Our CEO answers questions about money and life

Here’s a transcript if you’d rather read:

I really liked The Wealthy Barber. I thought there was a nice narrative to it. It was a – it’s a relatable story about people doing things, learning along the way. It’s not like a “Do this, Do that” kind of book. I’m not a big fan of the automatic millionaire concepts with the drinking less lattes and all these very prescriptive books. But, to be honest, I don’t read a lot of money books. These days I’m reading mostly more business books.

That’s a trick question, it’s neither. It is one word. It is Planswell.

Who is my idol, ahhh. That’s one of these… These aren’t rapid fire questions, these are like deep. I have to analyze everyone I know, or everyone I’ve ever heard of and rank them….

The chances of you having an emergency, right away, and needing the money in cash are quite low. There’s many people that thought it was a good idea to have a 30 or 50 thousand dollar emergency fund in cash, and they held out their whole life. I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head. We did the math on it at one point, it was like hundreds of thousands of dollars of missed opportunities. So, you might as well have the money invested, but I would give it to… Let Planswell portfolios take care of that, for me.

I don’t wear them on the weekends, so maybe three. But I would say if you were counting business days, we’re about a year and a half in. If you’re talking about the same t-shirt, I would say, I usually do about two days in between washes if it’s not that hot.

A hot dog… Nope, it’s a hot dog.

The basic math that I use is that, if I can have a cost of borrowing that is considerably lower than my reasonably expected rate of return… So if my, for example, my mortgage is about just over 2% that I spend, and my returns on my investments are considerably more than that and I believe that they will, for my portfolio, stay that way, then I would keep the debt. If I’m carrying 20% credit card debt, I would absolutely pay those off. We actually won’t allow you to start funding your investment accounts if you’re carrying credit card debt, ’cause that doesn’t make sense.

Well, the most meaningful validation recently was this past weekend actually at the bridal show. I’ve been very proud of and showing everybody the photos. We had a booth set up and it was jammed full of people. People were like pushing each other out of the way, it felt like, to get, to make a plan. At any given point in time, we had between five and eight people making an entire financial plan in about three minutes, flat. There were all these other booths around from Sun Life and RBC Insurance and Investors Group, and the booths were just empty.

Gel, that is very 90s. It’s more of like a paste thing that people do these days, and actually you gotta use both to do it right. You use the… paste as the base, and then you lock it in.