying for college stinks. Whether you are in school, you’re trying to keep up with your child’s tuition which tends to increase by twice the rate of inflation every year, or you’ve graduated and are facing paying back student loans, the cost of higher education can be a tremendous burden.

So what can you do about it?

Well, the first, and most obvious answer here is you need to save for it. Sure, there are other things you can do to reduce the cost of college such as scholarship hacking (i.e., applying for every scholarship under the sun in the hope you get some) or taking a job with a college offering tuition reimbursement as a benefit, but those kinds of silver bullets aren’t the norm. No, chances are you’re going to need to start thinking about college expenses well in advance and start saving sooner rather than later.

Thankfully, the government gives college savers a helping hand in the form of tax-advantaged savings vehicles; the two most popular choices are the Coverdell Education Savings Account and the 529 plan. In this post, we’re going to do a deep dive into the more popular latter option: the 529.

What is a 529 Plan?

In a nutshell, a 529 plan is simply an account that allows money to be invested and grow tax-free for future education expenses. This is similar to other tax-advantaged accounts like an IRA or 401(k). Unlike those plans, money in a 529 plan can only be withdrawn (without penalty) to pay for qualified education expenses. If the expense qualifies, the money coming out of the plan also comes out tax-free. What’s more, contributions made to 529 plans can have some tax benefits too depending on your state (more on this later). In this respect, the 529 falls somewhere in between a Roth IRA and an HSA in terms of preferential tax treatment.

Before opening one, there are several things to consider; and most, if not all, will depend on your situation. What follows is a brief overview of seven main considerations before starting a 529 plan and it is not an all-inclusive list. As always, if you have questions about how best to incorporate these concepts into your financial plan, make sure to reach out to a financial professional like those at YFP Planning.

Let’s dive in.

What to Consider Before Starting a 529 Plan

1. Which Type of 529 Plan is Right for You?

Like many things in life, even those trying to save for college can find themselves facing the tyranny of choice. Case in point, as of when this post was written, there are 150 different plans considered to be 529 plans. But fear not! We’ll help you sort through it.

First off, you need to decide on the general type of 529 plan you want. While the term “529 Plan” is sometimes used as a catch-all for these savings vehicles, there are only two distinct types of plans governed by section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code: prepaid tuition plans and savings plans.

With a prepaid tuition plan, you do just that: pre-pay tuition. The idea here is that since the price of college tuition tends to increase quite a bit over time, it’s better to prepay to lock in tuition prices at today’s rates. In addition, by using a prepaid plan, there can be far less guesswork in the planning process. Sounds good, right? There’s a catch.

As you may have guessed, when you pre-pay tuition, you’re pre-paying at an institution’s (or institutions’) going rate. As such, you may be limiting where the funds in the account can be spent. After all, you can’t pre-pay 4 years’ worth of tuition for an inexpensive state school and then expect Harvard to say you’re all paid up for there as well. What happens with prepaid plans is that the pre-payment is based on the tuition rates at schools either in a particular state or within a private network of schools outlined by the plan; and to use the prepaid plan as intended, the beneficiary would need to attend one of the covered schools. If the beneficiary chooses to go somewhere else (or doesn’t get into a prepaid school) options are generally limited to changing the beneficiary of the account, rolling the account value into a 529 savings plan, or getting a refund (usually with fees applied).

On the other hand, 529 savings plans offer much more flexibility. With a savings plan, you’re able to use account funds for qualifying expenses at thousands of colleges and universities in the US and abroad as well as private/religious K-12 tuition (up to $10,000 annually). In addition, money added to a savings plan can be invested, similar to a workplace retirement plan, allowing you to grow the account faster when compared to a prepaid plan. Finally, unlike prepaid tuition plans, where participation can be restricted depending on the beneficiary’s state of residence, 529 savings plans are generally open to anyone.

However, not all 529 savings plans are created equal and some are, objectively, better than others. Separating the wheat from the chaff here can be a kind of daunting process too as savings plans comprise the vast majority of available 529 plans and there are several variables to consider for each; such as state-specific tax breaks, plan fees, and investment choice. What’s more, unlike a prepaid tuition plan where the amount you need to save is explicit, market returns (which are relatively unpredictable) are going to play a more central role in the plan’s success. Given the added uncertainty, a savings plan might not work for everyone.

Finally, I should note that while many people choose to use one type of plan or the other exclusively, there’s no law saying you can’t use both. For some, combining the greater certainty of the prepaid plan with the flexibility of a savings plan by investing in both can be a good fit.

2. Should You Use an In-State 529?

Once you’ve decided the kind of 529 plan you want to use, it’s time to start narrowing the list of available plans to the one best suited for the plan’s beneficiary, and you! Generally, the next step here is to decide whether or not to use a plan specific to your state of residence.

Unlike other tax-advantaged accounts such as IRAs and HSAs, the federal government doesn’t offer any tax incentives for 529 contributions. However, depending on your state of residence, contributions made to a 529 plan can have state income tax incentives such as deductions or credits. Here’s where things can get a little challenging. The rules surrounding state tax incentives are, much like state pharmacy laws, kind of a patchwork across the country.

For instance, in my home state of Vermont, my wife and I get a 10% tax credit on up to $5,000 worth of 529 contributions per beneficiary per year as long as we make those contributions to the official in-state 529 plan. If we lived in Pennsylvania though, we could get a tax deduction on up to $30,000 worth of contributions per beneficiary per year and it doesn’t matter what 529 plan we use. But on the flip side, if we lived in California, it doesn’t matter how much we contribute or what plan we contribute to because California doesn’t offer any tax incentives for 529 contributions.

As you can see, the relative value of these tax incentives can vary a lot from state to state. You could live in a state that heavily rewards saving for college…or not so much. When choosing a 529 plan, paying attention to how your state treats contributions can help you avoid leaving money on the table allowing you to save for college much more efficiently.

3. Is Your In-State Plan a Good Investment?

A saying in the investment world is “don’t let the tax tail wag the investment dog” and I think it’s extremely relevant when choosing a 529 savings plan. When it comes to investments, 529 savings plans share a lot in common with workplace retirement plans such as 401(k)s. They both limit your choice of investments to a short menu of options and tend to offer the same types of investments no matter where you go. Typically, this means an age-based allocation strategy (similar to a retirement plan’s target-date fund) and some stock, bond, and cash choices for those who want a more custom portfolio.

So if there’s not much difference between savings plans in terms of what they offer, why should an investor care about which plan they choose?

Fees!

Just as I said in an earlier post on investing basics, fees can have an enormous impact on your overall investment returns. Their effect on the performance of a 529 savings plan is no different. While many plans offer solid low-cost investment options, some do not. And worse yet, some plans charge high admin or advisor fees on top of those already charged by the funds you invest in. Yikes!

So going back to the old investing adage “don’t let the tax tail wag the investment dog,” the presence of high fees within your in-state options is a good reason to think twice before investing. After all, getting a couple of hundred dollars back in taxes but losing thousands due to fees over time is the very definition of penny-wise, pound-foolish.

It’s for this reason that many people who choose to use a 529 savings plan opt for an out-of-state plan. Once you’ve decided to invest outside the limited options provided by your state, you’re free to choose whatever plan you want; some of which explicitly market themselves as low-fee options.

In addition, depending on your state, it may be possible to invest in the in-state option, get a tax break, and then later, move the investment to a more fee-friendly out-of-state plan (so-called “deduct and dash”). Yes, it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too. This sort of thing isn’t allowed in all states though, and doing so in the wrong state might cause tax penalties. Be sure to check first with a CPA or another qualified tax professional before pursuing such a plan.

4. What Types of Expenses are Covered?

When I was in college, I spent a whole lot of money on a variety of things that were loosely affiliated with my status as a full-time student. However, a number of those expenses that I would’ve considered to be “college-related” wouldn’t have been considered qualified higher education expenses covered by a 529 savings plan. Here’s a short list of what would’ve made the cut:

Tuition and fees
Room and board (limited to the costs published by the college attended)
Textbooks
Computers (related to schooling only, sorry no gaming or crypto mining rigs)
Student loan repayment ($10k lifetime max per beneficiary as of 2021)
Tuition for private or religious K-12 education (up to $10k per year)

But what about other things such as transportation or the cost of an internet connection for the apartment? Surely those are “education-related expenses” and would be covered, right? Wrong! This is where people trying to pay for everything related to a child’s schooling can get into trouble when using 529 funds.

So what happens if money from a 529 savings plan gets tapped for a non-qualified expense? First off, relax, no one from the government is going to come and break down your door about it. However, you will owe ordinary income tax on the portion of the withdrawal that comes from account earnings as well as a 10% penalty; very similar to what would happen if you withdrew from a Roth IRA before age 59 ½.

5. What are Your Plan’s Contribution Limits?

So just how much money can you squirrel away in a 529 savings plan? Well, the most accurate answer here is “it depends.” Contribution limits are set not by the federal government, but instead by the states, and it ends up being another legal patchwork across the country. In addition, contribution limits are not based on some yearly amount that you can put in, but by a limit on the balance of the account. Once the account’s value reaches the prescribed limit, no more contributions can be made until the balance falls back below it.

On the other hand, even states boasting the lowest allowable balances let you build up quite the war chest before the limits are reached. For example, as of 2021, even the strictest of state-sponsored plans have a limit of $235,000 per beneficiary; quite a bit if you ask me. And if that weren’t enough, some states will even let you have over half a million in a 529. At that point, if you can’t pay for college, you’re doing it wrong.

6. Is “Front Loading” Contributions the Right Move?

Another question often asked about 529 plans is whether you should front-load the contributions (aka. lump sum invest) or spread them out over time (aka dollar cost average). Fortunately, there’s some guidance on this and generally speaking, it’s better to invest as much as you can as early as possible. As the adage goes “time in the market beats timing the market.” The more time your investments have to grow, the better chance you have for those investments to grow.

In addition, the IRS makes a special exception for 529 contributions when it comes to gift taxes. Normally when you give money to a child, there’s a $15,000 per year cap per person, per child ($30,000 for couples filing jointly). However, the IRS makes an exception for gifts going to 529 accounts, allowing you to front-load 5 years of contributions into one. This could mean up to $150,000 going into a 529 account in a single year! Now I know what you’re thinking, that sounds pretty baller even on a pharmacist’s salary, but hear me out. Given the exception, front-loading a 529 account like this can be a very good play for those receiving an inheritance or other significant windfall. While it won’t keep you from paying taxes on the money you get, it can keep that money growing tax-free and for a good cause.

7. What if My Kid Doesn’t Use It?

Finally, when thinking about using a 529 as part of the financial plan, you should consider what to do with it if the original beneficiary doesn’t use all the money in it to fund their education. Or who knows, maybe they don’t use any of it! What happens then?

Fortunately, the 529 isn’t a use-it-or-lose-it type of savings vehicle like the flexible spending account (FSA) you may have at work for healthcare expenses. The money saved in one will continue to be there regardless of what your kid chooses to do in life. So if they don’t use it all does it make sense to just cash it out? Maybe, but transferring the account to someone else will probably make more sense when you consider the taxes and penalties you’d have to pay on such a move.

So how does that work? Well, it could be as simple as just changing the name of the beneficiary on the account. First kid not going to use the money? Now that money belongs to the second kid. Done. You could even name yourself as the new beneficiary to help fund yourself going back to school, something that may become necessary in the future. As Yuval Noah Harari points out in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the speed at which new technologies are disrupting old industries these days may make it difficult for anyone to stay in the same profession for 40 years; especially those in highly specialized ones such as pharmacy. Given that, utilizing a 529 account to fund not just your childrens’ but further your education by taking advantage of their ease of transferability can help protect you and your family from this kind of uncertainty.

But what if the person you want to name as a beneficiary already has their own 529 account? No worries, you can just combine the accounts once a year through a rollover. A rollover can also be a good choice if you move states and the new state you’re in has a better plan.

Conclusion

Overall, 529 plans can be a solid choice as a savings vehicle for future education expenses. With their preferential tax treatment, high contribution limits, and ease of transferability, choosing to use a 529 plan versus alternatives such as a taxable brokerage account can make a lot of sense.

529 Plans aren’t without their drawbacks though. The quality and tax benefits of 529 plans can vary from state to state, with some states making investments in their 529 almost a no-brainer and others…well, not so much. In addition, the requirement to spend 529 money on “qualified higher education expenses” only without incurring a significant penalty, can definitely be a turn-off for those who don’t care for restrictions on their savings.

Need help determining how to best save for your child’s education?

In the end, the suitability of a 529 plan as a savings vehicle is going to come down to your family’s financial plan. The seven considerations I’ve spoken to above are good for getting an appreciation of these types of plans and how they might fit into your plan. But it’s no substitute for doing in-depth research or working with a financial professional. If you think you need more help deciding whether a 529 plan is a good fit or which one to choose, feel free to reach out to the team of fee-only, comprehensive CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS TM at YFP Planning. They can walk you through all the ins and outs of saving for college and getting the most from your customized financial plan.

You can book a free discovery meeting with our team to see if YFP Planning is the right fit for you.

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YFP 208: Why Minimizing Fees On Your Investments Is So Important

Posted on June 17, 2021November 2, 2022 by yfpadmin

Why Minimizing Fees On Your Investments Is So Important

Tim Baker digs into the f-word we want to minimize when it comes to our investments…FEES! When you do the hard work to save money, you should be interested in keeping as much of that investment intact by minimizing the fees that can take away from your long-term gains. Tim discusses various fees, the impact these fees can have on achieving your long-term savings goals, and strategies you can take to evaluate the fees related to your own investment plan.

Summary

Tim Baker discusses the many types of fees associated with your investments and their impact on your financial plan, including expense ratios, platform fees, trading fees, and advisor fees. He also breaks down the ABCs of mutual funds: A shares, B shares, and C shares and the types of fees each of these investments may include. Tim further details how these fees can impact your investments over time, affect growth, and impact your financial plan overall.

Tim discusses his experiences with clients, sharing that many do not know they are being charged various fees or do not understand the full impact the cost can be in the long term. While many fees may be challenging to uncover, Tim shares the importance of asking questions about fees, whether you are just getting started or are farther into your investment history. Investors should be asking what their fees are, why they are paying them, and the benefit – if any – they have on the investments.

Tim mentions that it’s okay to pay a fee for professional help but be wary when advisors are charging commission because there may be a conflict of interest. Tim also suggests you ask what you are getting for your fees across the board, with professional services as well as the investments themselves. Typically, the expense that you pay does not equate to increased benefits for the investor, so trimming those fees whenever and wherever possible may benefit the investor over time.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Tim, back-to-back episodes. Good to have you on again.

Tim Baker: Yeah, good to be back. I’m excited for this episode. I think it’s going to be hopefully valuable for those that are listening.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I think so. And we talked last week about common financial errors or mistakes, some that we’ve made, some we’ve seen other pharmacist clients, colleagues, make. And today, we’re talking about one that was not on that list of common mistakes we discussed last episode but certainly can have a major impact on how much wealth you’re able to build. And we’re going to talk really big numbers at the impact that fees can have, fees on the investments is going to be the focus of today’s discussion and hopefully shedding some light on a topic that maybe folks have heard about but haven’t really thought about and evaluated for their own investing plan. So Tim, one of the things I share when I talk on the topic of investing is that if you’re going to do all of the hard work to save money each and every month, take advantage of compound interest and the time value of money, then we want to do everything we can to maintain as much of the pie as possible. And I often think that there’s really three big things that can eat at our investment pie: that’s taxes — and we’ve talked about that on several episodes on the show of things that we can do from the tax-advantaged investing standpoint — inflation — obviously can be out of control to some degree — and then the third is the one we’re going to be talking about today, which is fees. And something I’ve heard you say before is that you need to follow the “Three F Rule” of 401k management. And that’s Figure out the Fees First. So that’s what we’re going to be digging into today, and that’s even beyond just the 401k when we talk about fees. So Tim, before we get too far into the weeds about this discussion of fees, let’s back up a bit as some may be thinking, fees on my investments? What fees on my investments? So talk to us a little bit about the common fees that are out there when it comes to one’s individual investment portfolio.

Tim Baker: Yeah, if I could even back up further, Tim, I would even say like the importance of this — like it shouldn’t be understated. And I think that, you know, when we — kind of like when I talk about baby stepping the financial plan, we look at things like what does the emergency fund look like, what does the consumer debt look like.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Tim Baker: When we dive in particular into the investment part of the financial plan, one of the first things I look at is fees. And you know, outside of the asset allocation, which the asset allocation being like how do I divvy up in a broad sense between like stocks versus bonds and you can actually get more granular than that, outside of the asset allocations, the fees probably play one of the biggest roles in your ability to kind of build wealth over time and really the fees, just like you mentioned along with tax and inflation, is it can really be in a factor that erodes that ability to build wealth. So it’s super important. And you know, when I look at the fees, one of the problems in the industry is that the industry is not super transparent with regard to what the investor pays. A lot of these can be wrapped up in products that are sold to investors or not necessarily appropriately disclosed on a statement. So you’re really up against it when you’re trying to figure out, OK, what exactly am I paying? And the fact that it can be a little bit opaque in that regard is frustrating. I think that’s one of the things that we work with our clients is to show them, ‘Hey, did you know that you’re paying this in your 401k?’ And most people are like, ‘I had no idea.’ Then the question is, ‘Is that good or bad?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, it’s typically higher than what we see,’ or something along those lines. So to me, the name in the game is really trying to understand — to answer the question, what are the things that you could be charged? And then like what is that exactly for your particular case? So if we look at the things that we typically see, if we look at the 401k first, you know, the things that are typically in the 401k are things like platform fees. So this might be where Fidelity or Schwab or someone might charge you a fee just to really have an account with them. And that’s less common in a 401k. You typically see them more in brokerage accounts, more in IRAs. When I was in the broker dealer world, we would charge — the custodian would charge clients just to have an account open. And a lot of this is in also response to like lower entrance environments. You know, they’re trying to make money where they can. And sometimes these additional line item fees are created. Things like trading fees and transaction fees. So this is like anytime that you buy and sell, again, typically you don’t see these inside of a 401k, but you do see these outside, like a brokerage account, an IRA, you know, if you buy stock ABC, sometimes you’ll be charged anywhere from $7 to $50 a trade. Now, these have kind of become less and less common as a lot of the custodians want to be competitive and they’ll waive fees and things like that.

Tim Ulbrich: Race to 0 here, right?

Tim Baker: Exactly.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Tim Baker: Yep. The other thing that you would see are things like advisor fees. So these can be both within inside and outside of a 401k. So these are things like, ‘Hey, I work with an advisor, and they charge me a flat 1% on the investments that they’re managing.’ It could also come in the form of commissions, and that’s a whole other ball of wax in terms of how an A share, a B share, a C share mutual fund, you typically don’t see commissions inside of a 401k, but you do see — sometimes you see C share, which are commissions, inside of a 401k. But you typically see those more in brokerage accounts, IRAs, and such that. And then probably the last one that basically permeates just about every investment is expense ratio. So the expense ratio is the money that the fund takes to kind of run the fund. So if I’m a mutual fund manager, Tim, and I’m in charge of a large cap mutual fund, you know, I’m managing billions of dollars, so I’m pulling a bunch of investors’ money together to buy large cap stocks and the like. Then I need to pay myself, I need to pay for the fancy office on Wall Street, I need to be able to pay for information. I might even need to pay sales people to go out and market my fund. So those all are basically captured in an expense ratio. So the expense ratio basically, you know, takes money out of that fund and it’s shared, that expense is shared, with the rest of the investors that are invested in it. So those are typically the broad strokes. You also see other ones I would say outside — and these kind of can get wrapped up into platform fees — but you’ll see like administrative or like bookkeeping fees in a 401k. And this could be like record keeping and all of the laws that are surrounding 401k plans and 403b’s. These can be pretty prohibitive. Sometimes they’re a flat fee, sometimes they’re a percentage. But these are kind of just administrative fees that, again, that are not listed on a — they’re not listed on a statement anywhere. It’s just part of the plan and what the plan takes to make sure it runs within the laws of the United States.

Tim Ulbrich: Tim, when I hear you say, you know — and obviously it depends on the account, you mentioned some of these may be more applicable to like an IRA, brokerage, others across the board, but several different types of fees you mentioned, right? Platform fees, advisor fees, trading fees, sometimes commission fees, expense ratios perhaps is the one that folks may be most aware of. My follow-up question is transparency and understanding of these fees. So those are two very different things to me. You know? Even if something is transparent, how it’s disclosed or how somebody may be informed of it or how easy it is to find that information obviously can lead to whether or not they may have an understanding of it. So in your experience working with clients and really more specifically our clients at YFP Planning, is this something that you find folks are surprised by? And how transparent and accessible is this information to either the individual or you as the advisor trying to work with them?

Tim Baker: Yeah, Tim, so I think it is a surprise. And what I typically try to do to kind of make it a little bit more real is put it in real dollar sense. So you know, one of the things that when we talk to pharmacy schools and we’re trying to like drive home the point that this isn’t Monopoly money, that when you graduate, you’re like at with the average student loan debt that graduates are coming out with, it’s a $2,000 payment for 10 years. And when most people think about it in that terms, you’re like, ‘Oh, OK, that becomes more real.’ So I try to do the same thing with the fees. So yeah, like when we go over this, I think at first, it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, well that doesn’t sound that bad.’ You know, so like I’m looking at this independent pharmacist, their 401k, and typically the smaller the employer, the worse the 401k is or the most more expensive it is per each participant. So like this particular pharmacist, their all-in when they look at the administrative fees and the average investment fees, it’s about 1.27%. So you’re like, ‘Wow, that doesn’t sound too bad, 1.27%.’ But if you have $100,000 in that 401k, that’s $1,270 per year that the 401k and the funds inside of the 401k basically absorbs. So with this particular client, they have $250,000 in that, so that’s a lot more. It’s a lot more money. It’s more than double that every year. And again, it’s not like it’s a line item on the statement anywhere. It’s what the 401k takes to run and the investments take to basically run the funds that they’re in. So what we really try to do is, again, look at it — and we have tools that can assess that information. But even to do it yourself — and I’ve tried to do this even outside of the tools that we use — it’s hard to find. You have to find basically the plan. Every year, they have to file what’s called a Form 5500 with the IRS that basically outlines how much money is in the fund and what are the assets, what are the liabilities, if there’s any loans, what are the admin expenses. And a lot of those are just a dollar amount that’s populated in there. So like sometimes you might see like, ‘Oh, my administrative fee is 1.2%.’ And then the next time we log into our tool, it’s 1.4% just because there’s new data that’s been filed with the IRS. So it’s a little bit of a moving target as well. And I think the — you know, I think I read a stat somewhere that the average 401k all-in expense is about like 1.68%.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s wild.

Tim Baker: So — yeah. And again, when I look at our 401k that we’ve set up at YFP, I think it’s less than .2%. I think the fees have changed a little bit for ours, but I think when you look at the expense ratio and everything, it’s less than .2%. So it’s a factor of 8. So if I’m paying $1,000 — and again, that’s a pretty large 401k with that, then I don’t want to pay $8,000 a year. So those are some of the things that most people when they say, ‘Oh, like 1.2% is not bad,’ but then when we actually put in dollars — and then if we compound that year over year, it really adds up. So to me, the fees are so important. And I think another discussion to have is like OK, but like are the fees worth it?

Tim Ulbrich: That’s right. Yep.

Tim Baker: And I would say in a lot of the cases, no. I mean, with some of these fees, you have to pay the fees to be able to like have the fund run and things like that. But in a lot of cases, if you’re paying 10x the amount in terms of an expense ratio, you’re not getting 10x the performance or it’s not 10x safer for the same amount of performance. So every type of fee is going to be different in why you would pay this versus that, but in most cases, the name of the game is to kind of shave that down as much as you can to really the investments unadulterated so it can grow and really allow you to build wealth over 10, 20, 30 years, whatever the time horizon is.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think one of the things, Tim, I’ve heard you say often is that our job, your job, and the planning team’s job, one of the roles is to really try to keep as much of that contribution intact as possible and allow the compound growth to do its thing, right? So really minimize the fees that are coming out of that. And I think that’s so important. You know, again, back to my earlier comment, if you’re already doing the hard work, right, to put away whatever percentage of your income each and every month towards long-term savings, then why do we want to give up anything in terms of the fees? And that example you gave is really powerful, that independent pharmacist who’s got $250,000 in that account with a 1.27%, which is, as you mentioned, is lower than the average 401k. You know, that’s a little over $3,000 this year. But as that account continues to grow and compound, that $250,000 is eventually going to turn into likely $300,000 and $400,000 and $500,000 and so on. And that fee obviously will continue to go up over time. So let me ask the big and nebulous question. Like yeah, maybe a 10x fee isn’t worth or justified that you’re going to have that value, but is there a place where the fees are justified? You know, such that whatever would be the net return inclusive of fees makes the fees worth it? And how do you evaluate that decision?

Tim Baker: Yeah, I mean, I think with — so it’s going to sound a little self-serving, but I think if you’re paying an advisor, a fiduciary, a fee-only advisor, and you’re paying them say whatever percentage out of your investments to be able to do financial planning or investment management or what we do, which is very comprehensive with the tax work and really a lot of different components there, I think that the return that you get far exceeds what you pay. The idea is that our focus is on more of wealth building, not necessarily just the investments and everything else but it kind of is beyond that. When I think of the — if you take things like expense ratio as an example, I’m looking at a client who — you know, and that same client that was at 1.27%, I think when we first started working with them, it was close to 2% because there are things that you can control and there are things that you can’t control with regard to the 401k. So things that you can’t really control are things like administrative, record keeping fees. Like that’s just — you know, I always talk about with the investments in a 401k, that’s the sandbox. Like those are the toys that you can play with. There’s only 10, 20 mutual funds in there. And it’s the same thing, like with some of the fees, you can’t really effect change unless you’re small enough that you can, you work for an independent pharmacy, you can say, “Hey, boss, this 401k is pretty terrible. Can we replace it?” For bigger organizations, that’s a harder thing to go about. So you’re kind of stuck with those fees. But things that you can control somewhat are things like the expense ratio. So this particular client’s, her average investment fees are .06%. So that’s her expense ratio. But when we started, it was closer to .8%. So again, a $100,000 portfolio, just for this part of the portfolio, she’s paying $60 per year whereas before she’s paying over $800. So the reason that we did that — or how we got there is that the funds that she was in, she was selecting a lot of the funds that she heard of like American funds or I think there was like a Morgan Stanley here and JP Morgan. And these funds are more expensive as in comparison. So I’m in this particular portfolio, and I’m looking at the mid-cap fund that she was in, it’s called a Touchstone mid cap, and the ticker is TMPIX. That costs .9%. So if I had $100,000 just in this, I would be paying $900 per year. What we replaced that with was an iShares fund that basically is .05%. So .9% versus .05%. So $50 on $100,000 or $900. So like those are things that you can control. And for the most part, there’s going to be differences, especially as you get to mid and small and international funds. Like there will be some differences in performance and some differences here and there, but for the most part, you know, like if I look at those same funds and I have the data that says over the course of a year, the mid cap iShares that we put her in is up 56%. The one that was more expensive is up 33%. You know, five years, it’s pretty close, 17% with the one that we put her in, 16%. So the performance, these are things you have to look at: since inception, 10% versus 9% for that. So like there are things that you have to look at, but typically the expense that you pay is not worth it. And for things like large cap, when you click into those and you say, ‘OK, what am I actually invested in?’ So like what are the underlying funds, it’s the same stuff, Tim. It’s things like that we know about. It’s Apple, it’s Microsoft, it’s Amazon, Facebook. It’s just that if you wrap it in a more expensive wrapper, you charge 5, 6, 10x just because it’s a known entity, even though Vanguard and iShares are pretty known, there is — like from a large cap fund, it should be very cheap because everyone is invested in the same stuff. So I don’t like paying high administrative fees. I don’t mind paying like a flat dollar amount, so like there’s sometimes you see like, oh, it’s $80. OK. That’s better than .8%. Expense ratio, I don’t like paying a high expense ratio. I don’t like when advisors charge commission. I just think that there’s a conflict of interest there. So these are typically outside of the 401k. So I think it’s OK to pay a fee for professional help, but it just depends on like what do you get for that? And you know, and all of the associated fees that come with that, what do you get for that? So if there are 401k’s that charge you .2% or less and then there’s some that charge you close to 2%, that’s a big range over the course of — and are you getting 12x more value there? And I typically say the answer is no.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I think it’s just a really good reminder, you know, Tim, that No. 1, not all fees are created equal. Right? So really asking yourself, what may or may not be justified with this fee? And then you know, I think really evaluating and understanding what your current fee situation is and recognizing that some of that may not be in your control, to your point, that especially for those that work for a larger organization, unless you’ve got the ear of HR and can influence those decisions, that 401k plan is probably what it is in terms of some of those fees. But within the fee options, might you have some control when it comes to expense ratio and then obviously in other accounts, IRA and so forth, then you can leverage other options to reduce those fees. Tim, I suspect that many of our listeners, especially those that are listening today that have been saving for some time, might be investing in mutual funds through various institutions to be unnamed and are paying substantial fees and, as we’ve discussed, aren’t even aware of it. So I want to take a few minutes to just break down the A, B, Cs of mutual funds. And that’s A shares, B shares, and C shares. So can you quickly define the difference between A shares, B shares, and C shares and then talk to us a little bit about what is the fees or could be the fees associated with those types of shares?

Tim Baker: Yeah, so whenever you see A shares, B shares, C shares, what you typically — think commission. So that’s — it’s a sales commission for that intermediary, the intermediary being the financial advisor, that is selling you a product, i.e. a mutual fund, in exchange for a commission. And I’ve sold these in the past, so like I’m a big proponent of fee-only. I haven’t always been a fee-only advisor. I started in the industry in fee-based, which is often confused for fee-only. A lot of the fee-only people want advisors that are fee-based to identify as fee and commission. So when I was in this model, I thought, again, I thought we were great because we didn’t have to sell a proprietary product that was with one of the big financial institutions. We could basically sell whatever we wanted. But the reality is that you want to really work with someone that is not selling on commission, in my opinion, because I think there’s a conflict of interest there. So anytime that you have the sale of a product with advice, there’s a conflict. So when you hear or see A, B, C shares — and you can typically see this, you can see this on the statement, but it’s not necessarily as intuitive as you would want it. So like I’m looking at a statement from a very big institution that I know goes and markets to pharmacists, talks to pharmacy schools, but on the statement, I see the mutual funds that this particular pharmacist was in was a Washington Mutual Investors Fund, CL A. So CL A. So that’s Class A, which that’s an A share mutual fund. So what that means is that for an A share mutual fund, these are up front basically fees or commissions with lower expense ratios. So these are typically better for long-term investors. I would say they’re not necessarily good for anybody. But the idea, Tim, is that if this particular — say you opened up an IRA with me and I basically charged you an A share commission, this particular fund I think basically charges 5.75%. So $5,000 times 5.75%, that’s a $287 commission that goes straight to me. So basically, when I look at my statement the next time, my statement is going to be like $4,700. It’s going to be $300 short. A lot of advisors don’t necessarily like to sell those because it can be very, you know, abrupt for clients. The other way to basically sell these — and I’ve never sold a B share, and I’m not sure how prevalent they are, but a B share, it’s basically, it has high exit fees for when you sell and higher expense ratios. But they convert over to A shares over basically the course of many years. So the idea is that you don’t get that kind of abrupt fee, but if you hold the investment long enough, it basically converts into an A share. And I don’t have as much experience with these and I haven’t seen these much, even on statements. But the one that I do see fairly often is called a C share. So these have higher expense ratios than A shares and a small exit fee that’s typically waived after one year. So the idea is that in that same example, if you were to basically buy, put $5,000 into a C share mutual fund, you wouldn’t necessarily get hit with a big commission up front, but what’s basically on there is — and it’s kind of built into the total expense ratio — is 12b1 fees. So this is like a marketing fee. So as the advisor, I would be making say like 1% as long as you held that investment. So it’s more of a trailing commission that you pay versus an up front commission. And these could be very prohibitive to an investor. Lots of fees that you really don’t understand how you’re paying. And the advisor is basically getting paid that marketing or that service fee over the course of however long you’ve held that investment.

Tim Ulbrich: So Tim, let me ask the question that I suspect many of our listeners are thinking, that I’m thinking individually as you describe A shares, B shares, C shares on the heels of our discussion of today’s day and age where we can obviously have an option to reduce some of those fees, whether that be up front trading fees or even ongoing expense ratios. There’s other options that are out there. What is the role, if any, for these A shares, B shares, and C shares? Like are these ever in the best interest of a client? And I say that dramatically knowing it’s not a black-and-white answer, but why would I invest in an A share, B share, or C share?

Tim Baker: So in my experience in this world, you would charge a client — and this is going to be very true for many kind of new practitioners and pharmacists that are out there that are maybe seeking help and a lot of people that are listening to this. So the industry and really why I’m here sitting in this seat and why, Tim, we’re partners, it kind of is derived from the story or the way that the industry basically operates. So when I was in the fee and commission, the fee-based world, it was — and I started working with a lot of pharmacists — the going advice was — you know, and I remember, I actually remember, I have this pivotal memory where I was talking to my mentor and I think the pharmacist couple that I was working with, they had something like $300,000 in student loans. And I was like, ‘Hey, mentor, like what do you think that we should do with this client’s?’ And basically, the advice was, to me, to how to advise the client was to say, “Hey, just tell them the loans will figure themselves out. Either a snowball or something like that, focus on the highest interest first,” which is terrible advice, Tim, as we all know, that the student loans are going to be more nuanced. And then you know, because this client maybe had like $20,000 to invest, that’s not a lot of money. So like it was sell them insurance that they didn’t need, so whether that was life or disability insurance, and then invest their IRA or something like that and then just touch base with them every couple years until they have $50,000, $100,000, $250,000, and then you can actually ‘help’ them. The problem with this model, Tim, is that it’s not a planning issue. Like we work with clients that are in their 30s that there is a lot of need there to get their investments, their debt, their cash flowing budgeting, their insurance, their credit, their taxes, all humming and working in a unified fashion that we’re really trying to take the resources that the client has and apply them in a way that is a wealthy life to them. It’s not a planning issue. It’s a pricing issue. And unfortunately, the way that the industry is set up is that, hey, unless you have investments, I can’t really do anything for you. And it’s because somebody with $20,000, that’s $200 a year on a 1% AUM versus if someone had $200,000, 1%, that’s $2,000. So money talks, right? So that’s where A share and C share and those types of commissions come into play is like typically if it was less than $50,000 or typically less than $100,000, you would charge these commissions, especially the A share, because it was a higher upfront or a C share because it was more — I want to say it was more undetected, under the radar. And then you would couple that with a crappy insurance product or disability that they might not need. Or maybe they do need, but you’re still making commission on that. And that was a way for you to help the client and make a little bit of money, feed yourself at the same time. And I don’t want to — so I also don’t want to paint a picture, sometimes especially in the fee-only community, there is this picture that’s painted that like people that charge commissions are evil. They’re not. They’re not. It’s just the difference in model. And you know, I was early enough in my career that I recognized — in financial services — that I recognized that there was a better way, and that’s being fee-only and that’s not charging these commissions. So I was able to pivot away from that. It’s not that they’re evil, it’s just that I think the model or the system that they’re in doesn’t necessarily suit itself for a lot of clients. You know, typically — we talk about this with insurance — typically the better the insurance product is for the person that’s selling it, the worse it is for the person that’s basically buying it. So there is this kind of 0-sum, so to speak. So if you’re out there and you’re like, ‘Hmm, I’m listening to Tim and I’m going to look at my statement and see,’ if you see like A’s and C’s next to your mutual fund that says Class A or just I’m looking at one that says Investo Equity and Income Funds C, I know that that particular — at that particular time, he’s being charged kind of an ongoing trail that’s eating away. And again, if he’s being serviced for that, maybe that’s worth it. But in most cases, it’s not. I wouldn’t say that there’s ever — there’s never a time — but I would say, you know, again, there are advisors out there that will work with you in a fiduciary capacity and that should be divorced from the commissions that you would make from selling a product. So one of the things that, you know, kind of longer story longer, Tim, one of the things that I talk about, when I was in the broker-dealer world, the fee-based, fee and commission world, this is the story that I tell prospects and clients is you know, I would show up to the office and I would see on my counter, I’m like, ‘Oh, this mutual fund wholesaler is going to come a-knocking.’ And that wholesaler would show up to our office in a fancy suit, he would take basically the advisors in our office, which was me and my mentor, he would take us out to a fancy dinner or a fancy lunch, I should say, he would show us fancy glossies about why his funds were so — or her funds were so great. And then he would basically say, “Hey, when your client Tim Ulbrich, when he leaves his job or if he has money on the side and he wants to roll over that Fidelity 401k, like use our funds.” And —

Tim Ulbrich: Sounds like another industry I know, Tim.

Tim Baker: Yeah, it sounds like drug rep, right? And when I say that, most people are like, ‘Oh yeah.’ But here’s the difference, Tim. Like in the medical world, my understanding is that it’s illegal for physicians to get kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies because it taints their ability to prescribe medication without the strings attached, right?

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely. Yep.

Tim Baker: But if we compare that to my industry, the financial services, not only is it legal, it’s prevalent. So like 95% of advisors out there operate in this manner. So like now, like no one takes me out to lunch, Tim. No one takes me out to lunch because I’m not incentivized to put someone in these mutual funds because I don’t make a commission from that. So what I’m incentivized to do is to put the client in the best situation across the board, but particularly for the investments we’re talking about where they’re paying the least amount for the most gain. So like, I would get through those lunches — again, they’re not all bad. You would learn something. But you kind of felt like you needed to take a shower because you kind of — you know, they gave you something. They gave you a nice lunch, so you’re kind of like, alright, well, if this client rolls it over, you kind of feel beholden to them. And I just hated that feeling. And by the way, if you’re putting those sales rep out in the field, that costs money.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s right.

Tim Baker: Who pays for that? The investor does. And that typically means that fund that you’re investing in is going to be more expensive. So I remember having this conversation, you know, and I was talking to this old wholesaler, this experienced, I should say, wholesaler, and I’m like — and I found the kind of story to really dig deeper, and I’m like, “So how can you guys justify charging 1.5% on your large cap when I could put the client in a Vanguard fund that’s .05%?” And he started talking about like, you know — and again, there was nothing about that when I was buying because it’s literally 10x more — like it’s so much more, and I just don’t think that you get that return. So I know a little bit — kind of on a tangent there — but to me, it’s one of these things that I think as a pharmacist, these are things that you probably aren’t looking at that over the course of years really have a compounding factor, either from a negative perspective or if you can remove those, it can be very positive. So it’s important to maybe dust off your statement and look at it and really understand what you’re paying.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and as we zoom out for a moment, Tim, to that point coming full circle here, don’t underestimate the long-term impact of these fees. You know, any one year, especially for those that are maybe getting started with investing and haven’t built up that large portfolio, you might look at 1%, 1.2%, 1.5% and say, ‘Eh, what’s the big deal?’ But if you look at 1.5%, as an example, versus .2% as another example and perhaps even an opportunity to get lower than that, over the long range of 30 or 35 years, that’s a big frickin’ deal.

Tim Baker: Yeah.

Tim Ulbrich: Big deal. And I wrote a blog post a couple years back that we’ll link to in the show notes really showing two side-by-side examples of somebody who’s investing over 35 years, another person same timeline, 1.5% average annual fee versus .2%, and it ends up being the difference of $1 million. And the title of that article is “Are You Making this $1 Million Mistake?” And you know, for some, maybe it’s larger. For others, maybe it’s a little bit smaller. But I think it’s so important that we uncover, understand, and begin to put a plan in place that can minimize these fees if possible wherever you have control of doing that. Tim, two perspectives I want to talk about as we wrap up this really important: And that’s first, from the perspective of, ‘Hey, I’m listening and I’m at the beginning of my investing journey. What can I do?’ And then somebody who’s listening that says, ‘You know what, I’m more in the wealth-building phase. I’ve been investing, maybe I’ve got a loose understanding of some of these fees but I’m not exactly sure. And what can I do and pivot now? And is it perhaps too late or not?’ So what would you say to those two individuals, one who’s just getting started, what tangible steps that I can take, and somebody who’s maybe a little bit later on in their journey and wondering is it too late and are there steps that I can take to help reconcile some of this issue around fees?

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I think for both of those buckets of people, I think it really goes back to what are your goals, right? So I think some people, they work with an advisor because they think that’s the right thing to do. And the advisor, you know, unfortunately sometimes it’s like every solution is the same. So everyone needs insurance and I need to make that commission. And that’s not true. I think it’s really understanding what your goals are, and that’s the first and foremost thing. And I think from there, if you’re at the beginning of the journey, I think it’s ask questions. You know, if I’m looking at my 401k statement, I want to understand why am I paying these fees? A lot of 401k’s, they have these managed solutions, and I’m like, well what do you get for that? And most of the time, it’s not a whole lot. Same thing like if you’re at the beginning and you maybe, you were contacted by an advisor in pharmacy school, chances are if you started working with them, a lot of those in mutual funds and IRAs and even — we just signed on a client that was sold this recently, and we’re like, it’s kind of a process of unwinding them. It’s really being cognizant of this and don’t sweep this under the rug. So like it’s definitely something that can compound over many, many years. So you want to get it right out of the gate. And it isn’t ever too late. So for the second, for the wealth-building phase, people that maybe have been working with an advisor for a long time or maybe their advisor is someone that’s been in the family, things have changed. So like even 10 years ago, what was offered in terms of high expenses and commissions and things like that, that day is thankfully dying with the advent of Vanguard and really trying to drive fees down and things like that. But I look at some of these well-known institutions that a lot of pharmacists work with, there’s just a better route. So like, you know, I’m looking at this particular statement, and the all-in for what this particular client was paying on commissions and everything like that was something like 1.75%.

Tim Ulbrich: Sheesh.

Tim Baker: You know? And if I compare that to like what we do, like if we were to move that into an IRA, it’s like .05%. And it almost sounds like fake. It sounds like it’s not real. But the reality is it’s like if you can get your money in a position where it’s unadulterated by those kind of hidden — and I could say they are kind of hidden because if you look at the statement and I search like “commission” or “fee,” it’s nonexistent. There might be like a fee disclaimer in the small print, but again, it’s not a line item that’s very obvious to the investor. So I would just say, like I would question, again, if you’re in a wealth-building stage, I would question what you’re currently in and if there’s a better way, just like we do with car insurance and things like that. There are opportunities out there to potentially be in a better position to again, really allow you to build money and grow wealth over time.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and Tim, I would wrap up here by telling our listeners and community, whether you’re at the beginning of this journey, whether you’re in that wealth-building phase, whether you’re somewhere in between, I think this obviously is such an important topic. And we would love to have the opportunity to talk with you to see if what we offer at YFP Planning is a good fit for you and your individual plan and situation. And folks can find more by going to YFPPlanning.com, they can schedule a free discovery call. And I’m going to toot our own horn for a minute, but I’m so proud of what we have built — Tim, really what you have built starting back in the days of Script Financial, which is a fee-only comprehensive financial planning model. And one of the things I so appreciate about that model is it’s fully transparent, the fees are the fees in terms of what we charge for our services, and the client is paying our financial planning team for the advice that they’re giving related to their financial plan as a whole. So you know, whether that means we’ve got to spend a boatload of time on the investments and the retirement side of the plan, whether that’s we need to spend some time on the tax side or the insurance side or the student loan side or the home buying side, whatever would be the aspect of the financial plan, by nature, because of how that client is transparently paying for the advice and the transparency of those fees, we can spend the time where we feel like it’s most needed for the client and their financial plan and ultimately is in their best interest. And so that’s a model that I’m really proud of that we offer to the YFP community and for folks that are looking for a financial planner or perhaps re-evaluating the relationship they have currently, head on over to YFPPlanning.com and you can schedule a free discovery call. Tim Baker, great stuff, as always. And appreciate your time and expertise here as it relates to the discussion of fees and looking forward to upcoming content we have for the second half of 2021.

Tim Baker: Yeah, thanks, Tim.

Tim Ulbrich: As always, a thank you to the listeners for joining us on this week’s episode. And as we wrap up this first half of 2021, we appreciate you listening but also would appreciate if you could leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which ultimately helps other people find this show. Our mission is to help as many pharmacy professionals as we can on their path towards achieving financial freedom, and one way we can do that is by reaching more people with this show. So if you haven’t already done so, please do us that favor, leave us a rating and review and ultimately that will help others find the show in the future. Thanks for joining us and have a great rest of your week.

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YFP 207: How to Avoid These 6 Common Financial Mistakes

Posted on June 10, 2021November 2, 2022 by yfpadmin

How to Avoid These 6 Common Financial Mistakes

On this episode, sponsored by Insuring Income, YFP Co-founder and Director of Financial Planning, Tim Baker, discusses common financial errors ranging from those made with investing, insurance, credit, and more. Whether you are just getting started with your financial plan or looking for a tune-up, this episode will help you avoid the most common financial blunders so you can maximize your financial plan and achieve your financial goals.

Summary

Tim Baker and Tim Ulbrich discuss six common financial mistakes and how to avoid them. While financial mistakes may seem inevitable, Tim and Tim speak from their own experiences with financial errors and share ways to prevent these mistakes from impacting your financial plan and financial goals.

Common financial errors discussed in this episode include:

1. Not taking advantage of employer match

When you don’t take advantage of your employer’s match, you essentially turn down free money. Many people don’t take full advantage of employer matches because they are not auto-enrolled to do so. Getting the maximum amount out of your employer match increases your compound interest over time.

2. No budget or no financial plan

Without a budget or financial plan, it is increasingly difficult to reach your financial goals. The budget is not a one-size-fits-all and should custom fit your personal experience and what works for you.

3. No insurance or inadequate insurance

As a pharmacist with a spouse, house, and mouths to feed, you should be aware of your insurance needs and insured for an event that will require insurance ranging from life, disability, or professional liability insurance.

4. Failure to monitor your credit reports

Tim Baker recommends checking your credit reports twice a year – he pulls his reports with the changing of the clocks for daylight savings. With the increase in the digital nature of personal information, it is critical to monitor your credit for errors and identity theft.

5. Not investing or not having the right attitude when it comes to investing

Being risk-averse may impact your long-term financial plan. Building and maintaining an appropriate asset allocation that matches your goals, risk tolerance, and time horizon while avoiding impulse purchases or hunches is a more intelligent way to positive investment returns.

6. Not utilizing professional advice

Financial professionals know what they are doing, and hiring someone allows you to have more free time to do the things you want to do.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Tim, welcome back to the show.

Tim Baker: Hey, Tim, thanks. Thanks for having me back. It’s been awhile.

Tim Ulbrich: What’s new and exciting from YFP Planning’s perspective?

Tim Baker: It feels like a lot, Tim. I feel like this year is full of change and we’re excited. A lot of things going on in the background. We’ve had our lead planners out in Columbus to do some planning. It was good to kind of meet up and now that people are getting vaccinated, to be able to meet up and do some planning and talk about our goals. And that was exciting to kind of show the new office, which people may or may not know that YFP has bought headquarters in Columbus. And we’re in the process of kind of renovating a little bit and getting that ready for us to move here in — move in here shortly. And that’s been exciting and having to deal with contractors, maybe not as exciting. I think the team has continued to expand. We finish up tax season here, which is always hair on fire, and we had a lot of good help to go through that. But we actually welcomed back a former team member, now current member again, Christina Slavonik, who worked with me a year or so ago and decided to kind of come back into the fold. And we’re super excited to have her as part of the team. And yeah, so lots of changes, but all good things I think.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, certainly excited to have Christina back, what that means for our team. Pumped up about the new office and it’s an open invitation to any of the community that’s in Columbus or finds their way traveling through Columbus, we’d love to host you and have a chance to meet up with you. Please reach out to us. And a shoutout, as you mentioned, Tim, to our tax team. I mean, over 250 returns that we filed this year, lots of wrenches that were thrown their way with extensions and delays in state extensions and legislative pieces that were being passed in the middle of tax season. And I thought they handled it well, and we’re ultimately able to serve the community, and we very much believe tax is an important part of the financial plan. So excited to see that continuing to grow. So today, we’re talking all about common financial errors. And you and I know that financial errors seem inevitable. We’re all human; we all make mistakes. And one of our goals with YFP is to help you, the YFP community, and certainly our clients as well, to avoid as many financial mistakes as possible. And certainly we have lots of resources that are here to help in this, whether it be this podcast, blog posts, checklists, calculators, and certainly our one-on-one comprehensive financial planning services as well. And just to be clear, this is not about shaming by any means. This is about learning and hopefully avoiding a repeat of making the same mistakes. So if you’ve already made some of these mistakes, certainly Tim and I have. We often talk about these between the two of us. We’ll that here again today. So if you’ve made some of these mistakes, certainly this is not about beating yourself up. Take what you’ve learned and certainly apply that information, and hopefully that can help with avoiding future mishaps or help you to spread the word and encourage and teach others along the way as well. So Tim, let’s get to it. We’re going to warm up with what many consider low-hanging fruit. No. 1 financial error/mistake I’m going to list here is not taking advantage of the employer match. So talk to us about the employer match and why not taking advantage of it is a significant financial error.

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I think this is where often we say, it’s free money. So not often do you ever come across a situation where there’s money to be had, you know, without anything in return. So I think in a lot of cases — and I know there’s some gurus out there that say like if you’re in debt, you shouldn’t even do this, and I would probably disagree with that. I think there are some exceptions if you have lots of high interest like credit card debt, consumer debt, then this might be a situation where you don’t want to get the match. But I would say for the most part, if your employer has a 401k or a 403b match or whatever that is, you want to make sure that you are taking full advantage of that. Most employers are going to have matches that are going to incentivize you to put anywhere between 2-6% to get the full match. There are some that are designed to push you a little bit further. But for the most part, if you’re in that sweet spot of putting in 2-6% of your income into a 401k to get a full match, I would say to do that. The reason that you want to do this is because if you can get that dollar, those dollars deferred and into that retirement account, this all goes back to the concept of time in the market versus time in the market. And really taking advantage of more compounding periods to take advantage of the compound interest. So if you’re out there and you have — you’re looking at your student debt or if you have sizable consumer debt and you’re like, man, I just feel like I put money in and it stays the same, that’s compounding interest kind of taking advantage of you. And what we want to do is flip the script a bit and get that to where your money is making money. So Albert Einstein has said, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it. He who doesn’t, pays it.” So the idea here is that you can get your money to work in the investment world and keep it working and allow those dollars to make baby dollars and they make baby dollars. That’s the idea here. So it’s really about time in the market. We see this as less and less of an issue now that I think it was the Obama administration, you know, has really pushed 401k plans to have an auto-enroll feature. So based on studies on this, if we are the variable that gets in the way, meaning people, that we typically are going to go with whatever is the default. So if the default is not to enroll and you have to actually take steps to do that yourself, we’re not going to do that. If the default is that we’re already auto-enrolled, then that’s what we’re going to do. So a lot of these plans — and Tim, our plan has this — is that after a certain period of time, we auto-enroll participants and we say, “OK, we’re going to auto-enroll them at x%.” For ours right now and for — speaking of the YFP 401k — we auto-enroll at 3%. The maximum match is if they put 4% in. So they would just have to go in and make that determination that they would like to do that. So auto-enroll features on 401k’s have made this a little bit less of a common mistake, but they’re still there, nonetheless, and we still come across more than you would think of those that are not putting in at least to get to the company match. And just to kind of put a bow on this, think of this in this light: You know, if you’re a pharmacist and we use round numbers here — if you’re a pharmacist and you’re making $100,000 and your company offers you a 3% match, think of that — and you’re not taking advantage of that right now, think of this as like a 3% raise where you are making $103,000 because $3,000 of that is going into your company 401k. And it’s surprising, you know, I think if you — dependent on the 401k — and I know we’re going to talk about the fees in an upcoming episode — but dependent on the 401k, it’s surprising how quickly those types of accounts can grow if you are deferring dollars out of your paycheck so you’re hopefully not missing it too much, it invested in the right way, and it’s not being eaten away by fees. It’s surprising how quickly those accounts can grow. This is a big, big miss if you’re not necessarily taking advantage of a match.

Tim Ulbrich: Great stuff, Tim. And I think just to further highlight time value of money, and I think for those that are listening that are especially getting started on the employer contribution side and perhaps aren’t leaning into that match yet, there is some trust in the momentum in compound interest, right? You can run the calculations, see the numbers, but it does feel like early on that you’re putting money in and you’re not seeing that growth until obviously those funds get to a certain balance and then you start to see the momentum of the growth on the growth. But to take your example, Tim, of somebody making $100,000, 3% employer match, $3,000, I would encourage folks to also think about it’s not just that $3,000. It’s what would that $3,000 be worth in 25 or 30 years? Right? So you know, that $3,000, if that were to grow at let’s say 7% average annual rate of return over 25 years, that $3,000 in 25 years is worth more than $16,000. So time value of money is not just what does it mean in today’s dollars, but what would it also mean in the opportunity cost of not investing those dollars? So that’s No. 1, not taking advantage of the employer match. No. 2 is no budget, no financial plan. Harsh words, Tim Baker. What do you mean by that? And you know, budgeting, spending plan, whatever we want to call it, why is it so critical to the financial plan?

Tim Baker: And some people would disagree with this. But I guess some people, especially if they might lend credence to like, you know, if you’re starting out, if you’re a new practitioner, definitely budget. If you get to a certain inflection point, you don’t need to budget. I would disagree in a sense. If you think about this in terms of like if you think about your household and the salaries you make as like revenue, if you’re a household and you’re making $200,000-250,000 as a household and you equate that to like a business and a business making that revenue, businesses are going to have budgets, they’re going to have projections, they’re going to bucket money for certain — just like we do, Tim, at YFP. You know, we have ‘this is the amount of money we want to spend on marketing, and this is the amount of money that we want to spend here and there.’ Like that’s a budget. And I would say that if you treat your household as a company, like you’re going to earmark those for different purposes. So I think this is a way of how you go about and do that. So I think where budgeting kind of gets a bad rep is the $0-based budget where every dollar has a job and you basically assign a purpose for every dollar that kind of flows through the household. And for some people, that can be super arduous, that can be super over-the-top. But I don’t necessarily think it’s an exercise that doesn’t have merit or value. But I think typically as you go, you find the flavor of ice cream that works for you. So there’s lots of different types of budgets out there. You know, you have the $0-based. I’ve seen a line item budget, I’ve seen a pay yourself first budget. There’s a lot of different ways to go about it. I think at the end of the day, a budget goes back to what is the intention of the resources that you have.

Tim Ulbrich: Absolutely.

Tim Baker: And applying that to — and by intention, we typically mean like goals. So what are the goals that you have? What are you intentionally trying to achieve with the six figures of income that you’re earning? And how do we go about that? So the budget is typically the structure or the steps to go from ‘Hey, I want to travel,’ or ‘I want to be able to give back,’ or ‘I want to be able to take care of an aging parent.’ The budget is typically the mechanism that allows that to kind of come to be. So I would say that this is typically lockstep with the savings plan. Most financial planners, in my opinion, they’ll say, “OK, your savings plan is your emergency fund, and that’s it. So you need to have $20,000 in your emergency fund as an example or $30,000 in an emergency fund,” and then it stops there. I think it needs to go further. So I think your budget and how you’re spending needs to kind of be in sync with how you’re deliberately saving for different things that are basically on the docket for goals. So — and I wouldn’t even call this a step, Tim. It’s a process. I’m a big Sixers fan, trust the process. Hopefully JoJo is going to come back —

Tim Ulbrich: I was going to say…

Tim Baker: No, but it’s a process. And I think what people do and where they get hung up on budgeting is that it’s more about striving for improvement and not perfection.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, that’s right.

Tim Baker: We want everything to be balanced, we want everything to kind of line up. And in most cases, that’s not going to happen. So depending on the budget and what flavor that suits you best is going to really allow you to kind of figure out how it works. So to me, this is really about being more intentional with spending, being more intentional with kind of top-line revenue. So this is not just an effort in kind of an exercise in scarcity of like, hey, this is what the pie is. I want to challenge you to grow the pie. So to me, it’s looking at both sides of that equation and really striving for improvement of what you’re trying to accomplish and not perfection. So I think that if you can kind of wrap your arms around that and not be wed to one way of doing things, then I think you’re going to see improvement. So and there’s lots of different tools out there, technologies, Mint, YNAB, some people use good old-fashioned spreadsheets, some people use envelopes, like physical envelopes to do this. At the end of the day, you know, I think the question you should be asking is, am I intentional with how I’m spending? Am I intentional with how I’m bringing money into the household? And does this align with the goals that I have set out for myself. And if it doesn’t, then I think that’s where you kind of need a little bit of a gut check to make sure that you’re on track.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, intentionality really stands out there to me, Tim, whether someone’s listening and they’ve got a net worth of -$400,000 or a net worth of $4 million. The process may look different, the intensity of the month-to-month might look very different, but at the end of the day, like budgeting, whatever you want to call it, to your point about looking at it from the point of a business, it’s about what are the goals, what are we trying to achieve, and then what’s the plan to make sure that that’s a reality. And the buckets might look bigger or smaller, the process might look more or less intense. But it’s about being intentional with the goals and the plan. For those that are looking for a starting point, a template, a process, you can go to YourFinancialPharmacist.com/budget. We do have a spreadsheet that you can get started with, certainly not necessarily the ending point. You can implement technology tools and evolve it from there, but that can be a good starting point. So that’s No. 2, no budget, no financial plan. No. 3 is no or inadequate insurance. I’ve mentioned before, Tim, on this podcast that insurance I think is an often overlooked part of the financial plan for obvious reasons. Thinking about something like a death or a disability or a professional liability claim isn’t necessarily the most exciting thing to think about when it comes to financial planning, especially when we can think about things like investing or saving for the future or getting rid of that student loan debt. So tell us here about what you see as some of the common pitfalls around inadequate insurance coverage.

Tim Baker: I think what a lot of people default to, a lot of pharmacists default to, is that what their employer provides as part of their compensation package is the plan for their insurance. And it’s not. It’s typically — we view it as a benefit that should be taken into consideration as we’re building out an insurance plan for your financial plan. And we’re really talking about the protection here, so like what we talk about with our YFP planning clients is how are we helping them growing and protecting — so protecting being the operative word in this step — their income and growing and protecting their net worth while keeping their goals in mind? So protection here is what we’re talking about. And typically, you know, what we focus on is things like life, disability, and professional liability. So your employer might provide you different coverages based on the employer. And that’s going to mean different things to different people, depending on their life situation. But oftentimes with pharmacists, you need to take more action in this or you run the risk of exposing yourself to a loss that could potentially be catastrophic. So you know, health insurance — so I would say that the one thing that is a plan and not necessarily a perk is health insurance. So health insurance, you’re typically best to go with the group policy, although that could change in the future. That could change where the way that employer compensation packages are designed in our country is that if the government isn’t providing that, it’s health insurance the employer does. That could change in the future, and we’ve seen that with things like pensions and 401k’s where pensions have gone away and they’ve been more robust, and a lot of it put the onus back on the employee for saving for retirement. So that could change in the future. But if we break down the insurance piece, a big miss is if we say not having adequate insurance is knowing what to have, knowing what you think that you need from particularly a life and disability insurance policy. You know, I typically say with regard to life insurance — and another piece of the protection of the financial plan is estate insurance — is that typically when you have a spouse, a house, and mouths to feed, those are typically going to be the opportunities to make sure that you are protected from a life insurance perspective and from an estate planning perspective. So more often than not, pharmacists are going to need a lot more of a benefit than what their employer can provide. So that’s typically where you want to go out into the individual policy world and make sure that you are fully protected. That’s one of the problems in the financial services industry too is like we come across a lot of pharmacists, Tim, that they might be 27 or 28 and they’ve been sold a crappy insurance policy, life insurance policy, that they don’t need, right? Because they don’t have a mortgage, they don’t have other dependents relying on them, their loans are going to be forgiven upon death or disability, so it’s just a policy that they probably don’t need right now. So it’s kind of like you have a hammer and you see a nail and it was a good cookie-cutter solution for everyone. One of the mistakes here is not understanding the need. So like we’ll have clients that will come in that will have young kids and things like insurance are not even brought up. And I look at that and I’m like, that’s a big risk. Like the student loans are important, and you’re talking about real estate investing and some other things, but like we probably need to address this first. So — and it’s typical, right? We don’t want to — we typically think that it’s not going to happen to us, a premature death or disability. So it’s very natural. So that’s part of the planner’s job is to kind of bring that to the forefront and make the proper recommendations. The other thing we’ve been talking about is disability insurance. So these are typically more likely to happen and typically more expensive because you typically have medical bills that are going to pile up as a result of a disability. So having the proper insurance there, whether that is through your employer or your own policy or buying a supplemental policy to kind of make you not whole but make you to — indemnify you to a certain threshold that you feel like you can continue the household, that’s a big thing. And a lot of these policies, the way that they’re written don’t provide a lot of protection. So it’s really looking at does it make sense to add a policy for yourself? So the idea here is that the sooner, the better. Whether it’s life, disability, the younger that you can get these policies in place, typically the better from a cost perspective. A lot of the policies that you have through your employer, the group policies, they’re not portable. Or if they are, they’re not great compared to the individual policies. So I think if you can have these separate from the employer, it makes a lot of sense with regard to protecting your financial plan.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think you’ve covered a lot here, and there’s just a lot to think through. And we’ve only talked through very briefly three different areas. You mentioned professional liability, life, disability. But questions of like, what do you need? What do you not need? Based on what you do need, how do you shop for those, looking for policies that — and getting advice that really has your best interests in mind to make sure you’re not underinsured or overinsured? What does your employer offer? What do they not offer? What’s the gap? What are the tax implications? So important part of the plan. I think our planning team does an awesome job of weaving this in and for folks to consider, are they underinsured? Do they have adequate insurance or not? And how does that fit in with the rest of their financial goals and plans? So that’s No. 3, no or inadequate insurance. No. 4, Tim, failure to monitor credit reports. Wow. When I think of checking a credit report, I think of boring, No. 1. No. 2 is necessary, right? So you know, why is this such an important step? How often should one be doing it? And why do they need to monitor credit reports over time?

Tim Baker: Yeah, and I would definitely chalk this up to like to stage of life. So you know, if you’re more Gen X or Baby Boomer, this might not be as important because you might not be making the big decisions, although you could be sending kids to college, there might be some loans that you’re taking out. But I would say that if you’re — a lot of the clients that we work with, you know, especially as they’re starting their careers, there’s a lot of decisions that are being made that credit granting is on the table. So that’s like home purchase, car purchase, things like that. Naturally, because of age of credit, your credit is going to become stronger and stronger as you go because that’s the way that the factors that kind of go into your credit score, age of credit is a big one. But I think the big thing that is kind of universal here that is becoming more and more of a thing is just the identity theft stuff. So as our lives become more and more digital and there’s more exposure to theft, it’s kind of this cat-and-mouse game. It’s not really a question of if, it’s really when. Having kind of eyes on this is really important. So I like to typically recommend that we check credit at least twice per year. So I kind of do it when the clocks change, so when we spring forward and fall back. I myself have gone through this exercise. I’ve found large enough mistakes on my credit report that drastically changed my credit score. And this is even — like when I first started advising clients on credit, this was before the days of like banks learning kind of suspicious behavior. A lot of these banks, a lot of these institutions, they’ve come a long way to alert you and kind of give you some structural things to look at, you know, if you have expenses that are out-of-state or whatever. Even in that environment, there were some things that were from my credit report that should not have been there, that drastically changed my score. So typically, you see differences in scores because you have different formulas that every Equifax, Experian, Transunion are using to calculate your score. Different creditors are going to report differently. So if you buy a Toyota, they might be really good about reporting to Equifax but not Transunion for some reason. Or Mastercard is really good, but this other company isn’t. So you’re going to have different inputs. And really, that’s going to be the big factor that will see why your scores are different. But I think the big thing for all those that are out there listening to this is going to just be from an identity theft. And I’ve looked at client credit reports, and I’ve made comments about hey, these are things that we can do to improve this or these are different factors to consider, but I can’t look at a credit report and know that hey, this doesn’t belong there. So it’s really kind of home cooking that is really important here. So the Fact Act that was enacted I think in 2003 allows you to access your credit report for free one time per year from each of the three reporting agencies for free. So you go to annualcreditreport.com. It sounds fake, it sounds kind of hokey, but that’s the way to — the site that you want to go to is annualcreditreport.com, and pull your credit score from each of the reporting agencies. I would just kind of rotate them through and take a glance at it, see if there’s anything fishy or — and then you can always dispute things that are inaccurate, and it’s pretty easy to do that on the website there. So that would be a big thing that I would make sure that you want to build into your practice.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, I think to your point, this is a good maintenance part of the financial plan, right? It’s like periodic oil changes, like we’ve got to be doing this. I like your rhythm of when the clocks change, twice per year, again, annualcreditreport.com. We talk about tax being a thread of the financial plan, credit is a financial — is a thread of the financial plan, impacts so many different areas, whether that would be home buying, real estate investing, business purchases, you mentioned identity theft, so something we’ve got to stay on top of. We did an episode, Episode 162, where we talked all about credit, importance of credit, improving your credit, understanding your credit score, credit security practices, so I’d encourage you to check that out. Again, Episode 162. Tim, No. 5 here on our list of common financial errors is not investing or improper attitude towards investing. Now, I think we’ve talked a little bit about not investing when we talked about not taking advantage of the employer match. So obviously time value of money, compound interest, we’ve got to be in the market. Talk to us more about the improper attitude towards investing. What do you mean there?

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I think there’s like two extremes here when I would say that typically doesn’t necessarily align, which I think with what I think is a healthy investment portfolio. So one is not wanting to dip your toes into the market. So I kind of hear like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to take risks. I don’t want to lose any money.’ And I think for us to kind of stay in front of things like the inflation monster, like taxes, you can’t just stuff your mattress full of dollars and hope to one day be able to retire comfortably. You know, so it’s kind of like if you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to crack some eggs. So the idea here is that we need to build out a portfolio that takes risk intelligently but that is over the course of your career in line with what you’re trying to achieve. And most people, you know, if you’re in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and maybe even 50s, they typically are more heavily weighted in bonds than they need to be, in my opinion. So you know, a lot of people when the market crashed at the beginning of the pandemic, they’re like, oh my goodness, Tim, like I want to take my investment ball and go home, meaning like I want to get out of this investment. And the idea is no, like let’s keep going. Either let’s put more money in or let’s hold the course. So you want to do exactly what the opposite of how you feel. So you know, the big drivers in your ability to build wealth over time from an investment perspective is that you have the appropriate asset allocation, so the mix between stocks and bonds, and really driving your fees as low as possible with regard to the investments. In a lot of cases, when we look at our clients, there’s a lot of opportunity for improvement there. And one of the things we talk about in webinars and even in our presentation with clients is that you look at all the variables in investing, and we have conservative — we talk about Conservative Jane. So Conservative Jane makes $120,000, she gets 3% cost of living raises, she works for 30 years, but she doesn’t invest the dollars. She basically keeps them in cash or like a Money Market. At the end of that time period, she has $600,000. But then we look at Aggressive Jane, who does the exact same thing except the only thing that she changes — and I think the big thing is she puts 10% into her 401k — the only thing that Aggressive Jane does differently than Conservative Jane is that she trusts the market in the long run. So the market returns about 10% year over year, and we adjust it down for inflation to about 6.87%. And Aggressive Jane is not saving harder, she’s not working longer, she’s not making more money, she’s just trusting in the market over that amount of time, and the swing is about — I think it’s $1.2 million. So Aggressive Jane at the end of those 30 years will have $1.8 million. So that’s very impactful if you can internalize that and bake that into your investment strategy is really trust the market. Over long periods of time, it’s very predictable. The only other thing I think I’ll say about this is the other side of that is that people have maybe unrealistic expectations of their investments. So they think that if they invest a certain way for four or five years that they’re going to have this portfolio that it can live off the interest. That’s not the case, you know. And I think that there is a lot of speculation and things like that where you’re heavily invested maybe in crypto or these certain stock that can get you into trouble. And I typically say that it’s not that there’s no room for that, it’s that the overwhelming majority of your investments should be super boring and bland and not exciting at all. And typically the more exciting that the investments are, the worse it is for you, the investor. Keep that in mind as well.

Tim Ulbrich: Tim, I would argue — and you probably see this with clients and our planning team does as well — I’m not sure there’s a harder time than right now to trust the market over a long period of time and stay the course. You know, you mentioned that a good long-term investing plan — I’ve heard you say before — should be as boring as watching paint dry, right?

Tim Baker: Mhmm.

Tim Ulbrich: And I have that head knowledge, like I agree with that and I suspect many of our listeners do as well, but pick up any news cycle for 24 hours, right? I mean, whether it’s — and I’m not saying any one of these alone, to your point, is necessarily a bad thing or that folks shouldn’t be doing them — but whether it’s news around crypto or NFTs or ESGs or think of what happened with GameStop and Robinhood and others, like and I think it really challenges like the philosophy and you really have to be disciplined in like tuning out the noise for long-term investing strategies. Now again, I want to highlight, I’m not saying any of those things doesn’t necessarily have value or doesn’t have a place in one’s plan, but if the vast majority of an investing plan should be boring and should be over a long period of time, we’re trusting the market, it’s hard right now. I mean, it’s hard. Are you feeling that pressure not only individually but I sense from clients you’re probably seeing some of that as well.

Tim Baker: I kind of don’t listen to it. I don’t really read much — I mean, I try to read into it just to have an understanding of what’s going on, but I guess for me, I don’t feel the pull like I used to back in the day. One, because it’s a very humbling experience, and sometimes my clients haven’t been humbled. But like I kind of equate this, Tim, to kind of go a little bit off topic here, it’s like have you ever been around someone that’s like, man, the world is going to heck, this generation, whatever. And I think back on like well, what did they say about like the hippie, like free love? I feel like it’s always — like they probably were saying that about the dot-coms when before that, so there’s probably always been things like that that have tempted people to kind of go awry. And maybe cryptocurrency is a thing that does ultimately shatter our traditional way of looking at money and investments and things like that. I don’t know. I mean, I think that it’s really too soon to tell on that. But yeah, I mean, I think so. I mean, I think it is tough. I think if you’ve been humbled enough, it can be a little bit easier to drown it out. But to me, I think of this as like singles and doubles, singles and doubles, to use the baseball analogy is that if you’re going up at every at-bat and you’re trying to hit the cover off the ball, you’re going to strike out a lot. And you might hit a few home runs, but we’re really looking at consistency. And if I know that there is this — the S&P 500 returns this, and it’s never been, we’ve never had a rolling 20-year period that’s been negative, even through the Great Depression, I’m going to bank on that unless told otherwise. So like, that can be hard for people to hear because they think of investments and they think sexy and exciting and things like that, but that’s not what I think a healthy investment plan makes. I think you want to keep the speculation low. And I’m not saying that that’s not — I still from time to time will go to a casino and play Blackjack or play poker. I still gamble just because I don’t do it as much as I did when I was younger, but just because I’m out and I’m with friends or I’m doing whatever. But if that’s the bulk of what your plan is to get to financial freedom, so to speak, I would caution you.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Tim Baker: And it could work. I mean, it could work. You could put all your proverbial eggs in the Amazon bucket and be completely OK, but you know, the way that people view Amazon — maybe not now but you know, 5-10 years ago, was very similar to how they viewed Sears back in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s right.

Tim Baker: And that company was this behemoth and they sold everything and would never go away. And then all of a sudden, it’s not a viable company anymore. So — and I can say this, I used to work for Sears back in the day, so I can say that not everything lasts. But I think that the U.S. stock market has been very predictable over the long run.

Tim Ulbrich: That’s a great example, Tim. We might be dating ourselves a little bit, but you think of — I can remember when it was the lesser known at the time Walmart and Amazon entering into the KMart and Sears world. It’s hard to even think of that in today’s day and age. I think your point about being humbled is a really interesting one. You know, we’re talking about common financial errors. So I’ll throw one out here. 2008, I was humbled by thinking I could pick individual stocks. Thankfully, I didn’t invest a whole lot of money. Circuit City, how did that work out? Right? So you know, I think your point about being humbled and again, there may be a portion of the portfolio where this makes sense for many folks, especially if they want to scratch that itch. The other thing you mentioned here, which I want to highlight we’re going to come back to next week is you mentioned fees. And we’re going to talk next week about how important it is to really understand the fees of your investment portfolio and really understand the impact that those fees can be having on your long-term returns and the importance of holding on to as much of your investment pie as possible. So stay tuned with us next week as we talk about fees. Tim, I want to transition into our sixth and final error, which is not using professional advice, not having a coach in your corner when it comes to the financial plan. And I think this is a good segue to what I just mentioned of this day and age, there’s a lot of noise. And so having somebody who’s keeping you accountable, who’s really reflecting back to you what you said were important and the goals, helping you look across the financial plan and really helping to direct you towards those end goals that you had articulated and to keep you on the path when human behavior may suggest that we want to go off the path from time to time. So obviously we’re biased, full disclaimer, we wholeheartedly believe in the value of a financial planner, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it. So Tim, tell us why you think this is such an important part of the plan and why it’s perhaps a mistake if folks leave out a coach from their plan.

Tim Baker: Yeah, so I think if we look at it like our mission of empowering pharmacists to achieve financial freedom, I think we both agree that in a one-on-one engagement with a fiduciary, a fee-only planner, is the shortcut to that. And I think we’ve seen that a lot with our clients where we see kind of the before picture and the after picture, and those are typically because of I think that relationship that a planner has with a client and the way that is forcing them to think differently, right? So like I often joke that I’m a financial planner, but I need a financial planner because I need someone to — a third party to objectively look at our financial plan and say like, am I insane? Or are we nuts? Or are we on track? Right? So I like I know the technical piece of it, like I know what it is to be a CFP and what — just like you’re a pharmacist and you need to know the technical piece of it or a doctor, they’re still going to go to like other health providers to kind of provide that insight and those opinions. But so I think the third party is a big thing. I think the other thing that we don’t necessarily trade on that much is, you know, like for a lot of people, when’s the last time you actually sat down and talked about goals with yourself or like with a partner? So like, you know, I kind of equate this to like I’ve been in periods of my life, Tim, where you are so — I don’t want to say like zoned out but like you ever get into your car and you’re going to work, and it’s 6 o’clock in the morning or whenever you go into your work, and you drive that 30-minute commute, and then you get to work and you don’t even remember any of that drive. It’s just —

Tim Ulbrich: That’s right. Yep.

Tim Baker: You’re on like autopilot. I think that the danger of not utilizing a professional in some regard is that you get into that where you like wake up 10 years from now or 20 years from now and you’re like, what the heck did I actually do? Or like is this a wealthy life for me? And you’re not having those critical conversations with yourself or out loud, which I think can be so powerful. So where are we going? Are we sure that’s where we want to go? Is this insane? And having that kind of, again, objective third party to make sure that we’re outlining goals and we’re being held accountable to that. And then I think the other thing that like is really important is that guidance, is that knowledge, is that technical expertise with best interests in mind. So to me, like if you’re talking to a financial planner, the two things that I think need to be there and if they’re not I’m going the other way is are you a CFP? So unlike a PharmD or JD or MD, like this is a designation that there’s an ethics requirement, there’s an experience requirement, there’s an education requirement that most financial advisors don’t need to kind of do what they’re doing. So like the barrier to entry to become a financial planner is very low. So you want to make sure that the CFP designation is there. And I think the other thing is are you a fiduciary? Are you going to act in my best interests? Or can you put your interests, meaning the planner’s interests, ahead of mine? And what most people don’t know is that 95% of advisors out there are not fiduciaries. And typically if you know the names of those types of firms, they’re not fiduciaries, meaning that they can put their own client — put their own interests ahead of their client’s. So you know, I think that the technical expertise and that is, those are just table stakes. Like I think that that’s going to come with the territory. It’s really I think overlying the human element and to me, I think what we try to do from a planning perspective is make sure that we’re taking care of clients today, say in 2021, but we’re also taking care of clients in 10, 20, 30 years from now and their future self and really threading the needle between taking care of what’s going on today and then that future version of yourself. And I feel like if you don’t feel like that push and pull, if you’re always saving or if you’re always spending, that can lead to some problems. And I think that having that objective third party to kind of guide and hold you accountable, give you some tough love, give you some encouragement, give you some idea of where you’re at compared to peers, for example, I think that’s vitally important.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and Tim, what you said about the human element just really resonates with me and I think will with our community as well. I mean, I think we often may have a perception of financial planners or advisors, whether that’s from movies or books we’ve read or parents that have worked with an advisor, whatever it be, but we tend to think I think of more of that tactical type of moves that folks are making, right, whether that’s certain investing decisions and insurance decisions, maybe it’s Roth conversions, things like that, tax decisions, etc. All of those are important and to your point, that’s table stakes in terms of an expertise that they’re going to provide. You want that knowledge, experience, and expertise. But it’s the human element. I think so much of the value you’ve provided to Jess and I has been in the conversations that have been initiated and the constant revisiting of what are our goals? What did we say was important, and are we actually living the wealthy life that we said we wanted to live? And the answer to that is not always yes, but we need that compass that we’re moving towards and we need that reminder, we need some accountability, we need a coach to make sure as life is racing by that we’re ultimately stopping, pausing, and getting back on the direction that we said was so important. So for those that are listening to this, if that is resonating with you, we’d love to have an opportunity to talk with you to see if what we offer from a financial planning standpoint is a good fit for you. You can go to YFPPlanning.com, you can schedule a free discovery call. Again, YFPPlanning.com. Tim or I would love to have a chance to talk with you further. Tim, great stuff. We’ve covered six common financial errors, and as always, we appreciate the community listening in to this podcast. If you liked what you heard on this week’s episode of the podcast, please do us a favor and leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to the show. That will help other pharmacists be able to find this show as well. Thank you so much for joining, and we look forward to this episode next week. Have a great rest of your day.

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YFP 206: Three Strategies for Buying a House with Student Loans

Posted on June 3, 2021November 2, 2022 by yfpadmin

Three Strategies for Buying a House with Student Loans

Nate Hedrick discusses strategies for buying a home with student loans. He talks about the decision to rent vs. buy, how to determine when you’re ready to buy, and three strategies to consider when deciding to buy a home with student loans.

About Today’s Guest

Nate Hedrick is a full-time pharmacist by day, husband and father by evening and weekend, and real estate agent, investor, and blogger by late night and early morning. He has a passion for staying uncomfortable and is always on the lookout for a new challenge or a project. He found real estate investing in 2016 after his $300,000+ student loan debt led him to read Rich Dad Poor Dad. This book opened his mind to the possibilities of financial freedom and he has been obsessed ever since. After earning his real estate license in 2017, Nate founded Real Estate RPH as a source for real estate education designed with pharmacists in mind. Since then, he has helped dozens of pharmacists around the country realize their dream of owning a home or starting their investing journey. Nate resides in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife, Kristen, his two daughters Molly and Lucy, and his rescue dog Lexi.

Summary

Nate Hedrick returns to the show to discuss knowing when you are ready to buy a home, questions to ask yourself to gauge your readiness, and three strategies for buying when you have student loans.

The first strategy for buying a home when you have student loans is to buy a home as soon as possible. The advantages of this strategy include immediate emotional satisfaction, being your landlord, building equity in your home, and tax advantages for homeownership realized. The disadvantages include high upfront costs, increased likelihood of paying PMI, the effect the purchase may have on your budget, and the decrease in flexibility to move at will.

The second strategy is to pay off your student loans first, then buy a home. The advantages to this strategy are emotional relief from debts being gone, increased flexibility in the budget, and potentially increased emergency funds should problems arise. Disadvantages to this strategy include a period of renting and not building equity, potential loss of market appreciation, potentially missing out on historically low-interest rates, and delayed access to tax benefits.

The third strategy is more of a hybrid model. In this strategy, the homebuyer pays down the student loans and then buys a home. With this third strategy, there may be a feeling of relief and confidence, less overall debt, and a lower risk of defaulting on payments. Disadvantages are the same as the second strategy, though generally for a shorter time.

Mentioned on the Show

Episode Transcript

Tim Ulbrich: Nate, welcome back to the show.

Nate Hedrick: Hey, Tim, great to be here.

Tim Ulbrich: It’s been so fun to hear you and David on the Real Estate Investing podcast as hosts. I shared with you before we hit record, I’ve enjoyed being a fan of the show, love hearing other pharmacists’ stories about their real estate investing journey. So kudos to you and David on the work that you’ve been doing. That’s not what we’re going to talk about here today, though. I want to bring you on as a guest in your role as The Real Estate RPh, someone who has expertise on the home buying side, also being a real estate agent, so we can dig into the topic that I think is front-of-mind for so many pharmacists out there, especially in this real estate market, and that is buying a home while still dealing with student loan debt. So Nate, before we jump in, I think folks if they’ve listened to any of the news lately, they know the chaos that is the real estate market right now. But just give us a quick pulse from what you’re seeing in your market in Cleveland and obviously as an agent in helping other pharmacists.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks, it’s been really fun getting started with the podcast. And David and I are having a blast meeting all these great pharmacists doing real estate investing. And it’s been a really fun time. So but yeah, the market right now is obviously a big seller’s market. There is very low inventory. The interest rates are low, so it’s driving up people that want to buy because money is cheap. And so we’re seeing a lot of bidding wars. Houses come on the market and there’s 10 or 11 offers by Saturday afternoon and people are looking for highest and best by Sunday evening. And so it’s just — it’s a bit crazy. It’s nice for a market with my sellers. I had a listing that was on the market I think — I don’t know — two or three days that we got a full-price ask. So it’s really nice to have listings, but my buyers, it’s a lot of work. We’re doing a lot of offers that include escalation clauses, which bump up the price, and appraisal gap coverage and all kinds of crazy stuff.

Tim Ulbrich: I was thinking about you last week, you know, for agents that are obviously working with the buying and the selling side, like what a difference of just — I mean, effort of course and work but also I mean, you know, on one end you might be working with somebody who’s putting in one offer that is one of 10, 15, 20 offers. On the other end, it’s like, keep them coming. Keep the offers coming and we’re going to react to the best one.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, I had a physician client, two young physicians, new residency here in Cleveland, they’re moving from D.C. back to Cleveland. And I think we ended up looking at — it had to be 60 houses. It was the most I’ve ever seen with one client. And there’s other real estate agents that are listening that are probably like, that’s not a lot. But for me, that was a ton, a ton of houses. We did one offer every week and one offer every weekend, so two a week at least. It took us 10 or 11 houses, or 10 or 11 offers to get something accepted for them. But they’ve got a great house. It just took a ton, a ton of effort to get them there.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah. Persistence for sure. So let’s talk about home buying and student loans. You know, our audience knows well that pharmacists today are facing big mountains of student loan, $175,000 is the median indebtedness for a pharmacy graduate in 2020. Hopefully we’ll be getting the 2021 data here soon. But I think we know where that number is going to be going. And we often hear from folks in the YFP community as well as prospective financial planning clients of ours at Your Financial Pharmacist Planning that pharmacists are often trying to juggle several competing financial priorities, which really of course depends on the person, right? It could be buying a home, paying down debt, investing, saving for retirement, the list goes on and on. And what we often do when it comes to comprehensive financial planning is we’re working with clients to help them determine their financial and their life goals and to ultimately develop and establish a plan to help those individuals reach those goals. So when we talk here about student loan debt, obviously one big goal that we hear from many folks in the community, a big barrier is I want to get a home, but I’ve got all this student loan debt. And when is the right time? And so I think there’s this question of, is there a best time? You know, what are the different options that are out there? So Nate, high level, what do you think of as kind of the buckets or strategies that folks may be thinking about when it comes to buying a home while also focusing on student loan repayment?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, and I think this is, you know, regardless of the market, there are three main options for what this looks like. And you do this in a buyer’s market or a seller’s market. But you know, Option 1 is kind of the “I want everything now,” right? Buy a home ASAP. Go ahead and just do it. Option 2 would then be the opposite of that where you’re paying down all your debt first and then you buy a house, and that’s like the very Dave Ramsey approach. And then there’s Option 3, which we’ll talk a lot about I think as we go through this. But that’s kind of what I call the hybrid approach, where you’re looking at getting rid of the bad debt first and then going ahead and purchase that home, even though you’ve got some of those student loans in place. And we’ll talk through those details.

Tim Ulbrich: So we’ll dig into each of those strategies. First things first, you have to decide if it’s renting, is it buying, what’s the best move for you going forward? And really, if you do choose to buy a home, knowing whether or not you’re ready and being prepared to do so. So Nate, just some initial thoughts on how can someone determine if they are ready to buy a home.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, absolutely. I think there are a lot of things you can do in advance to make sure that you are prepared for that process and some questions you can kind of evaluate to determine is it right for me to rent? Is it a good time for me to jump in and start buying? And again, how do my other finances fit in with that? So you know, for example, are your student loans at a point where they are causing you significant stress? That’s just one easy-to-answer question, right? Are these driving me crazy? Are they the thing that I can’t stop thinking about? Or is it that I need to go buy a house first? And if your answer to that question becomes, absolutely, I’ve got to get rid of these student loans, it’s the thing that’s killing me, maybe you need to wait on that house purchase. And so questions like that can help you start to figure out where are your priorities, and then you can start looking at the actual financial pieces. You know, for example, do I have an emergency fund? Am I contributing to my retirement fund on a regular basis? Right? I would typically advise somebody to have those things in place first before going out and purchasing a home. You know, there are advantages to buying that house but not in replacing your emergency fund or taking away from your retirement just so you can go do it. So those early financial questions I think are a really good place to start so that you know your priorities before deciding what strategy is right for you.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, Nate, what I like about those questions, one thing I talk often about on the show — our audience has heard me on repeat say this — is really trying to avoid making any financial decision in a silo. Right? Taking a step back and saying, what else is going on with the financial plan? And I think in this scenario, right, we’re talking about home buying, we’re in the spring of 2021, the market is en fuego, like you’re talking to peers and friends and colleagues and others that are buying homes, it’s all over the news, interest rates are low, like that puts the pressure — perhaps — on like OK, got to buy, got to buy, got to buy, especially if folks are having that as an interest. And these questions, you know, are my student loans and other debt causing significant stress? What about my emergency fund? Where am I at with my retirement funds? Where are the contributions? How might this position to buy v. continue to rent ultimately direct that? So really taking that step back and asking those questions and also being fair that rent prices right now are also en fuego. So like this may not be necessarily just a home prices are escalating, therefore it’s best to stay put. But I think asking these questions to really try to evaluate it, you know, as objectively as you can with the rest of your financial plan in consideration. So let’s dig into those three strategies that you mentioned, Nate. And we’re talking here again about paying off student loans while also looking at purchasing a home. You mentioned No. 1 is “I want it now,” right? So ultimately, you know, getting the home as soon as possible and really focusing on that. The second approach you mentioned is really more of that Dave Ramsey type of approach of OK, let’s pay down all of the debt and then we’ll even think about a home after that. And then the third you mentioned is more of a hybrid approach. So let’s start with No. 1, the “I want it now,” buy a home as soon as possible. So who is this strategy for? Talk to us more about some considerations around this strategy.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah. And so full disclosure, this was me about seven years ago, right? We had come out of pharmacy school and residency and decided we wanted a house. We wanted space to call our own, we wanted space for our dog, we wanted — like, you name it, there were 10 reasons why emotionally we were ready to have a house. And so for us, it became alright, that’s going to be the driving decision, we’ll figure out the costs later. I don’t care, we’re going to buy a house. And so this strategy is really for those people that say, “Look, I am ready to jump in. I am comfortable with where my student loans are at, or comfortable enough that I can take this financial responsibility, and it’s time for us to dive in and take a look at purchasing that actual house.”

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, the other group I think about here too, Nate, you know, without getting into the weeds of student loans, would be for those that are pursuing a forgiveness option, right? So whether it’s PSLF, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, non-Public Service Loan Forgiveness — if you’re hearing those terms for the first time or want any more information, check out any previous YFP episode. I think we’ve talked about them. But you know, when I think about the strategy around forgiveness, now, granted if that is the right move, which is a further conversation back to my point about not looking at things in a silo — if Public Service Loan Forgiveness of non-Public Service Loan Forgiveness is the path forward, typically the strategy is then, OK, what can we do to minimize payment, maximize forgiveness. Well in that case, there might be additional cash flow, right, that’s there on a month-by-month basis that may not be the case if somebody’s let’s say in an aggressive repayment, either in the federal program or in the refinance. So great example where student loan strategy can really intersect here with the home buying discussion and decision as well. So advantages and risks. So as we talk about this strategy, Nate, buy a home as soon as possible, “I want it now,” what are some advantages? What are some potential disadvantages or risks?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah. I think most of the advantages here are emotional, right? I think they’re kind of obvious from that standpoint. You get the house, you get to become a landlord right away. But there are a couple of financial advantages as well. One is that you build that equity and that credit right away. I mean, if you had been in my shoes seven years ago and now where the housing market is today, right, our house has gone up tremendously in value just sitting here and enjoying it. So there is some advantage to that. You’ve got tax advantages as well. You know, you get to pay down or at least deduct in some capacity your mortgage interest and some of your property taxes in some cases. So there are definite financial advantages, but I think in this strategy, most of the advantage side is leaning toward the emotional aspects. And then on the risks or the disadvantages I guess, you know, obviously there’s less flexibility built in. You know, renting is great because you have that flexibility if your job changes or if you want to go to a different location. There’s higher upfront costs from doing it this way. Obviously you’ve got a lot more debt load, a lot more debt-to-income ratio is being increased by doing this. So you know, from a financial aspect, it’s a bit more tricky for sure.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think I’ve talked about this on the show before when we had a discussion on renting versus buying — we’ll link to that previous episode in the show notes — but you know, don’t forget about all the other costs. Right? We’ve talked about this on other episodes before, all of the other costs that come along with the home purchase, not necessarily just doing a rent payment comparison against what would it be with mortgage .Obviously you’ve got taxes, you’ve got insurance, you’ve got things that you need to furnish the home, take care of the house, etc., other costs that can be a significant factor. So strategy No. 2, get rid of all of the debt, then buy a home. Now I know folks are going to hear this, Nate, because I was in bucket No. 1, right, so I’m with you there. You know, folks that are looking at $175,000-250,000 of debt, like seriously? Like wait until I have all of that paid off? I mean, you know, some may — as we’ve had featured on the show before — some might be able to knock that out in 2, 3, 4 years very aggressively. But many folks are looking at 10, 15, 20-year repayment. So where does this strategy fall? What might this be an opportunity for some folks to consider when we talk about getting rid of all of your loans and then buying a home?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah. I definitely think this plays into someone who might have a smaller debt load than the average pharmacist. And by smaller, you could still be talking about $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 but something that you can tackle in 1 or 2 years if you really were aggressive with it. I think you’re right, the typical pharmacist or even the typical pharmacist couple in some cases where you’re coming out with $300,000 together in debt, like it’s just — it may not be possible to choose this strategy and still make financial sense. But there are plenty that do it. I mean, take a look at Tim Church’s story, right? He went out and him and his wife really focused every dollar on getting rid of that debt first and again, because it was a major pain point for them. They said, “I hate this debt. And the idea of taking on more makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t do it.” So if you’re one of those people, this might be the right call for you.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and I think that’s a good reminder, you know, Nate, of like really being true to how you emotionally feel. Here, we’re talking about how you emotionally feel about debt but also it will be about how you emotionally feel about other parts of the financial plan and not necessarily just what someone else is doing or what else you have read but really being true to how do you feel about that. And then this case, an obvious advantage would be if you just hate the idea of that student loan debt and you can really aggressively pay that off, then obviously the advantage being you’re going to have a lot of relief from having no other debt and be able to move into that home in a very confident financial position. So that of course is one advantage. What are some other advantages that you think about with this strategy as well as some disadvantages or risks?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah. From the advantage side, I definitely think that you have more flexibility once you get there. Right? All of the advantages are kind of once you get there. But you have that more flexibility in your budget when you’re ready to buy a home, you’ve got greater cushion, you can make bigger mortgage payments, especially if something unexpected comes up. So I know a couple of physician and pharmacist friends who are looking at methods like this where they want to get rid of their debt first so that one of them can cut back on their hours and they can still afford that home that they want to purchase. So there are definitely — it provides more flexibility, but again, a lot of those advantages don’t kick in until you paid off that debt. So you’re kind of sitting on the disadvantages until that point. And so again, obviously the risks there are it could take you several years to get there and you’re not building any equity in that time. And so you could miss out on significant market appreciation. You also could miss out on locking in these great interest rates that we’re having right now. I mean, we are talking about truly, truly historic lows. They’ve come up a little bit in the last couple of months as buying interest has increased, but I mean, truthfully, you cannot get interest rates much lower than they are right now. And so you might miss out on that if it takes you 2 or 3 more years to get access. And then of course, you know, there are very few advantages for income earners like ourselves in terms of tax implications. But getting a mortgage is one, and so you miss out on that small advantage as well.

Tim Ulbrich: I think interest rates is an interesting conversation, especially for those that are new graduates that are looking for a home or recent graduates. You know, Nate, it feels like — you know I graduated 2008, you were a few years after that — like we’ve been in a historically low interest rate period. Right? So I don’t feel like I have an appreciation — like when we say historically low rates, it’s like, yeah, they are relative to where they’ve been, but they were still really good just a couple years ago. And before that, we were talking about historically low rates that were there as well.

Nate Hedrick: Right.

Tim Ulbrich: So we don’t have the perspective. Like go talk to my parents or talk to my grandparents, and you hear stories of double-digit interest rates and other things. So definitely an important consideration, but I think it has become somewhat of a norm that we’ve been used to here more recently. But who knows where that will go here in the next year or so?

Nate Hedrick: Definitely.

Tim Ulbrich: Third strategy you mentioned, Nate, is a little bit more of a hybrid approach. So what do you exactly mean by that?

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, and so this is one that I really advocate for, which is really getting your financial house in some sort of order and then going off and purchasing that home. So it’s not paying down everything, but it’s also not just jumping in head first. What this looks like is getting those student loans either refinanced or into a student loan forgiveness program or under some sort of control, getting rid of the other bad debt that you might have, credit card debt, for example, getting rid of that stuff first, the things that are really going to outpace any of the advantages you get with purchasing a home. And once you’ve got that in line, you’ve saved up a sizable down payment so that you’re avoiding things like PMI or any sort of getting rid of your emergency fund, then you go forward and purchase that home. So it’s really about maximizing the benefits, minimizing the risks and trying to balance that out.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, this really intrigues me, Nate, and I wish I would have had you in my ear back in 2009 because I think what resonates with me with this strategy is, you know, I went into the buy a home ASAP. And I think with just a little bit more time, if I would have been able to really better understand like what are all of my student loan repayment options and what is the best fit for Jess and I in this repayment journey — and when I think about this, I think about locking in your strategy. Right? So it doesn’t mean — here, as you’ve articulated, it doesn’t mean you’re debt-free before you’re purchasing a home. That was No. 2. But we’ve got a game plan, and we know exactly what that game plan is, we’ve considered other parts of the financial plan. So whether that’s refinancing, whether that’s loan forgiveness, whether that’s some other plan, we know what that’s going to look like month-to-month, we know what the total amount is going to be paid or total amount that also may be forgiven in a forgiveness plan. And so now, we can put in that one puzzle piece of the plan of the student loans so we can then start to move these other puzzle pieces like the home in around it. Right? But we’re not moving into the home purchase decision still wondering like, what is the student loan plan? You know? What might this look like? We talk often on this topic, webinars and speaking events and other things, and I often will show a slide and a chart that shows for a pharmacist coming out with $150,000 or $200,000 of debt, if they choose Option A, B, C, D, or E when it comes to student loan repayment, whether that’s forgiveness or non-forgiveness, federal or private, there’s a difference, big difference that can happen on a monthly payment basis as well as what’s paid out over the life of the loan. So if that’s a question mark, you know, and you haven’t evaluated those options, I think it’s really difficult to know where does that home piece fit in around that, if the payment is going to look like on a month-to-month basis is still unknown. So talk to us then, Nate, about the advantages and disadvantages of this strategy when it comes to this hybrid approach of paying down the student loans and having a strategy while also moving forward with home buying.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, I think this really tries to play into the advantage — it really ups the advantages where it can and then it kind of disengages those risks wherever it’s possible. So for example, you’ve got that feeling of relief because you’re going to have the student loans under some sort of control, right? They’re not going to be gone.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah.

Nate Hedrick: But maybe you’ve refinanced them down to 3% now and now you know, OK, this is basically like inflation money. I have my payment, I’ve got that figured out every month, and I can stack things on top of that. It also helps because hopefully you’re going to be taking on less overall debt, especially if you’re taking the time to build up that down payment, that emergency fund, you know, and maybe you’re paying off things like — or you’re getting enough down payment that you’re going to avoid PMI or using a pharmacist home loan product to avoid PMI. All of those things are going to help you in taking on less overall bad debt. So those big advantages, and then again, kind of the ultimate is that if something does happen, right, if you lose a job, if you miss out on work for a period of time, or someone needs to cut back on hours, you have a lower risk of defaulting on those payments because you’ve set yourself up for success from the beginning. It’s not perfect, you’ve not paid down all that debt going into it. But you’re getting that home a little bit sooner, and you’ve got this cushion built in that may help you out. The disadvantages is obviously this still could take time, right? You could still take 2 years to approach this hybrid model where it makes sense. I like to think that you can pull this off in probably a year, a year and a half, because really, truly getting that down payment saved up in that time should be doable, especially using like a pharmacist home loan product. But you are waiting. It’s not getting the house tomorrow. It’s giving it a little bit of time still.

Tim Ulbrich: Great stuff. And for those that heard the three strategies and the discussion we’ve had here today and want a refresher without going back and hitting replay on this episode, Nate has put this into a blog post, “Three Strategies for Buying a House with Student Loans.” That’s available at YourFinancialPharmacist.com, on the YFP blog, and we’ll link to that in the show notes. Nate, I want to spend a few minutes and talk about the Real Estate RPh concierge service that we offer to the YFP community because I think that many folks that are listening to this are probably somewhere in the stages of home buying, whether that’s a hey, I’m out there looking right now, or I’m going to get started. Maybe it’s three months out, six months out, whatever be the case. But we know how important it is to have an agent that understands your situation and really ultimately has your best interests in mind. And we’ve got the advantage of having you, Nate, as someone who both understands the pharmacist, is a real estate agent, has gone through this process of student loan repayment and making a decision to buy a home, and I think that perspective can be incredibly valuable to other pharmacists that are in the home buying decision-making process. So Nate, tell us about exactly what is the real estate concierge service and what folks can expect as they go throughout that.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, so this goes back to when I bought my first house. And it came time to get myself an agent, right, I knew I was a buyer, I knew that getting an agent was basically free. But that’s about all I knew, right? I knew that I needed to go find one. And so I started asking my friends. And someone said, “Oh yeah, here, use this person.” And they were fine. They did their job OK. But as I learned more about real estate, becoming an agent, working with clients, I realized there was a lot of things that they could have done differently and that I wish I would have known as a buyer from the beginning. And so I said, “We can improve that for other people. Let’s go out and do that.” And so what I do is I actually connect with potential buyers, with pharmacists like yourselves or with anybody that’s looking to purchase a home anywhere in the country. We do a 30-minute planning call. It usually doesn’t take that long, but I at least set aside that 30 minutes to answer questions, go through the home buying process with you so that you can fully understand it, ask any questions that you have about it, and then once we have that conversation, I go out and I find you a great real estate agent. And sometimes it’s somebody we’ve already worked with, we’ve helped over 30 pharmacists close on houses at this point, which is pretty fun. And — so it might be somebody we’ve already worked with in the past, or it might be somebody that we simply know from interviewing them. And so I’ll go out and I’ll interview agents, try to match up someone who I think is going to be a really good fit for you. And then we get you connected, and you get off to the races with this great, personally-vetted agent. The other cool thing is that I don’t leave once that connection takes place. I get to be still a part of your team. And so if you need a second opinion, if you just want to bounce ideas off of me, somebody that isn’t your agent but is an agent, you can come right back to me, sign up for another call, send me some emails. You know, it just gives you that person in your back pocket that knows and understands this process to really help you out. And so it’s been a great tool for our pharmacists to tap into and our community to tap into. We’ve had a lot of success over the last year or so.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, that’s great, Nate. And for our community, this really initiated I think in part because of really the value that I see Nate brings to the community, his expertise in this area. We’ve known each I think for the better part of a decade now.

Nate Hedrick: Yep.

Tim Ulbrich: I realized that this topic of home buying is something that close behind student loans and some others is really top-of-mind for our community and going through this process firsthand a couple times, know how important it is to have a good agent that is in your corner. So —

Nate Hedrick: Especially in this market.

Tim Ulbrich: Yes. Big yes.

Nate Hedrick: I mean, having somebody that’s going to be able to fight for you and understand what kind of things are going to get the deals done — if you’re a buyer, I mean, that is so, so essential right now. I’ve seen tons of people that just get frustrated because the agent they’re working with isn’t helping them along or not explaining it to them well enough, and then they just say, “You know what, forget it. I’m just going to rent for another year. I’ll figure it out later.” But a lot of the agents that we work with, like they understand this market, they work in it every single day. And they’re able to navigate it for you and help you actually achieve that home buying process.

Tim Ulbrich: Yeah, and full disclosure, as Nate mentioned, the service is completely free to use for the buyer. If you work with an agent within the network that is referred and end up closing on a property, then that agent pays a small commission back to Nate. So that’s full transparency of how the process works. Obviously having Nate in your corner can be a valuable resource. We know that home buying, it’s an exciting experience, it can also be overwhelming at times. You’ve got finding an agent, financing, searching for the place, this market, as you mentioned, Nate, so that’s really the value I think that can be brought through the concierge service and working with Nate. So for those that are interested, YourFinancialPharmacist.com, top of the page, you’ll see Buy or Refi a Home. Then you can click on Find an Agent. That’ll get you connected to getting some time on Nate’s calendar. And we’ll also link to that directly in the show notes. Nate, as always, appreciate you taking the time, appreciate your expertise, and looking forward to having you back on the show in the future.

Nate Hedrick: Yeah, thanks for having me. And we’ll talk again soon I’m sure.

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