How to Protect Your Investments During a Recession

Welcome to another edition of the what's Next Retirement Podcast with Craig Weir. Life is full of transitions that have a financial impact now and in your future. When finances are affected, there are always questions to ask and choices to make. As an independent certified financial planner for well over 30 years, Craig has helped Americans make decisions that give them their best financial futures. The experiences with so many clients has given him a unique perspective to help with what's next for you as you navigate the unknowns of your own life. What's Next? Answers to the retirement issues on your mind.

Hey, this is Craig Weir. So welcome back to another episode of what's NEXT for YOUR Retirement. Got an interesting episode for you today, something a little bit different than we normally don't do, but I think it's timely for sure. And what's happening, I've got a guest today I'm going to introduce to you here in just a few minutes that is an expert in the field that we're going to be talking about. But first let me just kind of give you the background of why I even wanted to do this particular podcast. Back in October of last year, we had a very significant financial event that occurred that is going to have an impact and already has had an impact. But, but I think the impact is going to be felt even more in the coming months ahead. And that is something as geeky as what we called yield curve inversion. So the simple speak on that is it's basically when treasury rates short term are higher than treasury rates longer term. And all that really means is that you can actually get a better interest rate on a short term instrument than you can a long term instrument. And while that maybe doesn't seem like a big deal, it has, it's really a huge deal that has only happened four times in the last 30 years where a short term treasury paid you more than a ten year treasury, for example, in every other time that's happened four times in the last 30 years, every single time we've had a stock market crash and we've had a recession. So the question you have to ask yourself is, gee, what am I going to do about that? And I guess you could take the position of the consummate buy and hold guy, which nothing wrong with that. You're just going to your probabilities of having to crawl through some glass for quite a while are pretty high right now. If that's the choice that you make, that's the easy choice. You don't have to think about it. You don't have to do anything other than you got open statements and look at your balances and what happens after that. I'm confident a few years from now it'll all work out like it always has worked out. So there's always the do nothing camp, right? You could just do nothing, put your head in the sand and say it's gonna be fine and probably it will be. The other that you can do is you can just kind of pay attention to when we have these dips like we're in right now. And for those of you that are already our clients, you know, we're really big on the Roth conversion conversation and written books about it, have services that are designed to specifically help you do that. These are really good times to do Roth conversions out of your IRAs and 401ks because the market's down, which means if you have a thousand shares of Apple, you get to convert it at today's price. And when you do the conversion, you just move the shares over to a Roth, and that means when it comes back, you get all that growth totally tax free. So now's a great time to do some of that type of thing. The other thing is you could just kind of take some profits off the table on some of the positions you have. I mean, if you feel as though there's going to be an opportunity in the near future where prices are going to be lower and you still have some winners in your portfolio and you want to raise some cash for some opportunities later, you can do that now. And if you have money outside of your ira, you can do some, what we call tax loss harvesting to offset some of the gains with some of the losers. And that's the ability. I mean, you can do that. And that's smart when you have money that's not in the IRA or the Roth. The other thing, though is you could diversify. And there's different kinds of diversification, right? Everybody's kind of familiar with the kind of standard rule of thumb that's all over the financial press, which is a 60, 40 mix, and meaning you got 60% stocks, 40% bonds, or 70, 30 or 80, 20 or 100, 0, whatever it is. But all those allocations tend to exclude certain asset class that really there's an opportunity and it provides some inflation protection and some hedging against stock markets. And that is this whole world that we in the financial space call alternative investments. Diversification doesn't just have to be stocks and bonds, but you know, when you go into stocks, you're going to diverse. A good manager will diversify by large cap or small cap or international or domestic, or even down to different industries. Same thing with bonds. So when you decide that maybe you need something where you don't have all of the risk of the stock market, where maybe all of your net worth isn't tied up into volatile assets that swing like we've seen, then is when you get to start having conversations about alternative investments. And then when you get into talking about alternative investments, there are different classes of those as well. And so to help me help you kind of unravel all of those pieces, I've called on a new friend of mine, Matt Blackwell, with Reliant Investments, and wanted to have him kind of share some thoughts with you. So, Matt, can you turn your video screen on? And Jo.

Yes, sir.

Cool. So welcome. I appreciate you taking the time to sit in on this episode, man.

Thanks for having me on, Craig. Excited to be here.

I noticed in all the email I'm getting from you guys, it's Reliant Investments, Reliant Management. So did I say it right? Is it Reliant Investments is that you're.

Representing the real company's Reliant Real Estate Management. Reliant Investments is kind of part of that. So. Okay, we all tie in together. So.

Okay, cool, cool. Well, so I appreciate you being here. So, you know, once we get into that, the whole alternative investment space, as I was saying in the intro there, we can go a lot of different directions, right? You can go into apartment complexes, you can get oil and gas deals, you can find office buildings, industrial complexes. But you guys specialize in a niche in that, that most of the listeners probably are familiar with. Right? And so why don't you kind of give us an intro on kind of what, what your company does and what, what niche? What part of that alternative space do you guys work in?

Yeah, so we're in the self storage arena. So if you're not familiar with it, it's a whole bunch of garages for you to put all your junk in. And it's, it's crazy. I was looking at the statistics yesterday. It's 1 in 10Americans utilize self storage. They have a self storage unit and that's actually a little bit less than 10. It's like nine point something. So that it just keeps growing. More and more people are using self storage. So it's been a. And it started off as a very niche asset class and I always refer to as a redheaded stepchild of commercial real estate. And it's become much more mainstream and now everybody's wanting to get into it.

So, you know, I got an interesting kind of personal story for you. I don't know whether I've shared this with you in our other conversations, but back in. Probably it would have been the late 60s, maybe early 70s. No, it would have. It would have probably been late 60s. A guy came to my dad. This guy was sort of a financial mentor of him. He was at the time, he was the largest landowner in the state of Texas. He was. I forget exactly the net worth, but hundreds of millions of dollars. And he had made his fortune in real estate. And he actually owned. He built and owned entire subdivisions that he rented out to like ship channel workers and that stuff. We were on the Houston ship channel. We were down in that area. But he came to my dad and he said, look, Gordon, I got an interesting deal that I want you to go in with me down in. I think it was Corpus Christi. Could have been port A. Port Aransas. I'm not sure. But dad said, oh yeah. And of course, you know, this guy would show up in our middle class America subdivision in his limousine. And we were this middle collar Baptist family. And he was a. He was a Jewish guy that came in, in the limo and he was very wealthy and. And he was taking time to just kind of mentor my dad. And because of. Because of him, my dad had bought 15 rent houses in our neighborhood. And. And he was doing. I mean, he was just doing great. So Jerry said to dad, he said, gordon, I need you to go in on. I want you to go in on this thing with me. I think there's some real opportunity in the future with turned out. Dad said, dad said no because he didn't understand it. He said, look, he said, there's this company coming in from, I think it was California. And they're building these facilities where you rent a space and you put all the stuff that's. That you don't want in your garage or your attic and you put it in these and you get it out of the house. And dad was just like, what? I mean, why would anybody do that? Right? I think it. I think it turned out to be the very first public storage facility in the state of Texas. I think is the store.

Oh my gosh. Oh man.

My dad kicked that one.

Made a lot of money. If it was that made a lot of money.

My dad kicked himself many times for not. For not getting involved with that. But kind of interesting though. But so, you know, you mentioned 1 in 10 people have storage units. My wife and I are about to stop this life. But we've been full time in a motor coach for seven years. So seven years ago we moved a bunch. Well, we didn't sell and get rid of. We moved into a 10 by 20 storage building, climate controlled and another 10 by 10. And I got to counting, I got to counting up the other day. I think we put $35,000 into rent in a storage facility on furniture that I'm now going to go spend $18,000 to get moved up to me in the home we're buying.

And you probably could have just bought new furniture for the same price. But as an industry, we thank you.

Yeah. My point is somebody made money off of that, right?

Yep. Yep.

So go ahead.

No, I would say it's interesting. The data shows and this is kind of a national average for the industry. The, the average tenant is or 61% are there for a year and I think it's 46% are there for two, at least two years.

So I'm in the minority. Something. I've been there a long time.

You're our favorite kind of customer.

Yeah.

So how many times do they raise rates on you?

Several. Good. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, go ahead. You had a question for me?

Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the kind of deals that are, that are out there. I mean when we talk about this, are you guys going out and buying dirt and building a storage facility or you buying existing ones? What's, what's kind of your jam on that?

Yeah. So our sweet spot is we're generally buying existing facilities and doing value add. Self storage is an asset class, is very fragmented. There's five public companies. They all have thousands of properties. Those are the, the public storage cube, smart extra space type folks. They, they have thousands of properties, but altogether they're only about 30% of the total market. We're the 17th largest operator with 93 properties. There's a pretty big drop off after this. Top five original guys.

Say that again. You're this the 17th largest, 17th largest.

Self storage operator in the country with 93 properties. And they generally base it on square net rentable square footage. We're about 7.7 million in there.

Okay.

So it's a pretty big drop off from the top guys down to us. And people like us make up about 20% of the market. And then roughly 50% of the market is still owners who are operators who have five or less properties.

So they're the guys like you and me that decide to go in partnership and go, hey, let's go build a storage facility because we can get some money out of it. And you go to exactly them at some point in their life cycle and you buy the property from them and then what do you do with it to make it better?

Yeah, so for us that we're doing value add, that's why we're buying those existing properties from the smaller operators. And for those of you don't know, your, your values in commercial real estate are based on your net operating income, which is just revenue minus expenses. So anything you can do to increase that net operating income for small revenue into the property, you're increasing the value. So for self storage, the easiest way to do that is to expand. So we'll build some additional units, get that lease up and there's more revenue at the property. Additionally, we're vertically integrated, we manage all of our own properties. So plugging in that professional management platform makes a huge difference, especially on the revenue management side. A lot of smaller operators, their goal is to be full. They just wanted to have 100% occupancy. That's their goal in life. And a lot of these properties we buy are in the high 90s and occupancy. But when we look at their economic occupancy, they're getting about 75% of the current market rate on their tenant base. So they're not raising rates on you. So that's kind of low hanging fruit for us as well. We'll slowly 10, $15 a quarter, maybe every six months, start bringing them up to market rates and you get a few move outs. But generally you don't want to spend your entire weekend ready to U haul moving all of your stuff to save 15amonth and go down the street where somebody else is going to raise rates on you. So that's kind of low hanging fruit. And then we add some ancillary income streams as well. U Haul Truck Rentals, we do a tenant insurance program and then we sell boxes, locks, moving supplies. But the biggest value add is that expansion and creating more space to lease up.

And, and so do you guys do all the construction yourself or do you, is that outsourced or what?

That's outsourced. So we have a construction team and some project managers and they're overseeing the GCs or if it's a smaller project, maybe just some subs. But we're hiring that out. We're not our own GC yet.

All right, so you're, the value that you really bring to the table, as I'm hearing it, is maybe the implication of, you know, what to buy. And then the other is, you know, how to make it, make more money. So that's. That hints at the fact that there's maybe some income that's going to come in, but there's also another benefit down the road too. Right. Isn't that in correct? Yeah. So that's what I'm talking about, if we're on the same page, is at some point you're going to exit that property for a profit event, right?

Yep. For a lot more money. Hopefully, that's. That's the goal. So if you talk to our acquisitions team, they'll say you make the money when you buy the deal. And that's very true. You got to buy the right deal. The operations team, they like to take all the credit too. But that's also true because you've got to operate it efficiently, you've got to manage the revenue, you've got to have a good plan. And then that, if you do both of those correctly, it sets up for a strong exit and it's a consolidation play. Because the market is so fragmented, we're packaging those smaller properties together and then we're selling them to the bigger buyers, whether it's the public companies or institutional equity type groups, both of which want to do large deals. If Public Storage buys one property, it doesn't even move the needle for them. Nobody notices. They're so massive and they've got to show growth to their investors, so they'll pay a premium to buy a larger portfolio. And same thing with institutional equity groups. They've got money coming in from pension funds and family offices and they want to do big deals. They don't want to go out and buy one property at a time and have to manage all the.

So one of the things that I think that we've talked about or I read is that Storage actually kind of can be looked at as kind of a downside protection in the portfolio. Right. So kind of like how bonds are considered downside. Of course, you know, this last year bonds have got hammered. So they weren't. They didn't. They didn't have much downside unless you just keep holding for the next 30 years. But. So in what ways does investing in Self Storage provide some, I'll say, downside protection from. For the investor?

Yeah. So two things to mention there. The first is, even in good times, Self Storage has outperformed all the other major asset classes. If you're looking at the. The National association of REITs and they're tracking the public REIT data, not folks like us and we've traditionally outperformed them. But looking at the REITs, all the real estate REITs out there, self storage has averaged 18 annual return for the last 28 years. I think apartments around 14. And there's some other step downs after that, but. So historically self storage has done well in good times and the down times, it's done well in addition. And I think that's why it's become such a mainstream asset class now is after two downturns, the great financial crisis 2007-2009 and then during the pandemic, self storage performed extremely well. Now it doesn't mean you're hitting a home run in a downturn, but it means you're surviving it for better times when you can get the rate the values you want on the properties. And I think the reason is self storage. We call it the four Ds of self storage. It's kind of morbid. I always hate saying this is debt downsizing, dislocation and divorce. So when those things are happening in your life, you're utilizing self storage. When there's downturns, those things are happening. If you lose your house or you have to downsize, you go into an apartment, you're putting stuff in storage and hoping for better times. I was actually talking to a group last night and I was saying that, I hate saying that because it sounds negative. And the guy said I should add two more that are positive. He said diamonds and diapers. So when you get married, when you have kids, you're using self storage as well, which is actually a good point. So you're clearing out your stuff for nursery. So that, that makes it a little bit more positive spin. But if you look at the, the great financial crisis, self storage, and this is, look at that level data again, was down just under 4% but still outperforming all the other asset classes. So I'll never say it's recession proof because that's a lie. Nothing is recession proof. It can get bad enough, we're all crushed. But historically self storage has done very well in downturns.

Pandemic.

I was very nervous going to the pandemic, so I spent the year before that telling everybody, hey, self storage is recession resilient. And then that happened and I was like, well this is, this is different. We'll see how this goes. Ended up being the best two years in the industry. It was a boom for self storage, but didn't look like going into it.

And are you finding that you're still able to buy properties at A reasonable price to be able to continue to add value, or are you having to work harder at finding the right price because things have gone up so much?

Yeah, we're having to work a lot harder to find the good deals. The pandemic drove up prices, but debt was cheap. Now, if you know, if you're listening, as you probably know, interest rates are really high. So it makes it harder to pencil out some of those deals. So we've got to sort through a lot more deals to find the right ones. If you don't have to sell right now, they're not selling. If they've got some debt coming due, maybe they're willing to drop their price a little bit. We, the prices have come down, but not as much as we'd like. We're being pretty aggressive in offering some lower pricing on deals and seeing what we can get. And it really just depends on how motivated the seller is. Now the guy who built self storage 20 years ago and built it for a million dollars, now it's worth 20 million, he'll come down a little bit because he doesn't really care. He's about to retire and live the life.

Right?

So we said we got a couple of those where we found some good deals.

Are you guys a 506C?

506C? Yeah.

506C. You are? Yeah.

So that's good.

No, you tell them. Yeah, yeah.

I was going to say for those that don't know, there's kind of two different types of offerings in this kind of syndication real estate market. A506B and a506C. That 506C filing allows us to advertise. Now because of that, we have to make sure all of our, we have to verify all of our investors are accredited. Kind of the simple definition of that this comes from the securities Exchange Commission is $200,000 a year income for the last two years. 300 if you're filing jointly or a million dollar net worth, not including your primary residence. So we have to verify that you meet one of those qualifications to be able to invest with us. Now, 506B, you're still supposed to be accredited, but they have a certain, I think it's like 30 spots for sophisticated investors. And my understanding it's a very gray definition. It kind of depends on the sponsor, on who they let into those deals.

So, you know, my, my experience in the industry is like 38 years now. I know I only look 45, but I mean it's, it's been longer than that. Right.

I Was going to say 44. So.

Yeah, well, we're close. What I, you know, in the early days, in the late 80s, all the deals were out. There were just basically tax deals. I mean, there was not a lot of economic benefit to cattle. And some of the drilling things that they had, you bought them because you're in the 70% tax bracket. And so you, you know, if it made any money, you were ahead. Right. But, but the, even the deals that were really good deals as a financial advisor by the. They had to come through a compliance department. Then they had to come to my desk and the sponsors had to pay. They had to pay a commission to the advisors selling it. They had to pay enough to the broker, dealer, or the wirehouse so that they made some money on it. And then there was the marketing company that put it all together. I mean, the time I got to see it for my clients, the real profit was out of.

Was gone. Yep.

Yeah. And so I will. For those people who don't know much about our firm, we don't. Matt is on here for education purposes for your benefit. We don't sell financial products. We don't represent Matt's firm or anybody else. And we don't, we don't. We don't get referral fees from them. There's no financial incentive at all. It's just something I believe in. I put my own money in and I think people need to know about it. But for you to run back to your broker or to your independent advisor that is licensed, you're probably not going to get the deals like Matt has. You're probably going to get the deals that the advisor gets to earn is 7% or 6% commission on, and his back office is going to keep another 2 or 3% on top of that. And you'll notice the fee structure internally to the deal is a lot different. And so I'm not telling you you should do Matt's deal. I'm not allowed to do that. I'm saying you need to talk to Matt and evaluate whether or not these kinds of things fit what you're trying to get accomplished. But I wanted to, I wanted the listener to understand that not every syndication deal is the same. If you go through the normal retail channels, you're going to pay for that. That hurts your return and hurts what you get out of it. If you go to some of these, I don't know. Can I call you. Is it what I call you, a private syndication or.

Yeah, private equity. Real estate. Yeah, syndication, yeah.

You just get a kind of a different look, a different look at what's out there. So the other thing we haven't talked about really is, you know, if, if somebody invests money into an exchange traded fund or a stock and then they decide they want to go buy a car, they make a phone call or push a couple buttons and they got money in their account in a few days. So the one thing that you need to know about when you're investing in these kinds of assets is that it's still real estate, it's still an operating business. And the good news is you're not mark to market every day where you see these wild swings in price and valuation. The bad news is you got to let them do their job. You can't put your money there and expect six months from now, change your mind and have them write you a check. So typically what kind of length of time do you do your are your deal cycles, Matt?

Yeah, so. And one thing on that too Craig, is, is you're getting that. You know, I talked about the returns being better in real estate and especially in the private syndications like this. You're, you're paying, you're getting a premium on the illiquidity because you can't get your money out. But you're kind of getting a premium because you're getting a better return. If you pick the right team in the right group and they, they do what they say they're going to do, you're getting a premium on that. But it is illiquid. Historically we've exited in about 3.6 years. But we always underwrite out the six years. We actually underwrite out the 10 years. And when we look at the numbers, year six looks like the best time to sell. We've just been lucky, we've been wrong in the right direction. By all means, they could go the full six years. It's been a great real estate market the last 10, 15 years. I think the next 10 years are gonna, it's gonna separate the really good groups from the just got lucky and we're in the right market type groups.

Because of just how tight deals are right now. Is that why?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's going to come down much more to the operator. You know, I always preach look at the team and the track record. But as I just said, everybody probably has a good track record right now. If you don't have a good track record right now, you don't belong in real estate. But you know, debt was so cheap people were paying ridiculous amounts and it was still worked out for them because they're able to sell it two or three years later because everybody else was trying to get into it. That's going to change over the next few years. You know, I, I don't know what the market looks like five, ten years from now, but I, I do think it's gonna be a little different. It's going to take experienced operators who are more selective in the properties, more conservative in their debt and can operate the property. You know, rates have come down a little bit in self storage because the pandemic was really high rates, it was an anomaly, but it's come down. So our operations teams adjusting by putting more effort into the tenant insurance program and increasing revenue there. So it's having a strong operator who can kind of pull those different levers and keep being efficient with the property and making money.

So you mentioned that a few times. Typically, what kind of debt ratio will you have? What, what if you do a $10 million deal? How much debt is going to be on that?

Yeah, historically we're probably more in the 65 to 70 range. Right now the banks are really conservative and pulled back quite a bit. So our average in the fund we're raising for right now is about 55% loan to value, which it takes more equity to close each deal, but it's less risky because the bank doesn't have as much leverage. And that's the, the other, we, we didn't really talk about the beginning. The, the value in real estate is that diversification, it's not correlated to the market, but you have a real asset that is backing that property. Now if you have really bad debt terms that, that can be kind of dismissed. But if you, you know, for us we would have to lose 45% of the value in that property for investors to lose everything. So it's possible by all means, but hopefully not. We're, we're pretty good at what we do. So that lower leverage is a little bit more conservative investment.

Well, the other thing I think people need to know is that when you go into one of these syndications this way, you're, you are a limited partner in the deal. So part of the reason that Reliant gets some of the fees that they get and some of the back end incentives they get is that Reliant is the, they sign their name on the bottom line as the general partner for responsibility for all this stuff. As a limited partner, you're not going to be sued for your part of the deficiency. If there's a bankruptcy, you Know, you're done and out of it so you don't have to worry about you're going into debt. And, you know, they're not using the 90% leverage ratios that were used years ago. And you know, people just borrowing all the money they. And doing a ton of people because it didn't take a lot of money to do them. Yeah. So, okay, so you're looking at somewhere around six years, but maybe sooner. You're looking at potentially historically anyway, some downside protection from maybe what happens next. You got an asset that at least Craig has just kept paying the bill for seven years, you know, through the good times of bad. And I think we just had, I think last year we had a price increase, but I originally, I told you several and I think we've only had maybe 2 increases in 7 years. So started talking about what you guys do. I thought, you know, I don't know that we maybe have had that many. Which. And this a little private operator that owns this space. So, you know, we might buy one. I'll tell you offline, there's a bunch.

Of meat on the bone there. We might want to look at that one.

Yeah, well, I'm clearing mine out here. Before too long, we're getting out of the RV world. I'm clearing it out. So I'll give you the name after I get mine emptied out. So you don't go out there.

You go. I've had several investors reach out and ask me if I can get them a deal on a unit. And I'm like, hey, you saw my investment presentation. You know, I'm already, I'll get you a deal, but we're going to raise rates on you and you probably don't want to deal with us. And they're like, all right, fair enough.

Well, so what have I not asked you that really needs to be said that we haven't really talked about? Matt, is there anything.

One more thing I'd throw out, and this isn't specific to self storage because you kind of mentioned all the different asset classes at the beginning, you know, mobile home parks, industrial oil and gas, all the different things you can get into and alternatives. I like self storage. I'm biased towards it, obviously, but I think it's more risk mitigated investment and still good returns. But there's another. I don't even know the correct terminology. I refer to it as buckets. There's kind of three different buckets in real estate investing that also require diversification. So it's good to diversify away from the market probably good to diversify in different deals and what you're looking for. And that's why your, your clients should talk to you like, am I looking for cash flow? Am I looking for appreciation? Because there's some different buckets. So. And the first one is what they call opportunistic. That's ground up development, building a, buying the land, building a new property, or maybe it's a rehab. Taking a property that's in a bad spot, not performing well, needs a lot of work. Those are very high risk, high reward. So if you do it right, you can make a lot of money. They're very little cash flow during the whole period, generally probably a little bit higher debt ratio or leverage. So. And those are high risk. On the other end of that spectrum is a core asset that's a stabilized property. It's full, it's leased up well, good tenants, good credit record on the tenants, and it's kind of maximized. There's not a lot of upside when you sell it because you've already maximized the net operating income of that property. So it's a good cash flow play. So if you're looking for cash flow, I've got to replace income. That's a good play. And it's very low risk. In the middle is value add, which is what I discuss as we do moderate cash flow during the whole period because we're still kind of doing that business plan, moderate risk, and then still some really good upside at the end. So it all depends on what you're looking for or maybe if you've got enough money, you're diversifying a little bit each one of those buckets. And that's something you should talk to Craig and his team about. But I, I just. Because I get a lot of phone calls where people want both. They're like, I want a ton of cash flow and I want a lot of upside. I was like, me too. Let me know if you find it somewhere.

So, yeah, and I appreciate that. And we, you know, although we are best known what we do in the tax planning space with Roth conversion work, we do a lot of just comprehensive financial planning for clients, just as you've kind of hinted, helping them put together all the different pieces in a way that really maximizes the opportunities available to them and the objectives that they have for their family. And we oftentimes find that people have blind spots, you know, where they maybe have had relationships for a long time that did what they did very well, but they didn't look at other things that they could have been doing, whether it's investments or whether it's estate planning or tax planning or cash flow planning. So we come in as kind of a non biased third party that doesn't have a product to sell them, doesn't want to manage their money and just come alongside and say, look, how, how can we make your life better? How can we, how can we help you take everything you've worked for for the last 30, 40 years and really put it to the greatest potential that you've got? And it's kind of a different gig we have, Matt. I mean, you know, you know, most financial advisors, that's not how they make their money. They make their money by the other ways. And there's nothing wrong with that. We find that a lot of our clients are people who have existing relationships with good investment advisors, with good insurance people with good CPAs. But what they're missing is that third party that is totally unbiased to the transaction part of their life. They can say, that looks good. But if we move this to this, I mean, case in point, in our Roth conversion business, our average client has got a little over a million dollars in their IRA. They're in their mid-60s and we help them avoid $2.7 million of income taxes over their lifetime and for their kids, and they'll also avoid about $100,000 of Medicare premiums that they were going to pay beforehand. And that's. And we didn't sell them anything. We just taught them a different way to do it. And then we work with their advisors and that kind of thing. But this whole investment space of using alternatives I think is more important than ever because of where we are in the markets. And you know, I'm here, it's late October 2023, and I have no idea what's going to happen. I just know that the potential for a very big market event is really bigger than I've seen in my career. And so if that happens, you either you either going to look back and say, I listened to a podcast, I should have done that because I just lost a million bucks, or you're going to say, you know what, that made a lot of sense. So if, Matt, we're going to put your contact info and some links that you, that you've sent to us in the show notes on this podcast so that if people do want to get a hold of you, we want to get them directly to you where you can talk to them. And for those of you listening, if you haven't, if you're not already a subscriber to this podcast. Click the button, man. So that the next time we have some great info, you'll at least know about it, and it'll either interest you or it won't. It's not just going to be about investments. We do podcasts a variety of different subjects, so hopefully it works out good. So what do you think, Matt? Have we pretty well kicked the horse as much as we need to?

I think we have. If I get too much deeper, I'll get really nerdy and bore everybody to death. But I do want to throw out. I think your structure is very impressive, what you're doing with your clients, because we've reached out into the wealth Advisor space to try and find additional equity sources. And the first question I get is, what's in it for me? And yeah, so I think you're doing a great job and doing your clients a true service and just kind of looking at the bigger picture and what's healthy for them. Most of those people are focused on fees and assets under management. And you mentioned the groups that the broker dealer networks that we could go through to raise equity, but there's so many fees in between that it's just. We've looked at it because sometimes it's hard to raise equity, but by the time it gets down to our investors, we're like, it's. We're not doing them any kind of service. Now. We do this to make money for ourselves. But part of my job that I love is that I help people grow their wealth and generate value so they can have time. That's the most precious asset is your time. If you can create that wealth, you don't have to go out and earn it. You can have time. So we don't go that route because we want to help people out.

Yeah. And that is the only true currency is time. That's the thing that has more meaning than anything. With enough time, you can go make more money. Right. Without time. That's right. All right, Matt. Hey, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Appreciate getting to know you a little bit. Look forward to, you know, more of this kind of stuff that we can do together as the opportunity presents itself. So, again, if you have more interest in just kind of seeing how this kind of thing fits into your future, we've got Matt's contact info that if you want to go straight to the horse's mouth, you can kind of do that. And I guess a shameless plug is if you maybe have some doubts about your own big picture game. Plan. That's what we do. And we'd love to help too. And you know how to reach us through that as well. So, Matt, have a great rest of your day, and thanks so much for being on with us.

Thanks, Craig. My pleasure. You have a great day as well.

Investment Advisory services offered through Q3 Advisors. This presentation is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be individualized financial, tax or investment advice.