What if building wealth was simpler than you’ve been led to believe?
In today’s episode I’m sitting down with the “godfather of financial independence,” aka JL Collins to demystify investing in the most approachable way possible. JL has been in the game for over 50 years and wrote “The Simple Path to Wealth”—a book that’s helped nearly a million people understand how to grow their money with confidence. And today, he’s breaking it all down for you. We get real about what investing actually is, why you don’t need a finance degree to build wealth, and how the entire financial industry has tried to gatekeep this information. JL shares why index funds are his go-to, how to avoid common investing mistakes, and why market dips aren’t disasters—they’re opportunities. Whether you’re brand new to investing or just want a no-BS refresh on the basics, this conversation is for you.
Key takeaways:
Investing doesn’t have to be complicated—Wall Street wants you to think it is
JL breaks down how the financial industry profits from making investing feel inaccessible. The reality? You can build serious wealth with just a few key principles, mainly by investing in low-cost, broad-based index funds. You don’t need to be a finance expert—you need a simple, consistent strategy.
Index funds are the MVP of long-term wealth
Rather than betting on individual stocks or actively managed funds, JL recommends investing in total market index funds like VTSAX. These funds automatically balance themselves by holding every major U.S. company—so you benefit from long-term market growth without needing to constantly buy and sell.
Don’t fall for the “experts”—high fees don’t mean high performance
One of JL’s most powerful messages is that most financial advisors and actively managed funds underperform the market and charge you for it. Decades of research show that investing in the whole market consistently beats trying to outsmart it.
Staying the course is non-negotiable—even when the market gets shaky
Market crashes and volatility are normal, and they always pass. JL uses powerful analogies (like hurricanes in Florida and roller coasters) to explain why panic-selling is the worst thing you can do. Long-term success depends on holding steady, not reacting emotionally.
FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) isn’t just for tech bros
JL emphasizes that financial independence is about freedom, not early retirement. Anyone—regardless of background—can pursue FI by saving and investing consistently. He debunks the myth that it’s only for a privileged few and shares how buying back your time is the ultimate form of wealth.
Ethical investing is complicated and often ineffective
While socially responsible investing is popular, JL cautions that it’s expensive and subjective. Instead, he recommends using the wealth you grow from broad index funds to make a meaningful impact through donations or shareholder activism—approaches that can lead to real change.
Notable quotes
“The whole point of having money––it’s a tool, right? And it’s a way of buying your freedom. So you own your time.”
“The market doesn’t crash when it’s feeling comfortable and good. It crashes when it’s scared. But it always passes.”
“If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and spending every dime that comes your way, or even worse, going into debt to spend more to keep up with some standard, you’re [basically] a gilded slave.”
Episode-at-a-glance
≫ 03:24 Personal Finance Beginnings
≫ 06:44 The Birth of a Financial Blog
≫ 14:26 Understanding Index Funds
≫ 28:31 The FIRE Movement Explained
≫ 36:02 Calculating Financial Independence
≫ 40:28 Market Volatility: Should You Change Your Strategy?
≫ 44:48 Adjusting Investment Strategies Near Retirement
≫ 53:44 Ethical Investing: Pros and Cons
≫ 01:01:21 The Role of Financial Advisors
≫ 01:06:53 Key Insights for Successful Investing
JL’s Links:
Book: The Simple Path to Wealth
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Meet JL
JL Collins is known as “the godfather of financial independence” in the financial independence community. An investor in the stock market for five decades, he’s distilled his philosophy into The Simple Path to Wealth, which has sold close to a million copies across twenty languages worldwide.
Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Today we are sitting down with the godfather of the Financial Independence Movement, and we’re talking all things investing. We’re getting into everything from index funds to the stock market craziness right now, to the FIRE movement. And it’s truly like sitting down with a kind father figure as he walks us through everything we need to know to be smart and successful investors.
JL Collins:
The market doesn’t crash when it’s feeling comfortable and good. It crashes when there’s a pandemic and it’s scared. But it always passes.
Tori Dunlap:
JL Collins is known as the godfather of financial independence in the financial independence community. An investor in the stock market for the past five decades, he’s distilled his knowledge down into The Simple Path to Wealth, which has sold close to a million copies across 20 languages worldwide.
JL Collins:
And if you buy the whole market and hold it at a very low cost, you will outperform all those professional managers.
Tori Dunlap:
JL joins us today to really break down investing, and all of the jargon around it. And calling out the gatekeeping culture that tries to make things seem too complicated for you as an investor.
JL Collins:
Some of these things are so complex that the people who created them don’t quite understand, and there’s a reason for that. The more complex it is, the higher the fees you can charge around it, and the more you can convince people that, oh, you shouldn’t bother your pretty little head about this. Give me your money, I will take care of it.
Tori Dunlap:
We talk about investing strategy, the common mistakes we see people make, and how JL feels about hot button financial topics like the FIRE movement, financial advisers, and ethical investing. And he does have some pretty hot takes.
This is a classic financial episode of Financial Feminist and JL is so great at distilling these concepts down into something that will make you feel like you’re ready to take on investing with confidence. We also distill a lot of the common myths that we see around successful investing in our free workshop, Stock Market Secrets. You can go to herfirsthundredk.com/secrets, or the link in the description, to take my free workshop after you listen to the episode. Herfirsthundredk.com/secrets.
But first, a word from our sponsors.
Let’s look at two people, one that invests even with small amounts each month while the other doesn’t. How different are their lives?
JL Collins:
Oh, profoundly different, at least financially.
Even a little bit of money invested on a regular basis over time, with the power of compounding can grow into a significant amount. And money is the most useful tool we have to navigate this complex world that we’ve created. And so if you master money, if you accumulate money and investments, your life becomes richer, and not just in money, but freer and they’re much, far more options available to you.
If you don’t, if you’re living paycheck to paycheck and spending every dime that comes your way, or even worse, going into debt to spend more to keep up with some standard, you’re a gilded slave basically.
Tori Dunlap:
When we talk about personal finance, you are the godfather of financial independence. You are one of the original, the OGs. When and how did your obsession with personal finance begin?
JL Collins:
When I was a kid. I think like a lot of these things in our lives, it came out a little bit of trauma. My dad was self-employed. And he made a very good living until emphysema took him down. He was a heavy cigarette smoker. And the thing about cigarettes is it ultimately kills you, but it takes its own sweet time in doing so. And so as the emphysema progressed, his energy levels and his health declined. And along with it, his ability to work. And along with that, his ability to earn.
And so we went from a pretty comfortable life. He put both of my sisters through college, for instance, to a financially very uncomfortable life. And that was something that, as a kid, I noticed. And I determined at an early age, I never wanted to be solely dependent on my ability to earn. And I didn’t know what that looked like exactly, but I knew it meant setting aside money. And so from the very first professional job I had, I started doing that.
Tori Dunlap:
I think in this moment too, what you said really resonated where a lot of people are concerned about their primary source of income going away. Getting either laid off, or their hours getting cut. Why did you realize it was so important to have multiple streams of income, or at least thinking more strategically about how you made money?
JL Collins:
Well, again, watching my father and our family go through the experience we went through was the foundational kind of thing. But if your listeners are worried about their job, and their continued employment, and continued flow of earned income, they should be. Because that is not guaranteed.
When you go to work for a company, or for the government for that matter, it is not guaranteed that you’ll have that job for any given length of time. And you shouldn’t expect that, by the way, in my opinion. Just like they shouldn’t expect that you will stay with them for some certain length of time, unless you have a contract to do that, of course. You’re free to leave whenever you want. And go do something else or work for somebody else. And likewise, they’re free to say, thanks for the effort, we’re done now.
When people say, gee, I worked for this company for 10, 20 years or whatever it is, and they owe me, I have trouble wrapping my head around that because my response is, well, did they pay you what they agreed to pay you? The answer is usually yes. Did they provide the benefits that you both agreed they would provide? Yes. Did you do the job to the best of your ability over that period of time? Yes. Well then you’ve both fulfilled your obligation to each other. You shouldn’t expect anything more.
Andy Rooney who, he’s passed away now, but back in the day, he was a curmudgeonly old commentator on 60 Minutes at the very end. And he once had a great line. He said, don’t expect too much from your company, even if it’s a good company.
Tori Dunlap:
One of my favorite parts about your story, and I would love for you to bring this kind dad energy to our conversation, you already are. But you started your blog as a love letter to your daughter. And as someone who really started my financial education because of my parents, and especially investing where my dad sat down with me, it was very similar to my story.
Can you talk a little bit about that relationship, and why it led you to start your blog? And also how you said, you felt like you pushed her too hard, too young, and I think my dad might connect with that as well. So talk to me about that experience.
JL Collins:
Yeah. So it’s not necessarily a story that makes me look good, but as I said earlier, I mean, money is the most useful tool we have for navigating our complex society. And if you learn to master it, your life can be so much better. And if you don’t, it can be so much worse.
And so, like most parents, I wanted my kid to have the best possible life. So as you already said, I pushed it way too hard and way too soon, and I managed to turn her off to all things financial. My wife used to console me saying, she’s absorbing more than she lets on. But I didn’t see that. It turns out that Jane was right about that. She was absorbing more than I saw, but I didn’t see it. So I was very concerned. And so around 2011, I started writing letters to her with this financial information in them because I wanted, whenever she was ready to hear it, I wanted it to be there for her, even if I wasn’t around.
And that morphed into the blog. A business colleague of mine had read some of these letters. He said, yeah, this is pretty interesting stuff. You want to put it on a blog and share it with your family and friends. And I thought, that’s a great way to archive the information. I had no particular interest in sharing it other than for my daughter, but I put it up on a blog, and I sent a link to it around the family and friends. None of them cared. But then kind of to my amazement, strangers started finding the blog, and it started resonating, and that’s where it grew.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, when I think about the folks that shaped me, both personally, but also all of the resources online, I think that it was a lot of those original blogs that provided the foundation of what we now know as personal finance education.
What did you learn from people who were reaching out to you? What were their concerns? What were the common questions? What kind of people were reaching out? And what was their priority in learning this kind of information?
JL Collins:
Yeah, that’s a great question because it kind of surprised me. And the best illustration of it is, on the blog I have a thing called, The Stock Series. And that’s pretty much what the blog is famous for, and that’s what the book, The Simple Path to Wealth is based on.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
JL Collins:
And when I first came up with the idea of The Stock Series, and in putting it up there, I thought it was going to be five posts. So I had the original, the first five posts in mind when I did it. And it’s now up to like 35 posts, or something. And that comes directly from people asking questions. And my seeing these things say, yeah, that’s interesting. I should write about that. I should talk about that. That’s a different dynamic.
So the questions from my blog readers absolutely drove the content of the blog, and ultimately the content of the book. And then as to who they are, that too is an interesting thing for me, because this goes, you remember, we’re talking about 2011 when I started at 2012, 2013. 2012 I came up with the idea of doing Chautauqua’s, was which were these annual events where we’d take a very small group of people off to someplace cool in the world, and hang out for a week together, and talk about this stuff.
And when I first put it together, the first one was in 2013, we created it through 2012, and I didn’t know if anybody would show up, but it did fill up. Took a couple months and I had no idea who would be there, but the diversity of the people who showed up was just stunning. I didn’t expect it. It was kind of cool to see. But diversity on almost every measure you can think of. I mean there was gender diversity, racial diversity, sexual orientation, people all ages, all different levels of wealth. Some from the very beginning of their journey, some very far along, even fully financially independent. Not only did I expect that, it never even occurred to me to wonder about that. But that’s always flown in the face because in the early years, a lot of the pushback of this whole idea of achieving financial independence was, well, this is just for white men in the tech business. And that was not my experience all when I saw the people coming to Chautauqua.
Tori Dunlap:
Even that story, I think about the power of learning from different kinds of people, again, my dad was my first teacher about money, and obviously he knew so much, both because he was older than me, but also more experience. And I like to think I taught him things too.
Was there an interesting exchange of ideas from people who are older, to people who are younger, vice versa? People who were of different racial backgrounds? I can imagine that actually leads to a lot of really interesting learnings on both sides.
JL Collins:
I have a great example of exactly that with my daughter.
Tori Dunlap:
Great.
JL Collins:
As we talked about, I kept pushing this stuff at her.
She came home from college at one point, and I, of course immediately started up my lectures on why you should care about this, and what it looked like. And she stopped me and she said, dad, I get it. I understand this stuff is important, I just don’t want to think about it all the time. And that was an epiphany for me because it suddenly occurred to me, and I knew this on a certain level, but that people like me, who like this stuff, we’re the odd ones out. Most people have better things to do with their time than think about investing in money, and what have you.
And I wrote, everything I’ve written has been for my daughter, and she’s highly intelligent, highly motivated, has lots of interests in life, but she didn’t want to think about this financial stuff. And the beauty of The Simple Path to Wealth is you don’t have to. You have to understand a couple of key principles, and implement a couple of steps, and then set it on autopilot and then you’re done. Then you can go out and build bridges, or cure diseases, or teach, or wherever your passion lies. You don’t have to think, to be successful investing and to become wealthy, you don’t have to think about this all the time. I do it because I like to. Jessica’s done it, and she’s now in her early thirties successfully without thinking about it all the time.
Tori Dunlap:
Long time listeners will know this, but that’s the joke I make about my dad is this is his hobby. It’s a very dad thing, but he loves the stock market. He looks at it all the time. He has an investment club he goes to, I think, every other week or something. Ironically for me, being a financial expert, I think I’m much more in your daughter’s camp where I have other things I want to do.
So let’s talk about investing, and let’s start with what you just said, which is I think there’s a misconception that investing is super complicated, or it’s a full-time job. And that in order to get rich, or in order to be financially dependent, you have to have a certain degree, you have to have a certain amount of knowledge, or you have to be spending hours and hours every single week on this. Debunk that for me.
JL Collins:
Sure. It’s both true and not true.
So it’s true in the sense that the financial world could be exceedingly complex.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
JL Collins:
And that’s the financial world most people see on TV. That’s the financial world most people hear about. That’s the financial world, the way Wall Street creates it. With endless products, some of these things are so complex that the people who create it don’t quite understand them. And there’s a reason for that. The more complex it is, the higher the fees you can charge around it, and the more you can convince people that, oh, you shouldn’t bother your pretty little head about this, this is way too complex for you. Give me your money. I will take care of it for, of course, a hefty fee.
If you want to engage in those kinds of products that the financial community is creating, then yes, that’s all true. That’s the bad news. The good news is, not only don’t you need them, they are probably not going to be particularly helpful to you, and they are going to be less effective than the very simple things you need.
The analogy that I like to use is, imagine you have a banquet table and it’s filled with all kinds of exotic foods, all kinds of complex recipes that have been put together by chefs that spend their lives thinking about this. Well you could put your hand on that table and sweep all of that stuff onto the floor, except for the one little corner that has the basic fruits and vegetables and meats and what have you, that you really need to be healthy. And that’s the low cost broad-based index funds that I advocated, that little corner. And those are the soul of simplicity. Those are the things, when I say you need to understand a couple of key principles, and implement a couple of strategies, and then you’re done. That’s the little corner I’m talking about. And nobody needs a degree in finance to participate in that. Nobody needs more than a few hours to really figure it out.
Tori Dunlap:
So before I dive into that corner of meat, potato, veg, let’s talk about the whole banquet table. Because I talk about this ad nauseam here on this show. That there are a lot of financial companies, I would argue most of the multi-billion dollar industry has been built on making us feel like we’re too stupid to understand. And exactly what you said, we should hand over our money to somebody so that they can make money off of us.
JL Collins:
Exactly.
Tori Dunlap:
But I think for people who don’t understand personal finance, or are new to this, they think, oh, but these are experts. And I’m willing to pay a little bit of money if it means that they’re going to get me really good returns. But I know that’s not true. Debunk that for me of like, oh, but they’re experts, so I’m willing to pay them a fee. Are they actually good at their jobs?
JL Collins:
Well, it depends on what their job is. If their job is making money for themselves and their firms, they’re very, very good at that, right?
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
JL Collins:
There’s the old joke of two guys are walking through a harbor and the financial guy is pointing out, that yacht belongs to this financial executive, and that yacht belongs to this other financial executive. And at one point the other guy says, where are the customer yachts?
So yeah, in terms of what you need, no, there’s not great value to be had there. If I thought that spending money on a professional would give me a better result, a significantly better result, or even a small better result, then I’d be happy to spend that money. It would be worth it. But in investing, the very opposite is true. And this is not, by the way, just my opinion. This is years of research that indicate that professionals do not outperform the market. This was one of the great insights that Jack Bogle came up with. He’s the guy who created the first index fund that was available to mere mortals like us.
He was the guy who started Vanguard. This was his insight. Was that active management really didn’t provide much value, if any. And at first he was vilified for that concept because it was a huge threat to the income stream of people engaged in that kind of business. But he famously said, performance comes and goes, but costs are there forever. And if you buy the whole market, and hold it at a very low cost, you will outperform all those professional managers. And people sneered and laughed and what have you. But that was 1975.
So here we are 50 years later, and the research for decades now has been conclusive that he’s absolutely right. There is no value to be had there. There’s only costs.
Tori Dunlap:
And for anybody listening, I don’t need to back him up, but this is what I invest in as well. This is what’s made me a millionaire, is these index funds.
Yep, you heard me, index funds. Straightforward investing is what made me a millionaire. When we come back, we’re talking to JL about what index funds actually are, the biggest mistakes that new investors make and so much more. We’ll see you back here after the break.
I want to define a couple things because I’m going to have you explain it to us like we’re five years old, right?
So when we’re talking about actively managed, meaning that, again, we’re paying a hefty fee to somebody to manage our portfolio for us, that’s probably not a great idea. He just proved why. You’re going to spend a lot of money, you’re not going to get anything really in return. Passively managed stuff is what we’re talking about with index funds. And I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s just this easy. So explain to me what an index fund actually is, and how I might go about actually investing in one.
JL Collins:
Sure. If you look at the stock market in the United States, there’s about 3,600 roughly publicly traded companies. In an actively managed fund, let’s start there, as you alluded to, those are run by people who try to look at all those companies, and try to figure out which ones are going to outperform, and buy those and hold them in their fund. And that sounds great in theory. And in some ways, and by the way, I was the stock picker for decades, and I was also spent long time investing in actively managed funds trying to figure out which managers could actually outperform. So I’m pretty familiar with this whole process. And it’s the soul of logic because you think, if I just avoid the bad companies, I’ll outperform everything. Or if I just focus on the good companies, I’ll outperform everything. Well, the problem is, it’s surprisingly difficult to figure out which is which. Because the companies that look really great today, can turn out to be the ones that blow up tomorrow. And the companies that look like dogs today can turn out to be tomorrow’s cool turnaround story.
So what the research indicates is that if you just buy the entire market, if you just buy VTSAX as an example, which is Vanguard’s total stock market index fund, it’s the one I happen to invest in, it’s the one my daughter Jessica’s in, you own now every publicly traded company in the United States of America. And everyone from the factory floor, to the CEO is working to make you richer. Now, I don’t have to worry about which ones are going to succeed, and which ones aren’t. Because the ones that succeed like cream are going to rise to the top. And these are what’s called cap weighted funds. So the larger, more successful companies are a larger part of the portfolio. And those that fail will drift down and eventually will go away. So unlike when I buy an individual stock, I immediately have to start thinking about when am I going to sell it?
Let’s say I’m correct, my analysis has been good, and it starts to go up. Well, how high is it going to go, and for how long? And if it pulls back a little bit, is that temporary, or is that the end of the ride? And with an index fund, it’s what I call self-cleansing. Which means that, as I said, the ones that are successful rise and the ones that are not drift away. I never have to wonder about where I’m going to sell it. My holding period for VTSAX is forever. I just don’t have to think about that.
The same thing, by the way, is true not only of the individual companies within the index, but also the sectors. So right now, technology dominates a total stock market index fund. Because those companies have had a phenomenal run. That’s not always been the case. One of the few advantages of being an old guy is, I remember times when financials dominated, or when consumer goods dominated, or when energy dominated, those two rotate. So I have no idea how long technology’s going to dominate, but what I do know is, when the day comes that something else takes its place, I will also own that.
Tori Dunlap:
I think that’s the thing, when you start learning about investing, that does blow your mind. And obviously you wrote a book called The Simple Path to Wealth, but I think people think it’s really complicated because, again, the industry has made it feel like it’s complicated. And I cannot say enough that the way you get rich is actually very, very simple.
It is picking one of these general market index funds, for example, and just continuing to invest in it for a long period of time. So can we talk about mistakes that people often make in their financial journeys? We’ve already kind of talked about trying to make it too complicated. Are there other mistakes that you see people make?
JL Collins:
Well, so the first one is believing that it has to be complicated. And that’s not surprising that people believe that because that’s the message in the broader media. That’s all you really hear about.
I use the analogy of a mug of beer. What you hear about in the media is the foam on top of the beer, right? That’s the trading that’s going on day to day. That’s when stocks go up and down. You look at Tesla in recent weeks, I mean it can go up or down 10 to 15% in a day these days, tremendous volatility. But under all that volatility and foam, there’s the actual beer. The actual beer is what we, as investors for the long-term are interested in. That is the actual company that is manufacturing something, or providing some service, hopefully effectively, hopefully profitably. That’s what we want to own. And that’s where the long-term value lies. But everything you see on TV, everything you hear in the media, is all about that foam. It’s all about that short-term trading.
If you want to become wealthy in the stock market, you don’t care about the foam, you care about the beer.
Tori Dunlap:
I always talk about it as, investing shouldn’t be sexy. All the stuff we see on TV is the sexy, exciting stuff. And as Jim Cramer banging on a bunch of buttons, sound effect buttons.
JL Collins:
Yeah, buy, buy, buy, sell, sell, sell.
Tori Dunlap:
Right. And, what craziness happened in the market today? And I am just so focused on telling people what happens on a random Tuesday actually doesn’t really matter. What happens to one, or even a couple particular companies doesn’t really matter, if you have chosen these diversified investments like an index fund. I think one of the other mistakes I see, that again, if you’ve been listening to the show for a long time, you’ve heard me say a million times, but we always catch somebody new who’s been making this mistake.
Our audience is primarily women, and a lot of women don’t know, because no one’s ever taught them, that the Roth IRA, or the 401k is not the investment. It is the account that holds the investments. So I can’t tell you, JL, the amount of people who have reached out, thousands and thousands and thousands of people, who have reached out to me and told me, my money was in financial purgatory until I heard you speak about this because I thought it was a bank account. I put my thousand dollars in my Roth IRA, and I didn’t actually invest. So for everybody listening, that’s one of the mistakes I see. You put your money in the Roth IRA, or you put your money in a 401k, and then you have to go invest in something like an index fund. You have to do a two-step process. Do you see that in your work as well? It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see people make.
JL Collins:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right, first of all. And it is not just women, it’s all.
Tori Dunlap:
It’s everybody, yeah.
JL Collins:
It’s everybody. It’s all beginning investors. And I think of it, your IRA, or your 401k or whatever, as you well said, is not an investment. It’s a bucket that you put your investment in.
So the first thing you do is you go out and you get yourself the bucket. You get yourself the IRA or the 401k, you sign up for those things. And then, as you also said, so I’m just reinforcing your point, then you have to go out and decide what to put into that bucket. And of course, if you’re going to follow The Simple Path to Wealth, it’s going to be a broad based low cost index fund.
Tori Dunlap:
Let’s talk about FIRE for a little bit. Because I know, especially in my early twenties, I was doing probably multiple times a day, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but I was on the calculators trying to figure out if I was able to save even, or invest even, $50 more a month, I could cut the amount of time I was working. And I think that once people start realizing that, it kind of blows your mind to understand.
In the early days, you’re exactly right. I think there was a certain archetype of the person who could achieve FIRE, and it was a straight, white guy who had sold a tech company in his twenties. That seemed to be the kind of person. But there’s more and more people who are able to pursue financial independence, retire early, that’s what FIRE stands for, and achieve their own version of that. Whether it is truly laying on a beach by the time they’re 40, or taking mini retirements, or just being able to scale back.
So why is the FIRE movement so interesting, and how can we start almost rewiring our brains to make this something that we think is doable, or that we feel like we can be in pursuit of?
JL Collins:
Yeah, so I think one of the biggest obstacles that I hear is that if you’re going to pursue financial independence, and I’m less interested in the retire early part, by the way, because that’s optional, right? I never retired early. I liked working. You don’t have to retire early just because you’re financially independent. You can.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m financially independent now. I’m 30. I’ve been in financially independent for three years, I don’t plan on retiring anytime soon. Yeah.
JL Collins:
Right.
But you’re also doing exactly what you want to do. You don’t have to do anything. It gives you an option, right?
The biggest obstacle that I see is people who say, well, because you’re going to have to take your earned income, and you’re going to have to earn to live on less than your earning, to create a cashflow that you could then invest, because that’s how you buy your freedom. Which you have already obviously done. And I hear too many people say to me, well, JL, that just sounds like deprivation. I have to save that money, I can’t spend it? I like spending it. That’s the wrong way to think about it, in my world. For me, when I look at all the things that my money could possibly buy for me, there was nothing more important than my freedom. There was nothing I wanted more than my freedom.
So setting aside a large percentage of my income to invest, to buy that freedom, was the furthest thing from deprivation. It was me spending my money on the most valuable thing. Now, I appreciate the fact that not everybody values their freedom at the level I did, and it’s their life, it’s their money. I think the real tragedy is to get to your fifties or sixties or whatever, and not having saved a dime. And then to learn that this approach existed. So my mission such as it is, is just to let people know this is an option. Whether they choose to take the option or not, that’s up to them. But at least they will know that there is something they could buy with their money other than trinkets and trash. They could buy their freedom. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather have, personally.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. Well, and I think you can get tastes of that freedom while you’re continuing to pursue a larger goal.
JL Collins:
Of course.
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t think either of us would say, you can never travel, or you can never do anything joyous until you’ve reached financial independence. But I do think that it’s always a good question to ask yourself, and I encourage people to ask a version of it before they’re about to spend money, which is like, is this purchase worth being in debt longer? Or worth putting off that full freedom?
And sometimes maybe it is, right? Sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s not. We’ve largely been taught, I think, as women, that the reason we’re not rich is because we spend money. And so in order to get rich, we have to scrimp, we have to cut. And in actuality, it’s a lot easier to make more money, than it is to cut the things that we’re already spending. I think we can do both, but your earning potential, in theory, is seemingly limitless versus scrimping. So if you are listening and you’re like, I don’t want to give up everything, I think that’s understandable. But there’s ways that you can make more money so that you have more to save, as opposed to getting to a point where you’re just eating oatmeal for the rest of your life because you’re not doing anything fun.
JL Collins:
Yeah, a couple of things on that.
When I got out of college, I came out of college in the seventies, and it was the era of stagflation. So it was a very difficult economic time. It took me two years to get my first professional job, which paid me $10,000 a year. And I arbitrarily, and remember, there was no internet, there was no, I never heard the term… FIRE hadn’t been coined yet. I wasn’t even thinking about financial independence. I just wanted to have what I refer to as, FU money, so that I wouldn’t be as vulnerable as my father was. And so I arbitrarily, but I’m going to spend half my income getting that. And that meant I was going to live on $5,000 a year. Now, in those days, that was perfectly doable. And I knew lots of people who were doing it.
It was a lot more than the money I’d been making doing landscaping for that two years, between college and that professional job. It was a whole lot more than I was living on in college. So I was stepping up my lifestyle. And then as my income grew, I stayed at that 50%, which meant that the amount of money I had to invest grew, but so did my lifestyle. When I’m making 20 grand a year, now I’m living on 10. When I was making 50, 25, a hundred. So you could see.
So I let my lifestyle inflate, but in that very controlled way, at the same time my investments were inflating. The other thing I’d add to that is that when you’re young, there are certain things that you enjoy doing that don’t take much money, that maybe you’re not going to feel the same way when you’re older.
So when I was in my twenties, some of my vacations were riding my bicycle around Wisconsin. Or one year around Ireland. And that doesn’t cost a whole lot of money. I used to go backpacking, and sleeping on the ground was fine. I had no problems.
At this point in my life, I want to stay in luxury hotels and sleep in a bed. But now I can afford to do that. In my twenties, it would’ve been kind of silly to have those kinds of aspirations. So everything that you do has its season. And the advantage is that when you’re building your wealth, the things that don’t take a lot of money tend to be easier to do, and more fun.
Tori Dunlap:
Can we talk about the formula to FIRE? Because we’ve talked about it on the show before, but can we talk about actually calculating that number for yourself?
JL Collins:
Sure. So there’s a thing called the 4% rule. I kind of hate the word, rules. I think of it as a 4% guideline. And what that suggests, and there’s research to back this up, of course, is that at any given point, you could spend 4% of your portfolio. And your portfolio, invested properly, will continue to grow over time, and your money will last. And so if you put numbers to that, if you have a million dollars invested as an example, well 4% of that is $40,000. So that suggests that if you can live on $40,000 a year, you are now financially independent, and work has become optional. You might want to continue to work, and that has a success rate based on research done with the Trinity study of 96%. So one of the reasons I don’t like calling it a rule is I would never recommend that you set it up, start pulling 4% adjusted for inflation, and then forget about it, for two reasons.
One, there is a slight chance that you run out of money and you certainly don’t want that to happen. But there’s an even bigger chance that at the end of 30 years, your million dollars, in our example, will not only have thrown off that 4% a year, adjusted for inflation, but it will have grown to be 6, 8, 10, $15 million, because that’s how powerful a wealth generator the stock market is. And presumably by paying attention, you’re aware of that, and you could enjoy that money in the process, rather than waiting to the end. The final thing I’ll say about this, people that I’ve talked to have said, as an example, I’ve got million dollars invested, but I need 50,000 to live on, and that’s 5%. And I’m in this soul crushing job, and I don’t know what to do. Well, if you look at the Trinity study, 5% withdrawal rate has, I think it’s an 86% success rate.
If I’m at a soul crushing job, I’m going to take that gamble. I’m going to pay close attention. If the stock market turns against me in the early years, for an extended period, I might have to go back to work. I might have adjust my spending, but I’m not going to stay in that soul crushing job until I get the theoretical 4% that’s ideal.
And then the other thing that I will say to people is, if you really want to stick to that 4% withdrawal rate, and you need the 50,000, do you think there’s something you could do, over the course of a year, that would generate the other $10,000? There’s nobody I’ve met who has the smarts and the drive, and the skill set to get to that point, who says no to that question? These are smart, motivated people. So everybody who’s listening to us can probably figure out how to close that gap with what’s now come to be known as barista FIRE. You take some job that doesn’t have to pay you very much money to close the gap, while your wealth grows.
Tori Dunlap:
And also sometimes get health insurance. That’s the other one I hear about a lot of.
JL Collins:
Yes, right.
Tori Dunlap:
I’m working at Starbucks just to get health insurance. A version of this, and it’s the same formula just for me, it works in my brain better, is the amount of money you’re spending every year. So let’s say $50,000 multiplied by 25, and that’s the number that you need to hit in your investing account. That for me, takes the percentages out of it, so it makes it a little easier.
JL Collins:
Yeah, that’s a good point. You could look at that from two different directions.
Tori Dunlap:
Right.
JL Collins:
You could start with the lump sum like I did, but you can also work up from what you’re spending. And as you say, you multiply it by 25, and that tells you what you’re going to need.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Okay. JL, I have to ask you the question that everybody is asking me, and I am 99% sure we’re going to have the same answer.
Right now, there’s a lot of volatility. In the stock market, there’s talks of a recession, it seems politically like news changes, I mean, moment to moment at this point. Everyone is in my email, and in my Instagram DMS, asking me, do I keep investing? Do I change anything? My answer is, stay the course. What is your answer to, should we keep investing either while it’s crazy, while there’s talks of a recession? Do I need to do anything different? What is your response?
We got you on a cliffhanger there. When we come back, JL answers my question about market volatility, and we also talk to people in our inbox and comments who are 40 plus and worried about their investments, so close to retirement age. And how you can adjust your strategy to accommodate these crazy times. We’ll be right back.
JL Collins:
My answer would be, listen to Tori and stay the course.
Like you, Tori, my inbox, when the market hits a rough patch, lights up.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
JL Collins:
I actually wrote a post about this, probably a couple of months ago now. And in that post I look back to COVID, which was only a few years ago. And the same thing was happening, and people were saying to me at the time, JL, this time it’s truly different. This time, The Simple Path to Wealth isn’t going to work anymore. This time it’s the pandemic. This time people are dying. This time entire economies across the world are being shut down to deal with this. Surely this time is different.
Tori Dunlap:
We’re hearing the same thing now.
JL Collins:
My response.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, we’re hearing the same thing now.
JL Collins:
And you’re hearing the same.
Tori Dunlap:
We’ve never had a guy who feels like a dictator before. We’ve never had tariffs this high. We’ve never been this… Elon Musk has never been this involved in the government before.
Yep, absolutely.
JL Collins:
Right.
And my response to COVID, and it’s my same response to now, is that you’re right. This time is different in that the trigger that drove the stock market down 33% during COVID, so far, I think it hasn’t even gone down 20% yet, and it’s bounced back. So it’s volatile.
The trigger is always different. Last time it was a pandemic. This time it’s tariffs and political turmoil. So the trigger is always unique. And it’s always uniquely scary. There are always reasons around that trigger to be terrified. Right? That’s why the market crashes. The market doesn’t crash when it’s feeling comfortable and good. It crashes when there’s a pandemic and it’s scared. But it always passes. It’s like hurricanes in Florida, right? I mean, it’s a perfectly natural part of the process. If you live in Florida, you should expect hurricanes. It doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous. But if you hunker down, the hurricane passes and the sun comes out. If you panic and run out in the middle of the hurricane, you’re probably going to be in a world of hurt. If you panic and sell during one of these periods of time, then you’re going to be left bleeding by the side of the road.
You do not want to invest in the stock market. You do not want to follow The Simple Path to Wealth unless you are going to follow Tory’s advice, and stay the course. That’s critical.
You have to tie yourself to the mast, and not listen to the siren song that will only bring you on the rocks. And further, you need to learn to think about these periods of decline in two ways. One, they’re perfectly natural. They have always happened, whether it’s a 10% correction, a 20% bear market, or a crash above that, these are to be expected. They are a perfectly natural part of the process. And they always pass. And if anything, if you’re accumulating wealth, this gives you an opportunity to buy shares on sale to improve your position. So instead of being terrified when the market gets crazy, you should see it as the gift it truly is, providing you stay of the course and keep investing.
Tori Dunlap:
The metaphor I’ve heard that I think you’ll love is, the only person who gets hurt riding a roller coaster is the person who tries to get off.
JL Collins:
Yep, that’s good.
Tori Dunlap:
And that’s true.
However, I think there is a huge asterisk on here that we haven’t really had the opportunity to talk about. But again, a lot of people in my comments, a lot of people in my email, who are in their fifties or their sixties, or even late forties, and they’re nearing retirement, and a shocking amount of people seem to have all of their money still in the stock market. And so they’re panicking.
They’re like, I’m trying to near retirement. I’m maybe even retiring, trying to retire this year, or in a couple years, and the downturn is going to significantly affect me. And my first question for them is, I’m really concerned that you have all of your eggs in this one basket. Because I’ve watched my dad use things like certificate of deposit ladders, or slowly pulling some of the money out of your investments to protect it. Because he’s in, both he and my mom are in their early sixties. But talk to me about the people who are nearing retirement. Does the stay of the course advice get any different, and what adjustments do they need to make?
JL Collins:
I think of it as two stages. You have a wealth accumulation stage where you are building your wealth. And this is when you are working and you have earned income. And if you’re following The Simple Path to Wealth, as we’ve already talked about, you are saving and investing a significant amount of that income to buy your freedom. In my world, you should be a hundred percent in stocks during that period of time. And because you have that cashflow from your earned income, when the market drops, it works to your advantage, assuming that you stay the course. Now, the second stage is when you’re living on that portfolio, and you are no longer have that earned income to smooth the ride for you, to take advantage of the drops. At that point, you want to add something like CDs, or what I recommend is the total bond market index fund, because that smooths the ride.
And bonds tend, not always, but they tend to not drop when stocks do, or if they do drop, not as dramatically. So then you have, the way it works is you have an allocation. You choose whatever allocation works for your tolerance of volatility. But if you have a, let’s say a, well, I use 20% bonds, that’s pretty aggressive on the stock side, more conservative would be 40% bonds. You never, by the way, want to get less than 50% stocks because then you lose the engine of growth that’s essential for the portfolio to survive for a long time. But let’s suppose you go 60 40, bonds and stocks, if your stocks plummet, the percentage that they represent will drop below that 60, and the percentage of your bonds will rise above the 40. And in that case, you start shifting some of that bond money into the stocks that are underperforming. That’s taking advantage of those lower prices, and it’s bringing your allocation back into the alignment you wanted.
That’s how you handle it. If you’re newly retired and you haven’t done that yet, you’re still a hundred percent in stocks, you’ve made a strategic error. If you’re coming up to retirement, you probably should begin this process, I don’t know, five years out before retirement to begin slowly making this shift. But yeah, it’s all an asset allocation. So if you’re still a hundred percent in the stocks, and you’re retired, you’re not paying attention. And I think unfortunately, a lot of people, because the stock market has been so strong in the last 15 years, they don’t want to give up those lucrative returns. But if you’re going to be dependent on that portfolio… If you have a portfolio that is so large that you’re not pulling 4% of it, then you can be more aggressive with it. But if you’re cutting that line where you’ve got a million dollars, and you need the 40,000, you better have a bond proportion to get you through times when it gets rough.
Tori Dunlap:
As a reminder to everybody, stocks, tiny little slivers of companies, right? And then index funds are these groups of stocks. We were talking about index funds before. And bonds are either the debt of a company or government. So you are getting money off the interest of a loan to a company or government.
Stocks tend to be more lucrative, but they also tend to be more volatile. Bonds tend to be less lucrative but also less volatile. So what JL is saying is, if we can take some of the money and start reallocating it, we can better protect it, because there’s not as much volatility there.
When we’re talking about this kind of moving money to different sources to better protect it, who should not be doing this? I’m thinking people in their twenties, but I think when we hear panic, it’s very easy to say, I’m going to take all my money out of the market and put it in a savings account. My mom, even though she knows she’s wrong, always jokes that she wants to take all of the money my dad has invested and put it under the mattress. That’s my mom’s joke all the time.
Who should not be making such drastic changes, even during times of economic volatility?
JL Collins:
Well, nobody should be doing any changes in a panic. During COVID, I got a great comment on my blog from a woman who said, because of course then, like now, I was saying, stay the course. And this woman said, I’m staying the course with a side dish of panic.
They thought, that’s okay. You can be as panicked as you want to be, as long as you don’t start fooling around with your portfolio while you’re panicking. So nobody should be making changes when the market’s going through a tough time. You should be thinking about these things in the good times. You should be making these adjustments in the good times. So right now, the stock market, I gather, has rebounded and it’s pretty much back to where it was. If you were scared with this recent volatility and you, for instance, in your example, are newly retired and you’ve been a hundred percent stocks, you probably have an opportunity now to change that allocation without getting hurt too badly.
The other thing I would add to that, by the way, is when you start living on the portfolio and the market goes down, and it goes down, let’s say 30%, and you’re like, wow, I’ve lost 30% of my money. Well, not if you stay the course. And remember, even though you’re living on your portfolio, you’re not selling your whole portfolio to do that.
You are, first of all, you’re taking your dividends to live on. And then if you have bonds, you’re taking the interest from those bonds. And let’s suppose that makes up two a half percent of the 4% you want to withdraw. So now you’re only pulling a percent and a half a year out of your portfolio. So even in an extended down turn, that damage isn’t as great as the panic in the news media will make you feel like it would be.
Tori Dunlap:
The thing I always tell people is, you don’t lose unless you sell. You also don’t gain unless you sell. Because the value of the asset’s just going up and down. So I will hear so many people tell me, oh my gosh, I lost so much on the stock market today. And I’m like, well, did you liquidate? Did you sell? And they’re like, no. And I’m like, okay, then you actually didn’t lose anything.
And the example I give is it’s like buying a house, and after five years, if Zillow tells you that house is worth a hundred thousand dollars more, that’s great. But you don’t get a hundred thousand dollars in your pocket unless you sell the house. And it’s the same thing with the investment. It’s an asset. The asset’s going to go up in value, it’s going to go down in value. You don’t lose any money, or gain any money unless you choose to sell.
JL Collins:
Well, and with stocks, it continues to go up. I mean, it’ll be volatile, it’ll go up and down.
Tori Dunlap:
But if you zoom out. Yeah.
JL Collins:
Yeah, it goes up relentlessly. And the stock I have, one of the key chapters in the book, and in the stock series, is the stock market always goes up. And of course that’s intentionally shocking because people hear when the stock market plunges. So understand, I’m not saying it’s not volatile. I’m not saying it never goes down. I’m saying that over time, relentlessly it goes up. So you can feel very confident 10, 20, 30 years out, it will be significantly higher than it is today. And that’s how we benefit as long-term investors, picking up shares along the way.
Tori Dunlap:
When we come back from a word with our sponsors, we’re rounding out our conversation with JL by talking about some of the most controversial questions we get on the show. Ethical investing and working with financial advisors.
We also ask JL what successful investors know that others. Don’t stay tuned.
Can we talk about the idea of ethical investing, and how we approach that? That seems to be the other really common question we get.
JL Collins:
Right. I hate it.
Tori Dunlap:
Tell me more.
JL Collins:
And the reason I hate it is, first of all, what is ethical is in the eye of the beholder.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes.
JL Collins:
So when you say ethical investing, basically the next question has to be, well for whom? So for instance, if you’re a Muslim, you’re not going to invest in any company that makes money by charging interest, by giving loans, and charging interest.
Because charging interest is against the principles of Islam. So that would be a whole different set than it would be for a Christian looking at, or an atheist looking at their investment portfolio. So it’s very much a moving target. The other thing I don’t like is of course, investment companies have jumped all over this, because they see a great opportunity. If you’re going to go into ethical investing, basically you’re going into active investing, which is expensive. Because somebody has to decide, based on whatever fund you… Let’s say you and I, Tory create a fund, the JL and Tory, or the Tory and JL Ethical Investing Fund. And you and I sit down and decide between the two of us what that means, and what companies qualify. We put that in our perspective, and then we go out and buy those companies. Well, that’s active investing. We have to get paid.
And so the expense ratio on those funds are going to be much more expensive. And the third thing I don’t like about it is, it really doesn’t affect the world in any meaningful way. The better way, in my opinion, is to do, frankly what I do, which is obvious because I think it’s the better way, is buy the broad-based index fund, understanding that it’s going to hold some companies that you’re uncomfortable holding, and you got to kind of hold your nose to do that, and take the lower cost and probably the stronger return over time.
And then as it makes you wealthy, you can choose what charities, or what causes can really make the world a better place based on your definition of what that is, and channel that money you made into those institutions. And that, in my opinion, will have a much more powerful effect of achieving what you’re trying to achieve, which is to make the world a better place on your definition, than in arbitrarily saying, I am just not going to invest in companies. But that’s my opinion.
A lot of people, of course, have drawn to these things. And if you feel strongly about that, my opinion isn’t going to matter to you, and that’s okay. But just be aware that you’re probably going to have lower performance. You’re definitely going to have higher costs.
Tori Dunlap:
I think it’ll shock a lot of listeners to know that I agree with you. I largely agree with you because I think the first point cannot be overlooked that you just made. There is no governing body deciding what goes in these ethical investments. There is no B Corp for investing. We have our stock market school that we built that teaches women how to invest, and that actually gets them investing. And we have a collection of socially responsible funds. And one of them is ESGV, which is the Vanguard, ESG, the socially responsible fund. So I’m literally looking at this.
So it excludes companies related to adult entertainment. So pornography, alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, gambling, weapons, nuclear power, coal, oil, gas. Okay? So yes, we’ve eliminated those companies. We’ve also potentially eliminated the gains of those companies, but it still has Tesla. And a lot of people do not want to invest in an Elon Musk-owned company right now, our Elon Musk-led company.
So again, this gets back to what is ethical for you might be different than what’s ethical for me, might be different than what’s ethical for the person putting together this fund. And I think that shocks a lot of people. As soon as they look at this three fund, or socially responsible collection, they literally go to us in the forum and they’re like, but this has Tesla, or this has this company. And I’m like, there is no governing body who decides what’s ethical. Everybody has a different definition. And then with this expense ratio of this fund, it’s actually pretty low. It’s 0.09%. But to your point, there are a lot of funds out there that are charging an exorbitant amount of fees. And my not so conspiracy, conspiracy theory is that financial institutions know that they can make money off of you trying to do the right thing.
And I’m putting the right thing in quotes here. But I think that they’ve seen this as yet another product that we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, another way to make money off of you. So I would rather largely take my money, do exactly what you say as well, invest it maybe in some companies that I don’t absolutely love and that I don’t support, but that I can use to then transform my life, transform my family, my community, give to charities I believe in. And I would also say, we had Madeleine Pendleton on, who’s a previous guest. And she talked about actually being a shareholder in some companies you disagree with might be the most powerful way of making change in these companies.
So if you own an index fund, you potentially own part of these different companies, and you get to go to a shareholder’s meeting where you get to have your voice be heard because you’re now part owner. And when she said that, that was something that I think a lot of people don’t consider and think about too.
JL Collins:
Well, to do that, you probably want to own the individual company rather than…
Tori Dunlap:
Absolutely.
JL Collins:
Through an index fund. So if you wanted to do that with Tesla, for instance, you’d have to buy a share of Tesla and to go to the meeting. And I agree with everything you said. The only thing I would add to that, and using Tesla as our example here.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
JL Collins:
The people who would be uncomfortable owning Tesla today are uncomfortable because of Elon Musk’s political activities. But remember there’s a segment of the population that, for whom that makes Tesla more appealing, because they like his political activities.
Tori Dunlap:
Or it’s also an environmentally positive company. Like I am not a fan of Elon Musk at all, and I’ve never been. But if you just look at Tesla as a company, it is getting away from oil and gas. The reason it’s in these funds is because it is not an oil and gas company. It checks the environmental standard box. So that’s the trade off.
JL Collins:
Well, I mean, Tesla, Elon Musk and Tesla single-handedly created the electric vehicle market. The EV market. It was not a thing before that. And it’s an amazing accomplishment on that score.
So again, it speaks to the point you and I are both making that what’s ethical is very much in the eye of the beholder. And if this is really important to you, then there are lots and lots of ethical funds out there that slice that pie in lots of different ways. And you can probably find one that slices it in the way that you’re most comfortable with. But you’ll pay a price probably in performance, and absolutely in cost to do that.
Tori Dunlap:
Okay. Speaking of spicy hot takes, JL, you and I think believe the same thing about financial advisors. So every time I talk about it on the show, people get mad. What is your reasoning behind your stance of financial advisors?
JL Collins:
Well, let me start with the disclaimer that I’m sure there are lots of wonderful ethical financial advisors out there.
Tori Dunlap:
You and I have the same script. I’m like, there’s a lot of good people doing good things out there.
JL Collins:
Yeah. But the truth is, when I first started writing about this, I didn’t really think that. And since I’ve been writing about it, I’ve met some of these financial advisors who are on the side of the angels, so to speak.
So with that caveat, it’s tough for a financial advisor to be on the side of the angels because the incentives for the advisor are not aligned with the incentives of the customer. For the advisor to make a living, they have to charge. And that comes directly out of the investor’s high, just like an expense ratio does on an actively managed fund. But there are a couple other problems. One is, there’s no guarantee that the advisor you happen to find is going to be good. Like most professions, they’re not all particularly confident. One of the pushbacks from the community advisor community, back in ’08, ’09 when we had the financial crisis, and the market dropped I think 56%. So they said, you know, now the advantage of advisors is they are keeping their customers from panicking and selling.
Well, that sounds great. And if that were true, that would be a great advantage. But it’s interesting, the statistics indicated that advisors as a group were more likely to panic and sell in those days, than the average investor. And the other thing is, there’s inherent conflicts of interest. So the example I like to use is, let’s suppose you go to your advisor and you say, I’m thinking about paying off my mortgage. I’ve got a mortgage of half a million dollars, I’ve got $2 million invested. I think I want to take half a million of that and pay off my mortgage. Now, depending on your situation, that could be a good idea. That could be a bad idea. For the advisor, it can only be a bad idea. Because if you do that, that is half a million dollars that he no longer, or she no longer has under management. And that costs them money.
Now it really takes somebody who’s strongly on the side of the angels to give you advice that costs them money, that takes food out of the mouths of their children, in order to make your life better. Now it’s possible. And that leads me up to the final comment I’ll make is, if you’re going to use an advisor, have very specific questions for that person in mind. And use one that charges an hourly fee. Because that is the only way that you don’t have that conflict of interest.
Now, advisors don’t like that because it is less lucrative for them. They’re better off getting a percentage of your investments, or your assets invested with them, or getting a commission. Customers don’t like that because those fees never really show up. Whereas they have to write out a check for the hourly rate. And a good advisor, by the way, is not going to be cheap. So the advisors typically say, well, our customers don’t like that model, and it’s less advantageous to us. But it’s certainly the better model for the customer.
So put on your big girl pants and pay the hourly rate, and then know specifically what you want to ask. So you keep the number of hours you’re paying for, as low as possible.
Tori Dunlap:
I will plus one everything you just said. You also need to make sure they’re a fiduciary, meaning that they’re legally obligated to act in your own best interest, because a lot of people aren’t. So if you have somebody who’s trying to get to you to invest in life insurance, like an IUL policy, you don’t have a financial advisor, you have a life insurance salesman.
And I will also say too, we built stock market school in that way. We work with our team, who is my business partners who are fiduciary. So there’s other ways that you can go about getting financial advice. You can read books, you can listen to podcasts. There’s other ways to get financial advice that’s more accessible than paying somebody $500 an hour too, if that’s not in your budget.
JL Collins:
I would agree with all of that, but if I may, let me offer one caveat.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, please.
JL Collins:
And certainly you should seek out people who are fiduciaries, but that alone is not a guarantee. Because not everybody lives up to that obligation.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, sure. No, I think that’s a great point.
JL Collins:
That’s a good starting point, but it is not the ending point.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. More questions.
How do you get paid? What is your investment philosophy? How are they speaking to you as well? Because a lot of women’s experience is they walk into a male financial advisor’s office, and they either just talk to their husband, or they condescend. And so there’s other things and gut checks that you can ask, most definitely. I think that’s a good call out.
Okay. JL, what do successful investors know that the average person doesn’t?
JL Collins:
I think they know a couple of things we’ve already talked about. First of all, they know that the market is inherently volatile, and that drops are, they’re an expected part of the process, and they’re nothing to be upset about.
And they know to stay the course. They know the difference between being a speculator, a trader, the foam in our mug of beer, and the difference between that, and being an investor that is buying the underlying operating businesses that are providing a product or a service. So that’s a very important distinction you have to make. And the average person only sees the speculation part of it. That’s the Jim Cramer’s of the world. That’s almost everything you see on television is the speculative side, is the trading side of the investment world. And to be clear, that’s a big side. And when you hear people say, I would never invest in the stock market because it’s just gambling, it’s like going to the casino. Well, they’re absolutely right for the foam and the beer. That’s exactly what it is. And that’s why we as investors don’t go there. We don’t care about the short term. We’re investing for the long term.
Tori Dunlap:
My final question for you, how will taking your investing education seriously change your life?
JL Collins:
Oh, profoundly. It’ll make you richer and freer. The whole point of having money, again, it’s a tool. Right? And it’s a way of buying your freedom. So you own your time. And also, it’s not an on-off switch. I think sometimes if people are at the beginning of the journey, and they’re at ground zero, and they’re saying, wow, this all sounds great, but accumulating a million dollars, I mean, wow.
Tori Dunlap:
Crazy.
JL Collins:
Yeah, crazy, right?
Well understand, first of all, it’s a journey. It’s like going to the gym, right? The first day you go to the gym, you’re not going to be bench pressing 300 pounds. But you’ll get a little bit stronger than the day before and a little bit stronger, and a little bit stronger, and a little bit stronger, and a little bit stronger. It’s the same thing where you’re investing.
From the very first dollar you invest, you’re a little bit stronger than you were before. And that progresses over the time it takes to become fully financially independent. One of my all-time favorite quotes, and it’s in the first quote in the book, both in the new edition and in the old one, is from Leo Burnett, who was an advertising guy back in the day in Chicago. And the quote is, if you reach for a star, you might not get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
And by the corollary is, if you set your goal to accumulate a million dollars and you fail, and you only have half a million dollars at the end of whatever the period is, well, are you better off than if you had done nothing? I think the answer is true. Is absolutely you’re better off. The final thing is, if you have an aggressive savings rates, say around 50%, depending on how the stock market does behind you, whether the wind’s at your back or at your face, this is about a 10 to 15 year journey.
So I wrote the book for my daughter who was in college at the time, at the beginning of her journey. A question I get a lot from older people is, well, I’m 50. What about me? Well, okay, if you’re 50, it’s still a 10, 15 year journey for you, every step of the way you’re getting stronger. So if you’re 70, you may not get there a hundred percent, but you can make yourself stronger.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, dad, I really appreciate it. Thanks.
JL Collins:
Anything for such a lovely daughter.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you for being on the show.
Again, you don’t need my endorsement of it, but this is one of the best books you can read about truly taking your money and using it wisely. And there’s a reason it is considered a classic. And I love that it’s in a new edition. I’m so excited to read the new edition. Please tell me where people can find out more, get the book, etc.
JL Collins:
I suppose the best place to start is the blog, which is jlcollinsnh.com. From there, there’ll be links to the book. The book comes out, you could pre order it now, but it comes out May 20th to find it everywhere.
And Tori, thank you for having me. It’s been a real pleasure to be on the show. I have to tell you before I go, when my daughter heard I was going to be on your show, she was so excited. She’s a fan of yours. She’s a listener. I’m kind of horrified that I’m not the only source of financial information for her now, but I’m thrilled that she’s listening to somebody like you. And so she was like over the moon excited that you were willing to talk to her old man.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, I love that.
JL Collins:
Thanks. You made me a hero in my daughter’s eyes.
Tori Dunlap:
That’s so sweet. Was it Jessica? Is that what I heard? Is that her name?
JL Collins:
Yes, it’s Jessica.
Tori Dunlap:
Please give her my love. That’s so sweet. And please tell her that I could not do this work without her darling dad. So thank you.
JL Collins:
I’ll make her listen to this interview, and she can hear you say that yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
Perfect.
JL Collins:
Because she won’t believe it coming from me.
Tori Dunlap:
He paid me to say it, Jessica. I’m being held hostage. No, thank you. Thank you so much for your work.
JL Collins:
Yeah, okay. Now I’ll unhandcuff you, Tori. And let you go on with your day. Now that you’ve said the right things.
Tori Dunlap:
Perfect.
Here’s today’s newspaper. Okay. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much to JL for joining us. His book, which is incredible, I highly recommend it. The Simple Path to Wealth. It is an updated version. It is out now, available wherever you get your books. It was such a lovely conversation, and is a great one to share with the people in your life who are nearing retirement, or who are stressed out about the craziness going on in the stock market right now.
Thank you as always for being here, Financial Feminist. We can’t wait to see you in our free investing workshop. Again, that’s at herfirst100k.com/secrets. We’re talking about all of the secrets of the stock market, debunking all of the myths to make you a successful investor. So we’ll see you in our Secrets workshop soon. Thanks for being here. Thanks for supporting feminist media, and we’ll see you soon. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First 100K Podcast. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First 100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirst100k.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
