Save Money, Build Wealth and Just Keep Buying with Nick Maggiulli
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If you want to do more and spend less like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at allthehacks.com slash oracle. That's allthehacks.com slash oracle. Allthehacks.com slash oracle. Hello and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited you're here today.

With all that's happening in the markets right now, it had me thinking a bit about my guest from episode six, Morgan Housel, who talks about how volatility in the stock market should be viewed more as a fee for admission than necessarily a fine. I think that's a really helpful perspective, especially given what's going on. It's currently mid-May 2022. We're getting awfully close to bear market.

So today, I want to bring on Nick Maggiuli, who shares a similar sentiment to Morgan and has written about it on multiple occasions. He's the COO at Ritholtz Wealth Management, but he's also a writer, investor, and data scientist who regularly uses data to produce insights and great content about investing and personal finance on his blog of dollars and data. And he recently released his first book, Just Keep Buying, Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth.

He's covered a lot on his blog and in his book, but I'm really excited to dig into his focus on income producing assets, why you might not want to max out your 401k, investing during a downturn, getting comfortable with spending more, and why you'll probably never feel rich. Chris Hutchins works at Wealthfront.

All opinions expressed by Chris and his guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Wealthfront. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for investment decisions. Nick, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me on, Chris. Appreciate it. So you talk about volatility in the market being kind of the price for admission for people interested in buying stocks. How do you think people should be thinking about this?

I agree completely. It is like a fee for admission, except the fee isn't paid. You don't actually have to necessarily pay it. If you hold for a long enough time in a diverse set of income producing assets, you never have to physically pay it. You pay it with your emotional costs of holding through all that stuff. And so it's more of a

I'd say it's more of a mental fee than it is an actual financial transaction fee, right? So keeping that in mind is what's important. I think the thing for me that just like allows me to stay calm when markets are crashing. I've just seen this happen so often. Actually, tomorrow I'm writing a blog post about this. It's just like I've been investing for 10 years and on average, the market declines by a little over 10% every other year, 30% every 4 to 5 years and 50% like once a generation. So let's say every 20 to 25 years, right? We did have two...

50% declines in the 2000s. There was the dot-com followed by the Great Recession, but the last 50% decline before that was 74. So this is all on average. But if it's happening every other year, then you shouldn't be panicking over this because these types of things just happen. There's going to be different catalysts, different reasons that cause them. That's why I can be like, hey, this stuff happens. It's just like the nature of markets and it's going to keep happening that way. And what do you say to someone who's like, gosh, it feels like it could get even worse. Maybe I should get out before it bottoms.

Well, let's say you do get out before bottoms, right? Like, wow, okay, I got out, maybe it goes down another 10%, right? But how do you know when the bottom's in? How do you know when to get back in? That's the problem. It's like you have psychological like hell on the exit, and you have psychological hell on the reentry. So it's not even about trying to time it. Like, that's why it's very difficult to do. But even if you got lucky on one side of the trade, you may get unlucky on the other side of the trade, and you end up not making anything in the long

Like imagine you sold in like early March, 2020, right? Like looking back now, that looks like a good idea. But when did you get back in within six months? We were at all time highs. Did you get back in before you passed your old price? Like, uh,

Probably not, right? And that's the thing because it would happen so quickly. Like it's really hard to predict that stuff. So I don't recommend those types of all or nothing type of moves. If you are getting worried, I say make minor, very, very minor tweaks. Just enough to get you to sleep at night, but not so much that you jeopardize your financial future. So that's my hack there. If you're going to sin, sin a little. Don't sin a lot. That's where people make big mistakes when they start moving everything too much based on short-term changes in information. And what would be a minor tweak?

Let's say I do like a 60-40. Every month in my 401k, I'm putting 60% into stocks, 40% into bonds. A minor tweak would be like, okay, I'm going to flip that. I'm going to put 60% into bonds, 40% into stocks. Obviously, it's a small change in money. You're still investing in stocks, but you're doing it at a slower rate and you're putting more into bonds on the productive front. Even having a rebalance, rebalancing back. If stocks have fallen a lot and bonds haven't, rebalancing back, that can also do things. There's a lot of different ways of doing this and there's no right answer. Every person is going to feel differently. Someone's like,

I'm not going to feel safe if I lose another dollar in the market. Well, it's like, the truth is now you know your actual risk tolerance and you shouldn't have had that money invested in the first place. But hey, you're here now. And if that's true, then yeah, you probably do need to get out completely because you didn't realize your risk tolerance. You should have had a very different portfolio before this happened. I think a lot of people think, okay, well, the stock market goes up always. So there's not really that much risk. But you kind of say, sometimes the biggest risk you can take is not taking risk. Can you talk a little bit more?

I guess you can look at it. There's two types of risk. There's slow risk and fast risk. Now, I would define as fast risk as something like stock market crashes happens very quickly. COVID-19, the world shutting down, all that stuff. Those are all types of fast risk. They happen very quickly. Slow risk is something that accumulates over a long time. So I think

The analogy I like to use is with drugs, right? So someone doing heroin, they're taking on fast risk. They're probably going to overdose relatively quickly. They're not going to be doing heroin for 20 years and then they get, I don't know, heroin cancer. I know that's not an equivalent, right? There's no cancer you can get from heroin, but they're going to get some sort of cancer and then die.

But smoking is slow risk, right? That's someone who you smoke a cigarette, nothing's going to happen from that. You do it over 20, 30 years, though, and you can see the incidence of lung cancer is highly correlated with smoking, especially after a 20-year period. So that's slow risk versus fast risk. So holding cash is slow risk. You're sitting there and just holding that cash, and that's just going to be dwindled away by inflation. And so the question is, which one's better? And

There's no right answer, but you have to figure out whichever risk you want to take. So I'm going to sit this one out and sit through cash. Not only is your cash being inflated away, but if the market does happen to move up, like for example, I had people in 2017 telling me that, oh, markets are overvalued. If you've been sitting in cash since then, you lost out on 100% gain, basically. Even with the current decline, maybe 80%, 90% gain. So it's like...

What risks do you want to take and where do you want to take it? That's the things you need to think about. So there's nothing wrong with sitting in cash, but as long as you know, hey, I'm going to lose purchasing power over time by doing this. As long as you've accepted that, let's say 2% to 4%, this last year inflation has been 8%, but that's generally not what happens over long periods of time. Let's just say 4% a year. You're willing to accept that haircut on your money, then that's fine. But in the short term, very little fluctuation, but that's what you have to deal with.

One thing you mentioned in there, which I just want you to drill down a little bit more, is about trying to use that cash to time the market. I always thought, "Okay, let's leave some cash on the sidelines so that when the market's down..." Which of course is very hard to predict. But we're in a situation like that now, you can put it to work. But given how long it might take for that to happen, it sounds like not actually from the data, the best decision.

No, it's definitely not. I mean, 80% of the time, you're going to underperform if you follow a strategy like this. There are cases where it does outperform. So the time when it's best to hold cash is right before a big dip, and then you have to time it pretty well to buy into that dip. But the problem is...

dips are rare and big dips are especially rare. Like if I had to go back and said, how many 50% drawdowns have we had? Or even let's just say 33% drawdowns like what we had in COVID. It was 2020. The one before that was 08. The one before that was 2000. I think the only one before that, maybe 87, we got to down 33 with everything. I don't know if we did. The time before that was 74. So they're very rare. And we keep going back through time is not a history lesson, but you get my point because they're so rare. The strategy doesn't work because you're sitting there in cash all

hoping for this dip that never usually comes. And so then you've just lost out on market gains that you could have had, basically. That's the whole issue with trying to time. And I think what you said was if you were sitting around in 2017 thinking things are overvalued,

And you waited. Even if you time the dip, you wouldn't come out ahead. Is that right? Yeah. So if you started at the beginning of 2017, and let's say you held cash the whole time, and you bought at the exact bottom on March 23rd, 2020, right? That was the most recent bottom, at least, right? Even if you perfectly time that, you still would have bought at prices 7% higher than what you could have gotten early 2017. Of course, that's still an incredible trade. Like, it's insane that you could do that. But it just, it doesn't really work that way. So...

Yeah, I don't recommend trying to time the market. It's tough. It's just too tough. I've shown some evidence that if you can do it even somewhat okay, you might be able to make some money on it. But it's really tough. And most people can't do it over the long run. You just end up losing out. What do you say about now? Now, we're not trying to time the market, but we are in a down market, right? Depending on what day this airs, maybe we hit bear market, maybe we recover. And a lot of this is not relevant, which I guess we are all hoping for. But when you're already in the down market, is there something to do differently?

If you have a way of getting more cash, of course, I'm not against buying the dip. I'm against holding cash and waiting to buy the dip. They're very different things because conditional on you being in a dip, let's say you just sold a business or you got an inheritance and by chance you happen to get a big cash infusion when the market's down, that is one of the best times to buy because if the market does recover as we expect it to over some period of time, you're looking at higher expected return. I cover this in chapter 17 of the book.

The math on this is very simple. So let's just use the COVID example. So for every percentage decline, you need a larger percentage gain to get back to even. This is just a mathematics, right? So let's say we're at 100 and the price goes down 33%. So something's at 100, it goes to 66. To get from 66 back to 100, you have to go up 50%, right? 66 has to go up by 33 more, roughly, right? Which is 50% gain. So X percent drop requires a larger gain to get back to even. So if you had bought on March 23rd, 2020...

All we need to do is figure out, okay, how long do you think it's going to take for the market to recover? You have some estimates, some time estimate. And then based on that, we can back out your expected return. So even if you thought it was going to take five years for the market to recover, right? You're looking at a 50% upside over five years. That's roughly 10%. Actually, do the compounding math. It's less. It's like 8.5%.

percent a year, but let's just make it linear to make it easy for us, right? Mentally, you're looking at 10 percent a year. That's a pretty good return if it took five years, right? Even if it took two years, you're looking at what? Fifty divided by two. That's 25 percent a year returns. You're like, who wouldn't want that? So if you think the COVID is going to recover in two to three years, you're looking at some pretty good returns if you buy, right? What actually happened, the market was back at all time highs within six months. You had something like a hundred and six percent annualized return, which is like one of the greatest of all time. Now,

I'm not saying that that's going to happen here. I don't know. But that's the thinking you need to get into. So, oh, we're 20% off the high, right? To get back to even, let's say it's whatever, like 25%, right? You know, if Hunter went to 80, you'd have to go up by 20, which is 25%.

80. So you made a 25% gain. Okay. If you think it's going to take two years to get back to our old high, let's say it takes two years. That's 12 and a half percent roughly doing the linear math there. Do you not want 12 and a half percent right now? That's a pretty good return, right? All else equal, but maybe it doesn't take two years. Maybe it takes five years to get back to high. Then you can see why it's not as good of a deal. You know, if you were to divide 25 by five, now it's only a 5% return, which isn't as great.

In the book, you said there are two good reasons to take on debt. One of them was when your expected return is higher than the cost. Does that mean that it could be a good idea right now to borrow to invest when the market's down? Is there risk there that's beyond the expected return that people should be thinking about?

So I would not recommend that under most of almost all circumstances. I think like technically, yes, the expected return could be higher. The problem is we don't know the future. Like we could be at the beginning of a five-year bear market. And so borrowing money to then invest is a very risky proposition unless like you could easily pay off

that debt. Unless you're like, you know what? I'm going to take this risk. I'm going to lever it. And even if it goes south, I can easily pay it off. You borrow like 2% of your net worth or some really small amount. You could try that. I don't think it's worth the hassle and effort and stress of that to do something like that. But you're right. If the drawdown was bigger, yes. I don't think we're there yet. We were down 20, but now the market's rallied today. And I don't know where it's going to be by the time this gets released, as you know. So

I don't know. I think it's too... It's a risky proposition. I don't recommend that type of stuff because you can get really wrecked by trying to lever up. I'm not here recommending it or proposing that you recommend it. The way I thought about it was, gosh, maybe if I had a certain amount of money I wanted to invest over the next 3 months, maybe I could invest those 3 months today and then just pay it back in 2 months. I always say when you borrow money, you need a plan to pay it back. And you need to be comfortable with rates. And a lot of...

borrowing against your portfolio, against your home, sometimes those rates aren't fixed. I will throw to anyone out there listening, thinking buying the dip, maybe I should borrow for the expected return. One, take all the advice you just gave. And two, there are some expectations of interest rates going up, which could mean that that equation of how much it costs to borrow is going up also. So from my perspective, I don't think it's a timely or wise thing to do. But I thought I'd touch on it a little.

Yeah, I generally don't recommend that. If you have extra cash, that's investable cash. I don't think for an emergency or anything, you have to have extra cash by chance. Go ahead and buy, right? But if not, I'd say, wait, don't do anything like that. Don't go beyond your means, basically.

But another way to buy the dip, in a sense, could be to just rebalance. If your stock portfolio is down significantly and you want it to be at 80-20 and you're at 70-30, you could sell some of those bonds when they're down and buy more stocks. That's another way of doing this. And obviously, it happens in the reverse too. When people think they're overheated and you reverse back, you sell some of the stocks to buy bonds, you can do the same thing there.

So it works both ways, right? It's a natural rebalancing process. And over time, there will be drift. The higher return asset will eat most of the portfolio over time and so or become most of the portfolio over time. So you'll have to just rebalance periodically.

Maybe we're out of this whole thing by the time this comes out. So I don't want to spend too much time digging on how to invest when the market's down. But let's talk a little bit about what to invest in. You focus a lot in the book on income producing assets. And when I heard that, I was like, I feel like I know what that is. But I feel like maybe it would be better to get your definition. Yeah, it's these are assets that actually produce some sort of cash flow. They have some sort of fundamentals around how their price. So what that means is

They're not just price based on what people feel. Of course, how people feel about assets is going to change out of their price. That's true of stocks, bonds, crypto, anything out there that's going to be true, right? But income producing assets have some sort of fundamental, like there's some weight there, which is the actual price.

cash flows for that asset, assuming they have cash flows. Imagine a suitcase with $50,000 in it. We all could be sitting here debating the value of the suitcase. But if we know there's $50,000 in that cash, that is a hard fact that we can use and be like, okay...

The value of this suitcase should never go below $50,000, right? Historically, that actually is not true because Warren Buffett used to buy something called Nets back in the day, which was like buying that $50,000 suitcase for $25,000 because he would buy a company where the liquidation value of the company was worth more than what you could buy it for in the open market. That's like an arbitrage. It should never happen. And today, they basically never have.

Because people are smarter now and then people have more data and they're not allowing these types of things to happen. But that's just an example of like income producing assets are just a fundamental weight that kind of keeps prices in line. And in the book, you outline a list of income producing assets. And some of them I think most people will be familiar with things like real estate and stocks.

But one that I think most people aren't is royalties. Are some of these more alternative income producing assets, things that you talk about because they exist or you talk about because the average person might want to look into them?

Well, I think it's something that people can consider looking into. I don't think any single asset class is necessary to build wealth. I think I've seen people do it with just real estate. I've seen people do it with stocks. I've seen people do it with farmland, etc. There's no one that's required. You don't need to have all these. I'm just trying to expose people to different asset classes and different...

options. I think, for example, in the case of farmland, that's something that during most good times, it's not really correlated as much with US stocks. Of course, most risk assets will decline together. That's going to probably be farmland as well. But the thing about farmland is it's just a different return stream. And so because of that, it's going to behave differently than stocks, right? So that's something to kind of keep in mind is like, hey, how am I diversified and what do I own? So I don't think there's any

reason why you need to use those. You don't have to. I just want to expose people to different ideas out there. Because they're like, oh, that's kind of cool. If you're a big music fan, I could understand why you might want to own royalties. I think there's a personal reason for that. I'm a big music fan. I think that's something I'll get into eventually. There's a lot of accredited investor rules and things around some of those things. So you have to just kind of wait until you can do that unless the rules change. But that's just something to keep in mind.

And for anyone who doesn't know, royalties, you essentially can just buy the income from an asset like an album or an entire collection of albums. And people sell these in private investor groups. Is that right? Yeah, basically. So you can say, hey, I want 10 years royalties for this particular song. And let's say they're selling those royalties for, I don't know...

Let's say 20 grand. That's what they sell. And you get 10 years of it, right? But last year, the song made five grand in income, right? So they would have paid you five grand. You're like, well, Nick, that's a great thing. If I got five grand for the next 10 years, you know, that's 50 grand. I only paid 20 grand for it. That's a great return. The problem is you don't know if the listens and streams and all those royalties are going to be five grand a year. They might be declining over time. You kind of see the history. You need to guess about the future. Obviously, if one of those artists were to die or something, you would see a huge spike in the royalties in that one year. Maybe the royalties would permanently be elevated.

You don't know. And so you're kind of guessing around the future. But it's also like a cultural investment. I think it's more like social than it is necessarily just the cash flows, but they both definitely matter. So you kind of said don't buy individual stocks, but I'm curious if the message is more don't trade stocks and that if you want to buy 20 companies that you're excited about and build that kind of basket of long term investments, how do you feel about that approach?

It's relative to the percentage of your wealth. So if you're doing that with 5% of your net worth, go ahead. If you're doing it for fun, go ahead. I don't care. But if you're going to put the bulk of your wealth in 20 companies that you're crazy about, I think that is a less prudent strategy than owning like an index fund because the probability that those 20 companies are going to grow at the market rate over a long period of time is unlikely. I mean, most companies die.

And the reason why you look at that chart of like, oh, here's the US economy or $1 invested in stocks for the last 100 years or the S&P 500 for the last 50 years. That line isn't realistic because the companies in that line are always changing over time. The companies that are falling behind fall out and the companies that are rising up get added in. It's like a momentum strategy. People don't realize that. So if you just do a buy and hold of 20 random companies, say I'm going to hold these for the next 40 years, like half of those companies probably won't exist. A couple of them will probably do really well.

But the question is, will those ones that do well offset all the ones that don't do well? And I don't know the answer to that. And so I don't recommend doing that for performance reasons. But most importantly, I don't recommend doing it because what I call the existential reasons, which is you don't know if you're a good stock picker. And I can get into that whole argument if you want. But unlike most endeavors where you can identify your skill, your talent pretty quickly, with stock picking, we don't know. Like you and I, Chris, can go pick a basket of stocks, come back a year. And if yours outperforms mine, does that mean you're a better stock picker?

I don't know. I don't think we can say that with certainty after one year. I don't think we can say it even after five years. Maybe 10, we'd have enough. Looking at our track records, we could probably say something. But after one to two years, no one knows. I just imagine someone who bought GameStop in July 2020 before the Wall Street Bets thing happened in early 2021. They had a huge return but had nothing to do with why they picked the stock, had zero to do with their intuition about that. So I think there's a lot of luck here and that's what makes it tough.

You mentioned if we picked a basket of stocks, some won't be gone, which I think means it's maybe even more important to figure out when to sell. So I want to talk about that a little. For me personally, it's tough, right? You pick a stock or you invest it in crypto early on or something where you have a little bit more of an attachment to it. I don't have a particular attachment to VTI, right? Like the total stock market, nor do I want to stop holding it at any point. But for all these other things that people might have invested in their 10%, 15%,

How do you think people should think about selling them? Or even if you work at a company and you just have the stock in that company and you have beliefs about it, how do you make it easier to sell either in advance when I know you could say, this is my criteria, but maybe when you're not that prepared in advance to have created criteria?

How do you think about selling? I think there's three reasons to sell. First reason, rebalancing. Sometimes that's just a natural thing. I don't think that's what you're asking in this question. So we're going to put that aside. The second reason is the point of investing is so you can live the life you want. So sometimes you need to sell stuff just because, hey, I'm going on a vacation. Maybe I want to do this or I want to do something nice for somebody. You sell.

I also assume that's not what you're asking either. So we're going to put that aside. So rebalancing and funding your lifestyle, let's put those aside reasons to sell. The third reason I think you should sell is to get out of a concentrated or losing position. Those are very different things because it's amplifying your risk. It depends. Let's say you work at a company, right? You can think of that company paying you stuff as like a bond income. That's like the income you're getting from the company is like a bond. It's just a payment, right? You get every two weeks, you get your payment or your coupon payment.

Now, why would you also want to hold the equity? You're like, but Nick, this would be the next big thing. Okay, that's fine. I recommend finding what is called the regret minimization framework. That's not something I came up with, but basically sell enough of it so that...

You can lock up some level of lifestyle and then anything above that, if you want to like let it ride, go ahead. I want you to imagine the future. If it goes to zero, how do you feel? If it triples, how do you feel? So sell the amount, the right amount such that no matter how the future unfolds, you're kind of happy with your decision. I think that's the best way to do it. I think it's the only prudent way to do it because...

Someone close to me, they went public. He saw his net worth shoot up a lot of money, talking high six figures. And he was in a high growth tech stock. And now that company has collapsed by like 80%. So he's now seen his wealth drop. And now that six figure position is still six figures, but now it's very low six figures.

So he's seen this happen because he didn't want to sell any of it because he thought it was going to be the next big thing. And I think he's having some regret because he should have sold probably some of it to lock up some lifestyle stuff. And I just said, hey, here's what I would do, but you can do whatever you want. And then they did what they wanted and that's it now. So that's what to just think about is regret minimization. That's the framework I would use. So let's say you're holding one of those stocks. And right now, it's down more than the market is on average, right? There are a handful of tickers that are down, like you said, 80%.

Is there an argument to stay in them? Because if the whole market recovers, they're going to recover at a rate that is maybe greater than the average market. Like if you just trade out of, I don't know, Peloton or Robinhood or something into the S&P, everything comes back to normal. Well, you went down 70% and now you're just up 20%.

Is the argument stay in them? Is it stay to something diversified, but closer to that profile? NASDAQ tech index fund or something like that? How do you think about when you lost a large percent diversifying into something that probably won't recover at the same rate if it recovers?

Yeah. So that's the thing. You don't know if it's going to recover. So the only thing you can use is like historical data. If you look at the one-year median return across any individual stock, I was using the Compustat database going to like 1976. The one-year return is like 6%. And the one-year return on an index is 9%.

The probability that you're going to have one of these stocks that's going to have one of these returns is going to do better is low. So it's more likely you're going to underperform. If we're picking stocks out of a hat, you're probably going to underperform. I hear your argument, but look, these ones are like high beta. So like when the stock market dips and they dip more, but when the stock market comes back, they come back more. Well,

Maybe that was true in this last run because tech was really high and everything was going well, but now maybe things have changed. I can't give you an answer that's going to satisfy you because I can be like, oh yeah, of course they're going to come back. The thing I like to think about is all the prices in the past...

Could have just been imaginary. We were all very bullish on tech and like, oh, COVID is taking over the world and we're never going to come out of our houses. And this is everything like Zoom and Peloton, all these companies are now the future, right? And now that the world's kind of coming back to reality, like maybe that's not true. And so maybe all those prices were like kind of imaginary in some respect. So I don't know if we're going to see something like that. Then again, like

I know it's crazy to say that we go to another pandemic and then those companies start to thrive again. I just don't know like the future is so uncertain. I mean, it's really tough to be in that space when you're down 80%. You have to just evaluate it going forward. I would say evaluate on risk parameters and not necessarily trying to get all your money back because you should just assume you're not going to. So what I'm doing, for example, I own two tech stocks.

We won't say what they are. I'm not trying to pump them or anything. But at the end of the year, if they're still down bad, I'm going to sell them and just have them as a tax loss. I'm holding through the end of this year. And if like if they come back, they do. If they don't at all, I'm selling at the end of this year regardless. And I'm just going to lock in the tax loss because I can write that off against other gains. So that's kind of how I look at it. That's a good strategy. Maybe I'm going to adopt that strategy for a handful of these small positions. You mentioned income producing assets. What about the other side of that equation? Crypto or art or anything like that? Where do those things fit into investing?

I hold roughly 10% of my investable assets in those different types of what I call non-income producing assets. So that actually does include mostly art and crypto. And I actually also put private companies, even though companies could be income producing, I don't consider them income producing. I have a couple of very small private investments, like 1% of my net worth or something. And those aren't income producing, right? I always look at it like that. And...

When the price is based completely on what people are willing to pay for it, and there's no income, you kind of have to look at it that way. So I'm not saying you can't make money in them, and they're not good for risk reasons or a host of other things. But I just think you need to keep it a smaller portion of your portfolio because it's really hard to show how those are going to keep going up in value in the same way that income producing assets go up in value. There's a much more fundamental reasoning for why those should go up in value versus why art or crypto or anything else should go up in value. That makes sense.

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So let's jump a little bit to where we put the money. I think one of your contrarian takes in the book is that maybe you shouldn't max out your 401k. Yes, that's one of my most contrarian takes. And I think it's a very disliked take, but some people kind of see the value in it. For someone listening, it's like, wait a second, wait a second. I've got my 401k. Let's set aside the match because I think we'll all agree that if your company is going to match your contributions, that's worth it. But if they're not, why would someone listening who's not getting matched...

want to stop and say, maybe I shouldn't do this? Well, I think the point of this is to actually just open the conversation up. Because if I looked and I was like, 9 out of 9 personal finance experts all said max or 401k. I was like, maybe I should just look into the numbers and find out. And you actually look at...

The after-tax savings you get from above the match, as you said, so anything above the employer match, was something like 0.7% a year. That's assuming a 15% capital gains rate and a bunch of other assumptions. But you're looking at 0.7% a year. And some 401k plans have all-in fees of over 1%. Those people are paying 1% to be in their 401k. They're getting negative 0.3% a year tax. They're paying a negative tax alpha, I guess you'd call it. You're losing money just to be in their 401k. They would be better off...

if they didn't put any money in there and just held that on the outside and put it in a brokerage account and got lower fee options, right? So they could just manage it themselves. And so I just wanted to open this up so that people would actually look at their 401ks and say, how much am I actually paying? The all-in fees, everything. If it's anywhere near, let's say 0.7%, you need to definitely get out of there. If it's like 0.5%, then the question is like, is it worth the extra 0.2% a year...

to like lock up your money to 59 and a half. And I don't know for all the excess money. And I don't know what the answer is. So I wrote about all this in the book. I was just comparing like a 401k to like a brokerage account, right? Where it's post-tax money and all this, what I didn't even consider. And I've since thought about since in a brokerage account, if your only income is capital gains, like dividends, capital gains, whatever,

and that's your only income for the year. You can have $40,000 a year tax-free as a single individual. If you include the standard deduction right now, it's like 50 grand. So if you're a couple... Now, multiply that by two. A couple... A retired couple right now, let's say they have a... I don't know, a $2 million portfolio, and it's paying them $100,000 a year in income, like capital gains, dividends, etc. And that's the only income they have. They have no Social Security, nothing else. They can...

have 0% tax on all that money, no taxes. So now if you use that, if you just have a well-managed brokerage account, that completely destroys maxing out a 401k because you're not putting money, locking it up to 59 and a half. It just makes absolutely no sense to do that when you can have a 0% tax-free plus

pulling money out of your brokerage account, which is kind of wild to think about. But that's like a real thing. You can look it up. Like, yes, a couple can pull out about $100,000 a year tax-free as long as their only income is capital gains. And most people don't talk about that. And that's something that now going back, I would have added that into the book as another counter argument. But just think about that. Like that completely changes the retirement landscape. I'm like, do you need to max 401k? Well, not necessarily. Because if you can build a big enough portfolio outside of your 401k, you can even do it and have a much better tax treatment as well.

I had Andy Ratcliffe, who started Wealthfront, where I work on that show. He has a similar take to you, but he added on... And so go back and listen to that episode if you want to go deeper on this. The cost of the liquidity. The fact that if you need the money, you have to pay fees. And there isn't an easy way to get the money out. And his argument was that young people, you don't know what you're going to need money for, whether it's starting a company, whether it's buying a home, whether something happens. And so his point was like,

If the fees don't make sense, then it's a no-brainer that you shouldn't do it. And there are sites out there right now where I think you could just search like 401k fee analysis and they'll tell you sometimes it's the account fee, sometimes it's these mutual funds that just get marked up. It's like you could get the same fund somewhere else, but we just charge you an extra half a percent. But there's also a cost to liquidity and not having access to your money if you need it.

If you're not a good saver, maybe that's actually a benefit. Maybe if you can't access your money, it's probably better for you. But if you are a good saver, I think that's another factor that kind of plays into it. Yeah, I agree. And I think so. Some people say locking up your money is a feature, not a bug. And I agree for some people that don't have discipline. This is not going to be a great idea because you're going to pull that money out and then probably spend it or something. So I completely understand that take. There's some benefits that go beyond a spreadsheet. But yeah, that's why I even thought about looking into the numbers on this because I was like...

I had the same issue where like, oh, wow, I couldn't buy real estate right now because like I locked up way too much money into my 401k that I probably should have just done the 4%, got my match and then had everything else on the outside. And I kind of regret that now. That's why I'm just trying to get this idea to people, especially young people who like, you're right, you don't know what you're gonna use the money for. And so just having that kind of in mind is kind of helpful, I think.

If you want to have a diverse portfolio, maybe there's some assets you put in your retirement account, some you put in your Roth IRA, some you put in your taxable account. And for someone versed, it's asset location. Is that really a big deal? I think I saw somewhere that you either don't do it or it's not an important part of your investing strategy, which made me question whether it's worth it.

There's two different ways of looking. If you're trying to maximize every dollar, there's an optimal way to do it. And I can tell you, you want to put your highest growth assets, the things you think are going to grow the fastest. Let's say stocks. Let's say there's only two assets. There's stocks, which are high growth. And let's say they're bonds, which are low growth.

In that scenario, you would put all your high growth assets into your non-taxable accounts. Your 401k would be all stocks, your IRAs would be all stocks, and then your bonds would sit in your taxable accounts where you have to pay whatever on the income that you're saying. But Nick, they'll pay the income. But if you actually look at the math, the high growth, all the taxes on the capital gains are going to be much bigger than any sort of income you're going to have to pay on a bond, especially with yields as low as they are today. The income is very small. So

If you're trying to just go like maximize every dollar, there is an asset location argument to be made. But if you want to do a convenience argument, which is what I care about, I just make all my accounts look basically the same, right? Like they're like carbon copies of each other in terms of the asset allocation. I don't put the same funds in all of them. The reason I don't is because I do tax loss harvesting once in a while. This is where you kind of need a professional sometimes. If you don't do that correctly, you can do something called a wash sale. And basically you try to tax loss harvest, like lock in a loss. But then if you

buy something like one of your IRAs, you buy the same thing, it's all washed. It's a very complex topic I don't want to get into here. I just recommend talking to a professional and getting that type of advice because if you're trying to do certain types of tax games in there, you're going to have to just be careful what you do. But just for ease of use, I like having the same allocation across all my accounts because then rebalancing is much easier because I can rebalance within an account, right? If I have all my stocks in one account,

and all the bonds in another account, how do I get the money out of the 401k and into my brokerage? You can't do that, right? So for a host of reasons, I recommend the carbon copy model, cookie cutter model of asset location.

When it comes to tax loss harvesting, one of the saddest emails I've ever gotten was from people while I was working at Wealthfront. They're like, "Gosh, I've been running 3 robo-advisor portfolios and tax loss harvesting on all of them." Which effectively meant they're buying and selling the same index funds to optimize their taxes, but 3 people completely uncoordinated are doing it.

And the end result is just not going to be fun. I always say like, if you are doing any kind of tax loss harvesting, make sure that whoever's doing it knows all the rules across all the accounts. Otherwise, it can be messy. Even just the investing of it, right? If you are investing regularly in your IRA, like you said, if you're buying the same thing, you're tax loss harvesting somewhere else, it can be a problem. The single feature that I thought was the coolest is in Wealthright, you can go in and put an email address and they have to confirm, I think. But so my wife and I each have an account.

If we put our email addresses in, Wealthfront will link them up and tax loss harvest accordingly across all the accounts. So there's software that can do it. There are advisors that can do it. You could do it once a year where you know everything's happening. But if you're trying to play the tax games, I'm with you that you just got to be careful because...

The tax games all go away if you mess it up. Yeah. Especially if you're tax loss harvesting, like I'd recommend do not automatically reinvest your dividends. That's also another nightmare because you could sell out of a position and then it automatically reinvest and starts to wash. That's another wash sale thing where you now don't get the tax loss at all.

You got to be really careful. We could do a whole episode just on that because I've made all the mistakes now and I know all the things to look out for. But it's so complex that I agree. You need like one person in the so-called driver's seat trying to figure out all the accounts and everything. Otherwise, you're going to wash sale yourself. It's not a matter of if but when. You got to be really careful.

Or like you said, a hack there would be just have a different set of funds. If you are investing in two different accounts and you don't want to have to deal with that, just pick a different set of index funds in each account so you're not at risk. Yeah, exactly. Also, all my non-taxables are identical because I can do whatever and I'm not going to get any sort of wash sale because they're all non-tax, my IRAs, 401ks, etc. But then all my brokerage stuff is a completely separate set of funds. There's no overlap there because I don't want any sort of accidents to happen, so to speak.

Now, we talked a lot about investing and a lot of the book is about saving. And I did want to touch on one thing where you talk a little bit about how some people early on might be focusing too much on investing when they should be focused on saving. Why is that?

Let's just do some simple math here. It'll illustrate it instantly, right? Imagine you have $1,000 to your name, right? You're 22 years old like I was or 23. I'm like, hey, I'm starting investing. I spent all this time analyzing my investments and all this. Let's say you get a 10% return. That's $100, right?

At the same time, when I was 23, I was out in San Francisco with friends. We'd go to dinner, have drinks, Uber home, all that. I easily was spending $100 in a single night. Like me foregoing one night going out with my friends was the same as my investment return for a year. So you can see when you don't have a lot of capital to invest, especially younger people, people who are just starting, it's not going to matter what your investments do. That's the sad truth. No one wants to talk about it, but it's not really going to matter what happens. And once you start building that nest egg, then it does. And so you can see generally over someone's life.

The phrase I like to use into the chapter one in the book is called savings for the poor and investing for the rich. And I don't mean poor like in an absolute way. It could be true in an absolute way, but I really mean in a relative way. If you're young, you're probably poor relative to your future self, right? You're assuming you're going to have a career, save money, etc. You need to focus more on like your income, your savings, things like that. And as you get older, you can spend a lot more time on investments. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read books on investing. I'm not anti-knowledge. Of course not. Of course, I want people to learn more about this stuff.

But you don't need to spend a ton of time on it, at least initially. Like just set something up. If you, oh, should I be in a target date? Should I do this? It's not going to matter that much if you're 22 or 23. It's really not. But as you start to learn more about stuff, start saving up more money, then your investment decisions matter because now let's do the flip side. Let's say you have $10 million portfolio and it declines by 10%. That's $1 million.

someone that could save a million dollars after tax. You have to have a very high paying job. There's very few people that can do something like that. So you can see once you have a big portfolio, investing is kind of the whole game. Your income's not gonna be able to do much to budge that, but your investment knowledge and what you do and what you own really matters a lot more. So just think about like, where do you have the most leverage? The best hack I know is take what your time and attention and focus on the area where you have the most leverage. When you're 22, when you're young, it's your career. And as you get older and assumingly you have more wealth,

it's your investments. And so figuring out where you are on that spectrum is what's important. So the little rule I like to use is just figure out how much you could save in the next year. That's some number, let's say $10,000. Figure out how much your investments can return you in the next year. Let's say...

in a good year, you can get a 10% return. Let's just use that number for fun. 10% return, unless you have 50 grand invested, that's 5 grand, right? So if you could save 10 grand, but your investments can only earn you 5 grand, you probably need to work a little bit more on either raising your income or saving more money to get that other number higher. You want that 50,000 to be 100 and then 200, etc. So that if it gets a 10% return...

The amount of income you're going to get is larger. So whatever number is bigger is where you need to focus on. Because over time, you're going to see that your investments are going to be able to return you more than you can save in a year, in theory, if everything goes well. So that's what they're focused on. And so let's go down that journey. Now you're at the point your investments are earning you more, that second half of the journey. And...

You're in a situation where I know a lot of people are, which is they're struggling to spend money. They've gone through this disciplined cycle of saving. And now... And maybe they're not all the way there. Maybe they're still saving more than they would earn in their investments. But they're struggling because they don't want to spend money. I know so many people that have that guilt and anxiety. Myself, my wife included, where we're trying to feel comfortable spending money because after all, what is all the money for if we're not able to actually use it on the things we want? But...

people who adopt a diligent savings habits sometimes struggle here. Yeah. So this is a problem that a lot of people have, especially like people who are affluent, who have done well, because by definition, the people that have a lot of money have probably, besides the people got lucky, let's put them aside, have probably had pretty good savings habits, right? So it's like, you're actually really good at acquiring money and you're not really good at spending. So by definition, it's going to be difficult. That's the first thing to realize, like, it's not going to be easy for you.

I think the second thing to recognize is a lot of this comes from guilt, whether you're guilting yourself or you're seeing the media guilt people, or maybe your social circles would be guilting you. I don't know what it is. And every person is going to be different. It's figuring out how to get past that guilt. I'm not saying that, oh, if you have a lot of money, you should be spending a lot of money. That's not my argument here. But I'm saying you should be comfortable spending money when you need to, right? I don't want you to spend money frivolously. I don't think that's good for anybody. But if you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know if I should buy these nice dress shoes because like,

My other ones, you know, they're fine, but they're kind of getting old. And if you're worried about $200 purchase and you're worth like 2 million bucks or 5 million bucks, like in net worth, you need to get something psychologically figured out. Like, why are you feeling that way about spending money? And sometimes it is from stuff you can't change. Like, for example, I go out and spend a lot of money at restaurants. That's the thing I like to do.

But at the same time, every time I go to McDonald's, I still order off the dollar menu because that's what my mom and dad always had me order off as a kid. And there's this weird thing where I can't get over it. I can go drop $60 on a dry-aged rib-eye steak. But there's something about me spending $5 on a McDonald's sandwich that's going to mess with me mentally. And so I don't know why that is. And so you got to figure out what in my psychology is making me do that and what in your psychology is making you behave the way that you are. Tips to do it. I would say if you want to spend, I have a rule I use. It's called the 2X rule.

If you're going to splurge on something, let's say you're going to spend $500 on some fancy watch or handbag or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. Take another $500 and either invest it or donate it to a good cause. Now you can get rid of your guilt saying every time I spend on myself, I'm also donating. So now, yes, you're going to be spending more money, but at least you can get rid of that guilt and spend it towards something that you care about in some other way. So that's another way of doing it. You can try and do that. It doesn't work for everyone, but I've heard some good results from it so far.

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Can you talk a little bit about what you call the biggest lie in personal finance? Yeah. So what I think is the biggest lie in personal finance is that cutting spending is a reliable path to building wealth. And I just don't think the data suggests that at all. Yes, you can cut spending. It's like a short-term workaround, but it doesn't build wealth over the long run. Just consider this. Very simple. If you look at the data, one of the most positively correlated things with savings rate is your income, your absolute level of income. And you're going to say, well, Nick, this is so obvious. Well,

It's so obvious, but yet people are still pushing this cutting spending argument, right? It's like people with higher incomes generally save more money. That is just across the board. The higher rate, they're even saving a higher percentage of their income. And the reason is simple. Incomes go up, but your spending doesn't move with it, right? It's like law of the stomach. Like if I increase your income 10x, are you going to spend 10 times more on food? Probably not. Are you going to spend 10 times more on housing? No.

but probably not. Maybe you'll spend eight times more on housing. I don't know. But you see people generally earn more and more money. They don't spend more and more. And you're like, but Nick, I know this person has high income. They spend a lot. Yes, you know these people. You know a handful. You can think of anecdotes. I know people like that too. But the data suggests if you're looking across aggregated data sets across most people that

That is just not true. And I'm sorry to burst the bubble, but it's just it's not in there. And if you want to bring other data sets that show this, I'd be happy to look at them. But I have not seen any data sets that show that people of higher income are spending money at a higher rate than people of lower income. So I think it really shows that really the way to get rich in the long run, the most reliable path, it does take longer is to raise your income and like find other income opportunities, work on your career, whatever, work on a side hustle that becomes a main hustle, whatever. There's a lot of ways to do this, but it's what I recommend.

recommend. And you like break down each one of those. Yeah. Chapter three, I talk about different ways you can raise your income. If you really need that type of stuff, there's different ways of doing that, whether it's like selling a product, whether it's like selling a skill or service, teaching people, there's a lot of different ways you can do this. And what mine is just like a limited set just to kind of get your ideas flowing if you need that help. But that's really the only way out as I see it. Cool. I think another big thing, and you talk about this, is that

As you build more wealth, it doesn't matter. You're never going to feel rich. I don't want to get into that paradigm because I know we've talked about it a lot. But I am curious if you have any stories, anecdotes or tips for people who are in that boat where they're like, gosh, I feel like I'm at a place where I thought when I got here, I'd be great. And now I just feel exactly like I did one year, five years, 10 years ago.

I think the easiest way to do it is to remember where you came from. Have an absolute measure of wealth. For example, if you have over $100,000 in liquid net worth, that puts you in the top 10% of people on the planet in terms of how rich you are. I would say that's considered rich. Now you're saying, Nick, that's ridiculous. You can't compare me to some random personnel out there in the world. That's not fair.

But in the book, I talk about this. Lloyd Blankfein, the ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, was interviewed about this. They asked him just about his life. And he's like, I don't feel rich. I'm well-to-do. Even though he's a billionaire. This person's a billionaire. He says, I'm not rich. I'm well-to-do. And you're saying like, that's a ridiculous argument. How can you say, Lloyd Blankfein, that you're not rich? Well, because he's hanging out with people like David Geffen and Jeff Bezos and people who have 10, 100x as well. So he doesn't feel rich relative to them. Well...

I can make the same argument that like, hey, I know what he's saying is outlandish, but what you're saying about how like, oh, well, you can't compare me to those other people around the world. It's the same thing. Lloyd Blankfein doesn't think that you can compare him to like people like you and me, right? Because he's like, that's not my social circle, right? Those aren't my people. So you're making the same argument he's making. Obviously, it's less objectively outrageous, but it's the same argument. So I think you have to look at global wealth. You have to look at like

absolute thing relative to your history, what you could expect to earn or expect to have in your life. I think that's the only way to stay grateful and to kind of break out of that cycle of not feeling rich. Like for example, I consider myself rich. I'm not a millionaire. Like objectively in the United States, I'm not rich, but like relative to the world, I consider myself rich. And so I have to think like that. Otherwise I will always be chasing that type of stuff. And so I think you have to remember that that's how you ground yourself. So I would consider myself a rich person, despite the fact that

I'm not even a millionaire. I'm not someone who can go around and fly private or any of that type of stuff, which we would consider rich behavior. I think it's just a way of like looking at the world so that I don't kind of lose myself, that type of stuff.

Taking out of your mind that flying private is rich behavior is probably going to help because I feel like most of us will probably never get to that point. We did have an episode where we talked about how you might be able to do it for a little bit less, but no matter how you slice it, it's just really expensive. So don't put that as a target or a goal. You can always use points and fly business class for way less. So I think most people here know that. Yeah.

So you ended the book talking about this experiment where you said, if I were able to create some principles that I would give to myself, if I were randomly dropped somewhere in the last 100 years, what would I create if those principles weren't like avoid the stock market during a certain time period or something? And you said that was the book. The idea was you wanted to write this book, I assume for anyone at any point in time to read...

But there were 21 principles. So I'm curious, if you had to pick only a couple, what would they be? We just discussed one of them. You'll never feel rich, and that's okay. I think that's a huge principle because throughout history, status is always going to be something that affects humans. It's going to be something true today, tomorrow.

100 years from now, 1,000 years from now, I know that's going to be true, right? I don't know what the investment environment is going to look like, whether we're going to have investments. You go back a couple hundred years, investing wasn't a thing that people did, especially like regular people did. It was something that maybe the rich did or governments did, but regular people wouldn't do that. You're never going to feel rich. That's one thing. If I had to guess, I assume markets on average will keep going up and to the right over the very long term, like there's going to be human growth. I think capitalism will survive despite all the...

So that's like an overarching point of my work. That's another big one I'd put out there. I know there's a lot of money things we can talk about, but I think a lot of the things that affect people is more about their lives.

life. So that's why I talk about not feeling rich. But in addition, figure out not where you're going to retire from, but where you're going to retire to. That's what's really important in retirement. A lot of people think retirement is about money and all this. And don't get me wrong, money is a piece of it. But I think the existential crisis of retirement is a far bigger thing that people do not talk about.

And it's literally a big life change. You go from going into an office every day or talking with people, whatever you're doing, to now you don't do that anymore. You have to fill that entire 40-hour week with other things. And I think a lot of people aren't ready for that. And it really hits them in a bad way. So before you figure out what you're going to retire from, figure out what you're going to retire to. Really imagine your retirement. Figure out what type of activities you're going to do, with who, how often.

and et cetera. Like, is that going to be with family, with friends, whatever? I think we should put a lot more emphasis on that because I think that's going to have a bigger impact on people's, uh,

a well-being than whether they can use the 4% rule or the 3% rule. I don't think money is the primary concern for most people in retirement. And I think my book has illustrated that. If you read chapter two, it talks about that at length. So if I had to give a couple of principles, the market timing one, because it's kind of my bread and butter when I talk about, I say the feeling rich thing, because I think a lot of people don't focus on that. And then same with the retirement thing, thinking about much, think beyond money when it comes to retirement. Those are the three big ones I'd give out.

I know that from our conversation outside of this interview, you have some life hacks, some tricks, some tactics, some routines that are worth sharing that have nothing to do with personal finance or investing. So I'm curious, while we have you, what some of your top ones are.

If you live in a city where they have laundry services, I recommend getting your laundry done. Just taking it in there or have them pick up, deliver. I actually have a friend who lives in Long Island. So he gets to drive it in and stuff. And he's like, it's the greatest thing I've ever done. It's because it saves you time and it's so low cost relative to your time. I hate folding clothes. It's one of the best things I've ever done. I feel like every time I spend my money there, I'm getting a bargain.

relative to doing my laundry by hand, especially if you have wife and kids or husband and children, whatever it is, that's a ton of clothing. You have to physically wash it, dry it, sort it out, fold it. It's just so much time and mental energy, especially if you're really busy. Having someone else just do that and getting it delivered all full and you just got to put it in a drawer is so much easier. So that's my first hack. Have someone else do your laundry if you can. If there's an area where you have laundry services, I think it's probably one of the most undervalued things out there.

That's one. Another thing, this is a travel hack I use. I have duplicates of almost like, you know, like, Oh, I have to pack a toothbrush. I have to pack this. I have to pack. Nope. I have everything already sitting in my suitcase ready to go. The only thing I have to still pack is clothing because weather does change. If I'm in Seattle, it's very different than I'm in Phoenix special or if I'm different in Boston and when I'm going. So yeah,

I do have to pack clothing, but everything else I have and I need on a trip is already in my suitcases. I never say, oh, did I forget my toothbrush? 0% chance because it's already in there. On top of that, if you do something happens, let's say your razor runs out of the blades go bad or something. I don't have a backup razor. Yeah, you do. It's in your travel bag.

right? So you already have a thinking more about redundancy is really important because it just reduces your risk. I used to forget, Oh God, I forgot my razor. Oh, I forgot my deodorant. I forgot this or that. Never. I've never forgotten a thing since. So double pack, you're saying I have to buy everything twice. I'm telling you it's worth the cost to do it once and you'll never have to think about it again. So if I could, I would actually have a whole wardrobe ready to pack, but that's really hard to do. And you're not going to know where you're going to go. So you can't do that. But I would say just have backups and travel.

Awesome. Okay, I have one more hack. The biggest hack I've ever done in my life, maybe the greatest decision of my life. So I applied to a very selective school, I got into Stanford. So I'd apply early where like, if I got in early, I basically had to go. And so I couldn't apply anywhere else early. But I was looking at the statistics and the acceptance rate my year to get into Stanford was 10%. Very difficult, right?

But early acceptance was 18%. It was double. So don't get me wrong. 10% is very hard. 18% is still hard, but it's not as hard. Today, those rates are half of that. If you want to get your kid into like a selective school and there's like some sort of early program, I guarantee you the acceptance rate is higher. And there's no single thing you can do to double your kid's chances of getting to a selective university than by having them apply early.

I don't care if they got a 2400. I don't care if they're valedictorian. I don't care. You can go across the board. There's not one single thing that's going to double their chances, but that's a hack that probably will. I bet if you look at the data now, it's still double. I think the last time I checked, like now the standard acceptance rate is like 5%, but if you apply early, it's 10.

It's like the easiest R about there. Of course, you can probably only do this to one school. But if you have one of these schools, you're like, hey, I want to go. Parents are spending all this money and all this stuff. It's like, have them apply early. That literally doubles their chance. It makes no sense to me why this isn't being talked about more. I should have seen a bunch of articles on this. I have not seen it yet. So that's my biggest life hack for trying to get your kids into a selective school. So I hope that helps. I hope it holds true a decade or two from now when my kids are actually going to school. Everyone's short in college now. So who knows, right?

Well, one more thing I always like to end on is to pick a city you love and just give some people some suggestions who are visiting from out of town. Places to eat, something to drink, something to do, anything in there.

Yeah. So I'll give you some New York City stuff. I'm a big foodie. So I'm going to focus on that. You can look up what's in New York City museums, etc. I say find your interest and go after that. So big thing, food places, it really depends what you want exactly. But I recommend one of the biggest brands in New York City is called Quality. So Quality Eats, Quality Meats, Quality Bistro, Quality Italian. There's a bunch of different restaurants here. It's not like a chain like that, but it's like a restaurant group. I think they have really good foods, more high end restaurants.

Really fun. If you like sushi, Sushi Seki is good. If you want to do a Michelin star restaurant, my favorite is probably Momofuku Co. That's really awesome. Honestly, if you just have restaurant recommendations, just DM me on Twitter. I'll just give them to you. Just tell me what you're looking for price range. I'll just help you. I love doing this for people. It's just so awesome because I've been in the city a while. In terms of bars...

If you want just my favorite like cocktail bar, it's a place called Ollie. Just for the taste of the drinks, O-L-L-I-E. They are just so good. It's in West Village in Manhattan. Not the flashiest place here, but the drinks are just incredible. If you want something that's more visually appealing and kind of fun, there's a place called Time Bar. It's like a seated tasting type of thing. T-H-Y-M-E. That's a really cool place. And you'll be drinking out of what looks like an oyster shell. It's just a copper's porcelain, but like it looks like an oyster shell and like all these different things. You'll have smoke coming out of things and drinks hanging from the roof.

Just really weird stuff. So if you want to experience, that's probably a place I'd recommend. Outside of that, trust me, just DM me if you want. I'm on Twitter at DollarsAndData. So Free Food Wrecks in NYC.

That's awesome. Where else can people find you and the book? My website's of dollarsanddata.com. I said Twitter at dollarsanddata. Book's going to be at Amazon, Barnes & Noble. Just search Just Keep Buying. You can find it there. So hope you guys enjoy it if you read it. The book's fantastic. I read it. I love that half of the subtitles for every chapter is something contrarian to pull you in because I'm like, whoa, I don't know if I buy that. And then I kept reading. So thank you for writing that. And thank you for being here. Yeah, appreciate it, Chris. Thanks for having me on.

I really hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you haven't already left a rating and a review for the show in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, I would really appreciate it. And if you have any feedback on the show, questions for me, or just want to say hi, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com or at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week.