#141: The 5 Things You Need To Know To Invest Like a Money Master with Peter Mallouk

If you really brings you a huge amount of pleasure to have a cup of Starbucks every day, well, have the cup of Starbucks every day. I mean, we don't want to live in misery now in exchange for a future that may or may not happen. So really trying to make sure that you remember that most of us fall into it starts when we're kids. We just blow everything we have or we can't spend anything. We save everything we have. And really that's not really healthy. We want to find a way to maximize our happiness. We all become happy in different ways, but a lot of them tie back to money and what it does for us.

Come on this journey with me each week when you join me. We are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow.

I'm ready for my close up.

Hi, welcome back. We are here this week with Peter Mallouk. Get ready for it. President and CEO of Creative Planning, a registered investment advisory firm that manages over 50B billion dollars in assets and serves clients in all 50 states. Peter has been featured in Worth magazine's Power 100, received the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year in 2017, and regularly appears on CNBC. But it doesn't stop there. Away from his day job, Peter is chairman of KC Kan, an organization of volunteers dedicated to improving the quality of life of children in Kansas City, but has also served on the boards of Pathway to Hope, American Stroke Foundation, St. Michael's Finance Council, Kansas City Hospice. Thank you for being here, Peter.

Thanks for having me. Heather.

Well, I'm so excited to figure out how an estate lawyer ended up partnering with Tony Robbins. What is that all about?

It's got a long and winding road and I'll abbreviate it for your listeners. But basically I went from being an estate attorney for other advisors, learned a lot about the industry, got onto the wealth management side and the idea was not just to manage money, but to manage money and do tax and legal and planning and all of those things in one place to really be a family office for all. Our favorite headline in the history of creative planning was when Barron's did an article on us and said creative planning is a family office for all. That's how we see ourselves as a place where client can make sure all those pieces are talking to each other. We were really ahead of the industry that's in doing all those things. Tony Robbins had written Money Master the Game, which I think to this day is still the top selling book of this century so far on finance and he had written it because he had a 401k plan. Somebody had come in named Tom Zegaynor and met with them and showed him that he was paying three times as much as he needed to in his 401k plan. They wound up moving their 401k plan to this guy Tom, who now works at Creative Planning. And it really opened Tony's eyes up. So he called some of his clients and some of his clients are like Ray Dalio and Tudor Jones, some of the biggest hedge fund managers in the world. And he started to learn from them how the industry works. And from there he went and talked to Jack Bogle, who was the founder of Vanguard, and he went and talked to Charles Schwab and Alan Greenspan. And he wound up with all these interviews. And his advisor said, you should really turn these interviews into a book. And that's how Money Master the Game formed. All of a sudden all these people want to know who Tony's advisor were. And they kept going to his advisor. His advisor and I connected and his advisor started sending those clients to Creative. Tony eventually came over to Creative himself, met everybody, got to know the firm. His advisor joined Creative, Tom Zegaynor joined Creative, and then we wrote two books together. One was Unshakeable, which did really well, and the other one just came out the path. And so it was a really crazy adventure. We hadn't known each other when each written our first books, and so to get to this point has been really fascinating.

It's so bizarre because it's not something I'm sure you ever thought when you were getting started that you would end up writing co authoring books with Tony Robbins.

No, I'm also writing one with this Jonathan Clements who used to write in the Wall Street Journal, who I read growing up. And so it's just fascinating to be writing books with these two who I had no personal connection with until just a few years ago.

Wait, do you actually write? Because to me, thinking of a person that's more into numbers and finance, I don't, in my mind, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see that typically as the creative person that dives into writing. How does that work for you?

I think you've got it pretty figured out. Normally the numbers people aren't writers, and I think I'm more of a writer than a numbers person, believe it or not. So I do actually write all my newsletters and I write content in my books and all of those things. I don't use a ghostwriter And I think that ultimately you want to have your voice. Now, I have a lot of editing. I have a lot of people proof it and have people help me with research, but we really do. And I know Tony really does write his parts, too. Wow.

Do you think that what you just described as leaning more towards the creative side, is that what separates you? Is that what makes you unique in this business?

Well, I think the business is a little bit messy. And so I think that, you know, if you look at the world of advisors, there's like 350 to 400,000 advisors, and about 90% of them work in the brokerage world. And the brokerage world has a lot of products. They get paid different ways. And so you might go to a JP Morgan, which is a good company, but they have their own mutual funds, they have their own all kinds of products. And so you can pay an advisor and then wind up paying again to get those products, which I view that as going to a doctor who owns the medicine. Right. You're going to get that medicine prescribed to you, even if maybe it's not the best medicine for you. So we're in this very small group, this very small group of about 10% of those advisors that are totally independent. We don't have our own products. We don't sell an investment and collect a commission. And in that world, we're also holistic. We're doing planning, we're customizing portfolios. That's very unique in our industry, saying, what do you need? When do you need it? How do we build it? And then giving legal and tax and so on. All of those things together, I think, are what make creative planning stand out in the industry.

Yeah, I love the transparency. And I can't imagine those other companies are able to lead with any level of transparency.

Well, I mean, and it's amazing, and it's something that just basically the end consumer doesn't understand. So they haven't demanded anything differently, you know, and I think that they know when they go to an accountant that the accountant's going to act in their best interest. They know when they go to a lawyer, that's going to be the case. So they just. They assume that the advisor that they're paying doesn't own products. You know, the industry is confusing because the products often don't have the same names. You can be going to, like, ABC Company, and they won't sell you ABC product. Like, they'll sell you XYZ product that's owned by abc. And so you feel like you're getting these independent vehicles, and really they're just products of the parent company.

That's very frustrating as an end user and consumer that isn't aware of this stuff without you bringing this knowledge to light.

Yeah, and I think that's what we address that in all of the books, you know, in the path. We talk a little bit about that and we really focus more on, okay, now that you know that, get to the right advisor, then that advisor. What other traits should they have to make sure that they're advising you? Well? And so we're really trying to walk people step by step through everything they need to know to make smarter decisions with their money.

Peter, let's back it up to the elephant in the room right now. So many people, including myself, are so concerned with the uncertainty, with the economic environment, with the coronavirus, with who knows what's gonna. With everything else in our world. How do people take that leap of faith to say, I should be investing right now instead of I want to hold onto my money to make sure I can pay my bills?

I would divide it into two parts. One is if people have job uncertainty, job insecurity, they're not sure how they're going to keep a roof over their heads month to month. They should not be investing. They should have the money set aside in an account, cash, just ready to go to help them get through things. If someone already has a secure job, or even if it's not secure, they're very marketable, and then you can pick up a job somewhere else or they already have emergency reserves, then that group should not be waiting for things to settle down. Things never settle down. We just trade one crisis for another. Someone who's been investing for 20 years has been through the tech bubble. 9 11, the 0809 crisis, the great debt crisis, coronavirus, elections, social unrest, all of that just. It just, we're going to have 10 more in the next 10 years. It's just how things work. But as an investor, just understand that the market is going to find a way. Like, I know if we buy a Hershey's bar today, we expect to pay less than if we buy it 10 years from now. We know that a can of Coke is going to cost more 10 years from now. A meal at McDonald's will cost more 10 years from now. But we're worried if we buy Those stocks in McDonald's and Hershey's and Coke that somehow they're not going to be hired 10 years from now. Anything can happen with one company, but the market tends to do what prices do, it tends to have this bias upwards to the right. There's this myth the market goes up and down. It really goes up with just breaks on the way up. You take a terrible investor, so unlucky, and they invested the day before the 0809 crisis. Well, their money has doubled or tripled or quadrupled already. It's that hard to lose money the longer that you go. So make sure you're secure. You don't go investing money that you need to get by for the next six months. But if you've got a secure job or you're marketable or you've got cash in the bank, then you should quit trying to figure out when entering the market and just start entering, start putting a little bit in every month. Be disciplined and start making progress towards your goals.

So you didn't have any type of a knee jerk reaction when you saw Disney lay off thousands of people?

No, I mean, I think that an investor really should be buying something. Remember that a stock is part of a company, so you're not really. People think it's like a roulette wheel and it's all made up, but it's really part of a company. The company just has to be public. It happens to be public where you can buy shares. Do I think Disney streaming is going to do better 10 years from now than today? Probably do. I think people are going to be going to Disney World 10 years from now more than they were today? Probably. And you can go through this with all of Disney's various revenue streams and I'm buying it like I'm a business owner. I think 10 years from now I'm going to be rewarded for owning it. Now I could be wrong about one company, which is why it makes sense to own a big, broad, diversified group of companies. Most of them will wind up doing better over the long run. And you really don't look at the month quarter to quarter or the year to year. Really look at the very long run. I mean, you really have to go out of your way and be a really negative thinker to think that Disney World's going to close their parks for good.

Right.

I mean, one way or another we're going to go back to complaining about how long the lines are.

I'm already seeing clips where their lines are back already. You're seeing people are already visiting the parks. It's shocking.

Yeah. I think that no matter what happens with coronavirus or anything else, one way or another, we're going to get through all of this. I think people already know that there's a lot of different paths out of it, from it just going on for another year, the absolute worst, longest case scenario to it weakening to a vaccine. Whatever, pick whatever it is, no one thinks this is going on for five years. And so I think if we start to accept that as an investor, we're looking at 5, 10 year increments. You should be looking at it that way and find your bargains.

So what you're describing to me is finding some certainty and knowing that the long game is there, which to me really takes me back to confidence. What role does confidence play in investing?

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Confidence is everything from a positive perspective and a negative perspective. So from a positive perspective, what you have is you have people watch the news and they get so freaked out watching the financial media that they lack the confidence to invest. They go, oh, I'm going to get burned here. And you've got to recognize that the media is not an investor's front. So no matter what your political or financial views are, most of these media outlets are owned by public entities. Abc, NBC, cbs, fox, msnbc, cnn. All publicly traded company divisions, right? So a publicly traded company has a fiduciary duty to maximize profits to their shareholders. So how do they do that? They all make money the same way. They sell advertising. How do you sell advertising? You need eyeballs, right? How do you get eyeballs? Not by calming people down, not by Giving the confidence to invest, but by feeding on anxiety, negativity, and insecurity. And that's what gets people to continue to watch, is they're scared, and now they feel like someone needs to help them through it. And so it paralyzed people for making the right decision. The more people watch those things, the actually the worst they do. It's the opposite of what you would expect. So what you want to do is you want to push out all that noise. Focus on the facts of how the market works over the long run. Know that a diversified portfolio will work in the long run. Start to invest every month and have the confidence not to be shaken. You need to be unshakable through that next correction, through that next bear market. Know that, hey, there's been 100 corrections, dozens of bear markets. They've all ended the same way. The economy recovers. Every recession has led to an expansion, Every contraction has led to an expansion. Every correction has given way to a bull market, and every bear market's given way to a bull market every time. Have that confidence. Don't let anybody shake you from that. On the other end of the spectrum, you have people that are overconfident. There's a lot of research that shows that women are better investors than men. And the reason is that men, if they place a trade and it works out well, they seem to think it was due to their brilliance, and then they go start trading more. And the more activity you do, the more it results in underperformance. Whereas women as a group, and everyone's different, but as a group, they tend to be more deliberate about each investment. And so because of that, they don't get overconfident based on a past success. And so confidence is such a big part of being a good investor. Understanding what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to really gives you that confidence to get through what you need to get through without getting shaken off course.

It's interesting when you were describing that overconfident investor. In my mind, I was thinking about an article I read about day trading and how day trading is taking off. And people think that they have the insights to know what stocks to pick. Are you seeing a lot of that?

Yeah. Whenever you see one sector of the market really take off, you see day traders come in. And we see that now with big US Tech companies. So Google, Amazon, Apple, Tesla. No one's gone wrong there. Right? You buy it, you sell it, you go buy something else, you sell it, you buy something else. It just goes up, up, up. Now of course, the person who just bought all of them and held it probably did better. But nonetheless, the day traders feel brilliant. The problem is 100% of the time this party ends and no one rings a bell before the party ends, it ends. And usually everyone's caught with their pants down because it happens very, very fast. The top performing stocks in the previous decade are not the same top five from this decade. And that's the same story over and over. No matter how invincible a company seems, it eventually gives way to capitalism. And capitalism basically says competitors are going to figure you out and they're going to take you out one way or another over time. And so the last time we really saw massive day trading activity was with the tech bubble, which a lot of your listeners will be too young for because it's 20 years ago and there were actually centers opening up all over the country for day trading and almost all of them went out of business when tech stocks crashed back then. I think we're going to see a pretty negative ending to this day trading bubble too. I don't know when it will be, but it'll eventually happen.

It just, it surprises me that somebody would roll the dice on themselves having zero experience or expertise, knowing there's people out there that can advise them. And I wonder for the people that actually do have financial advisors when they're hearing this conversation and the education that you're sharing with people into what's really happening, how do they know if they're with the right advisor? How do they know how to pick the right advisor?

Yes, it's incredibly difficult. A lot of people just kind of go as somebody that they know. And I think that what people really want to look for is they want somebody who's competent, right? So try to find somebody who's gotten a little bit educated in the field that you're in. So most financial companies are not run by financial advisors. And most of the people that give financial advice don't have any credentials or education related to financial planning or financial advice. So I'd say first look for a company that it's kind of in their DNA to give advice. One where you're dealing with a team that has a certified financial planner giving you planning advice. If they're giving you investment advice, it'd be nice if they have CFA designation. Legal, there's a law degree tax, there's a CPA demand that your advisor have some credentials and education, that that team has those credentials and education. So you can separate out a lot just by asking for a little bit of competence in education from your advisor. The second big part is what we talked about earlier, Heather, which is conflicts. Just Try to get advice from somebody that isn't conflicted. I don't walk into, like, a Hershey, Pennsylvania and walk into the chocolate factory and ask what chocolate's the best. They're going to give me five different kinds of Hershey bars. Right. So you really want to be paying somebody who doesn't own the investment products, Their company doesn't own the same investment products, or you're going to find out you're going to be paying a fee to get those products. So try to avoid that conflict. If you can get those two things nailed down, you've eliminated 95% of advisors and you really worked your way towards somebody that the next step, which is important, you can connect with, make sure that there's a relationship that they're used to dealing with people like you. If you're worth 120,000, you don't want to be an outlier to that advisor. If you're worth $10 million, you want to make sure that advisor is used to dealing with $10 million people, too.

That makes a lot of sense. So the financial considerations of being your own boss versus working for a company right now, a lot of people listening are wondering, hey, maybe I should take this time to go to work for myself. I. How do you advise people that are trying to make a decision? Do I stay in the 9 to 5 corporate America, or do I take this side hustle and just go for it?

People have very different views here. So I think what's interesting is millennials have really done both in record numbers. So I see a lot of clients that are closer to the boomer generation, which is above me, and then the millennials are below me. The boomers, there were a lot of them that were business owners and they wanted to be business owners and do all of those things. And then there were many that worked for the Same company for 30 years. When I look at millennials, I think they're inspiring in a couple of ways, but one of them is they demand that the company that they work for is a good corporate citizen. They're the first generation to really say, it's not enough just to have a nice place to work. I really want to know that I work for a company that does the right thing and my peers do the right thing. I'm surrounded by people that share my values and beliefs. I think the millennials have really done a great job with that. But what I've observed with our millennial clients is a lot of them don't want to be business owners because they don't want the hassle. So I just even take the medical profession. It used to be all the doctors wanted to work on their own. Now a lot of doctors can't sell their practices because millennials don't want to buy them. They're like, look, I want to enjoy my quality of life. When I'm off, I want to be off. If something happens, flood at the office or nurse quits, or there's a patient has an issue at 2 in the morning and there's no backup, I don't want to deal with it. You know, I want my vacation. I want to enjoy myself. I'm going to come in, I'm going to do what you need me to do, but my quality of life is too important. It's also the same reason some millennials leave their jobs. They don't like them. They don't like their peers, their boss, whatever, and so they go off and they do a side gig instead. So I think what's really driving that generation is quality of life, and it's what makes some of them decide to be employed and makes some of them decide to go do something different. But it's really unique to that generation in a way I don't see with other generations before them.

So you pointed out some different pieces that a company can bring into the fold, whether it be charity work or mission work. Are those some of the things that you've done to make your firm such a standout?

You know, I think we were doing it from the beginning just because we wanted to do it. And I think what we found over time is people really responded to it. And that was a nice side effect. But I just think philosophically, I mean, I think that you might read in, like, business school, like I did, that, you know, a business's job is just to create profit. But I think if a business takes from the community, it needs to give to the community. And I also think it's good business. You know, so I've learned over my career isn't just in the beginning. It started out as I feel like this is the right way to do it. And now it's just good business, too. I think every business should be proactively giving to the community and giving their team a way to have an outlet to give to the community as well.

You're so right. Not only does it foster employee engagement, employee passion with coming to work, but also the clients, I mean, they love that feel good. Yes, I'm spending money with them, but they're out giving back on my behalf and that's a beautiful thing.

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Yeah, I think that if you just go have everyone work for you and have everyone come hire you and then you don't do anything back, it doesn't, it, it doesn't work today. If it does, it's not going to work much longer. And I think that's a great development.

I couldn't agree more with that because back in the day, I don't remember companies even bringing that concept to light. Not when I was early on my career.

No, I agree. It's definitely new. I think we've been doing it since our inception. But you're seeing it become more and more front and center now as people are having to answer to their clients and their employees as to why they're not doing anything.

So what are the five biggest mistakes that investors make?

Oh, there are so many. That's the title of my first book, the five Mistakes Investors make and how to Avoid Them. And I cover a couple big ones. Number one is market timing. So going to the market and then you take money out of the market, that's market timing. Like, hey, I'm going to cash because I'm worried about an upcoming election or I'm going to cash because I'm worried about what's happening in the Middle east or whatever. But a lot of people don't think they're market timers, but they are market timers because they might get a bonus, but they're holding it for the world to settle down. That in and of itself is market timing. It's a big, big mistake if you meet somebody who says, oh, I lost everything. Usually the way they lost everything is they went to cash at the wrong time. There was a bear market, market went down, they got scared, they went to cash, they didn't get back in and they missed the upside for good. It's very, very dangerous to exit the market or delay contributions to the market. You're almost always going to be on the losing side of that. My whole career I haven't seen somebody sell out near the top and buy in near the bottom. Not one time. It's just, it's impossible thing to do. The second one is We've talked about a little earlier with the day trading is all this active trading. We know the more trading there is, the more taxes are created, the more friction the portfolio is created, the more likely you're going to make a mistake attributable to overconfidence and the more likely you are to underperform. So I think that those are two really big doozies. The third is really not understanding all the psychological pressures that make us bad investors. We have a general negativity bias. If we hear stomping, we think it's a dinosaur, we better get in our cave. We're just wired that way. We really feed off negative news. That's the reason you see negative political ads during political seasons is because they're seven times more effective. We just respond to it more. We're wired more that way. And so really being able to filter out the noise, control your behavior so that you have the confidence to do the right things, that's a really big part of it. But I think another big mistake, and I'll stop with them, is just not enjoying your money. I mean, money is a means to an end. And you should never give up all happiness today in exchange for happiness in the future. And you can't do everything you want today at the expense of the future. And really what we're trying to do is maximize happiness. And so if it makes you feel good to give and you can't afford to do a lot, maybe do a little bit now so that you can do more later. If you really brings you a huge amount of pleasure to have a cup of Starbucks every day. Well, have the cup of Starbucks every day. I mean, we don't want to live in misery now in exchange for a future that may or may not happen. So really trying to make sure that you remember that most of us fall into. It starts when we're kids. We just blow everything we have or we can't spend anything. We save everything we have. And really that's not really healthy. We want to find a way to maximize our happiness. We all become happy in different ways, but a lot of them tie back to money and what it does for us.

How do you help people? Because that sounds, as a psych major, that it's really fundamentally coming from how people grew up and how do you get them to see things in a more balanced way?

It's very, very hard to change thinking of people. A lot of people have this feeling of deprivation. A lot of people grew up in homes where they heard their parents talk about money. All the time, or there was a lot of job insecurity. There might not have been food on the table at times or the heat was off. Getting somebody like that to have an abundance mindset that, hey, you're okay, that's hard. And you also have people that have never had a consequence of spending every dollar they have, and they don't understand when the last dollar spent life will change completely. There won't be some easing into it. To me, what I found is empowering the client with education. You know, really trying to educate them on the big picture, but then also with specificity on their own picture. Where are you? What do you need? When do you need it? What do the taxes look like? If we keep doing these things that you're doing, what are the probability it'll work out great, in which case quit worrying about it. Or what are the probabilities you can run out of money, in which case, hey, you need to, like, have a little bit of anxiety around. We got to change your behavior here or there's going to be a problem in the future. But I think you have to do it in an understandable way. People have to understand exactly what it means to them and exactly what it's going to look like later if they do certain things. And then you're more likely to get them to do the behaviors and to feel at peace doing those things.

And did you just always have this mindset or was it a learned experience for you?

I don't know why, but I think one of our advantages at Creative is very, very early on, it was always about, what does it mean to you? Maybe the very first client that came in and did a plan, it was, how, what does this money need to do for you? And what do you need to do to be secure for the rest of your life? That was the very first person I ever saw, and that's what everybody that comes here to work every day does. Doesn't matter if they're a lawyer or a cpa. They know yes, there's laws and yes, there's tax guide rules, and yes, there's money management ideas. But we need to make this relate to what the client is trying to accomplish. That's just always been in our DNA rather than something we learned. I don't know why that is, but it's been a big reason people come to us is they want to know that the way they're invested matches up with what they're trying to do, and not just based on their age or their risk tolerance or beating the market. Or something like that.

Everything you just mentioned right there is every questionnaire someone has you fill out when you're talking to them about working with them.

That's right. Yeah.

That's very.

And most people just take that questionnaire and go, oh, you're 58. Well, you're going to be this percent in bonds, and that's like the dumbest way you could possibly invest. And it's a rule of thumb in the industry, but it's not a smart way to manage money.

I want to hide under the table right now because that's been every experience I've ever had with any investment person. Gosh. I mean, it's terrible. So as you're working with people right now going through the coronavirus, are you giving them any advice? For example, I was speaking to someone who told me, well, as soon as the coronavirus hit Heather, I knew Zoom was going to take off. So I did join. Jump right in. I know that you're going for the long game here, but do you sometimes advise people to look at new habits and trends?

I think with individual stocks, it's harder than it sounds. I mean, there's always going to be the people that hop onto these things, but a lot of these companies that really have taken off, I mean, I work with some of the people that have tens of millions or hundred million plus that worked at some of these companies, and being on the inside still sold sometimes pretty early because they weren't sure. You know, you just never really know. You can pick any company today and you could make a case. Like, we could take Netflix today and make a case that it's going to triple and it's going to take over the world, and why would it not? You could also make a case that, hey, Universal has their own coming out and Disney's got one now, and there's about seven or eight others coming out. And there's going to be fee pressure. And how are they going to match that fee? I mean, you could make a case for the demise of any company today, and you can make a case for it doubling or tripling. We could do this with Tesla or anything else. In retrospect is the only way it ever seems obvious.

Well, that's frustrating. You're not giving me. I'm looking for, like, the magic bullet. I mean, I feel like there's gotta be one.

Yeah. I mean, if there was, there'd be a whole bunch of people not working. Right. And so I think that what you find is even Warren Buffett over the last 10, 15 years. Has underperformed the market. It's hard to do. And here's a person that's been doing it his whole life more successfully than anybody else, and he couldn't do it recently. Right. And so I think that there's a lot of research that shows that the mutual funds that did the best in the last 10 years actually underperform in the next 10. So even the professionals who get paid hundreds of thousands or millions or dollars, sometimes tens of millions of dollars to beat the market and actually pull it off for a decade as a group are more likely to underperform in the following decade, which tells us that there's a lot of luck involved in outperforming over a shorter period of time.

In your new book that I want to talk about, because it's just come out, you're giving real life examples. What are some of the examples that you want to shine a light on?

Well, I think what the path talk talks about really is this arc of more than just money management. We talked a lot about today about money management, which is obviously the crux of what people are focused on. But all money is as a component of wealth. Where are you? What are you trying to do? And so the book really talks about identifying your goals, understanding your relationship with money, understanding why you interact with money the way you do, readjusting that in a healthy way, laying out the groundwork of where you are, the groundwork of investing, having the confidence to be a smart, unshakable investor through down markets. But then also how to manage risk, how not to lose everything because someone falls down the stairs in your house and sues you, or because somebody in the family dies that was making money, or you become disabled. And then how to make sure that you pass it to your loved ones that you can make important decisions like healthcare decisions for your loved ones, and then how to really enjoy that wealth. It's really that whole journey. All the components of wealth management, the way a very wealthy person looks at it. That's what we really try to touch on in the book. And I try to use real world examples of how one little thing can change everything. And so you really have to address each part of the step to make this path work out. You could be a great money manager and lose everything because you had illegal things screwed up. You can manage money great, but if you're losing 30% of its taxes, you'd have been better off doing something much easier. Right? And so I try to put all the pieces together for the first time for me in a Book like this, just everything thrown in there so that somebody can go, you know what? I spend thousands of hours a year working tens of thousands over my life going to read a book or listen to a book for a few hours. I've got a few hours of work to do. And all that work that I'm doing day and night is going to go towards something that makes sense.

I feel like there's no better time than right now because so many of us didn't anticipate this level of uncertainty. But like you just explained, someone can literally fall down the stairs at your house, you get sued, and you have the potential, if you're not set up correctly, to lose everything. So right now, the path can really set people up for that next unknown uncertainty.

Yes. I think that we tend to do the part that we're really interested in. You know, the really analytical people are in the text and how it works, and the fatalists are into estate planning, and someone's always selling insurance, and a lot of people are in the money investment management and so on. But you really have to have all these pieces together. They're all pieces to the same puzzle. They're all part of the same game. You can't just play the part of the game you want to play. All these pieces go together to be successful, and it's a long journey. Most of us can be doing this for decades, and so you really have to make sure all your bases are covered. And I think we do a good job of that in the path.

And where can everybody find the path?

So you can find it in any major bookstore. They can go to Amazon or any of the online sellers as well. Follow the path on social. You can follow me on social. I'm on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. And you can also learn more@creativeplanning.com thank.

You so much, Peter, for sharing some of your knowledge today and for creating such an amazing book with Tony Robbins, which is just such a cool story. So excited for the work that you continue doing and all the help that you're giving back. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Heather.

Okay, hang tight. We're gonna be right back. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're gonna hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone.

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