#46: How to begin building long-term wealth aside from your business with ex Wall Street analyst

If you can consistently be putting money to work, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in real estate, whether it's in whatever, but you're consistent about it, your returns are just going to end up naturally looking better.

Hey, Coach, my name is Lindsey, and I'm here to help heart-centered women like you build the money-making coaching business of their dreams. I've been coaching since 2019, and this pod is about So much more than building your business. It's about using your gifts to build a life and business you're 100% obsessed with. I went from working 50+ hours a week as a first grade teacher to building a sustainable business that replaced my job salary and gave me back 30+ hours a week of my time. Tune in to join the ride and learn from other coaches and experts along the way. All right. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Aligned Coach Podcast. This is your host, Lindsay Bodeo. So excited to have you all here. I have an awesome guest here today. I have Aryeh Sheinbein. Aryeh is a financial architect from Wall Street. He has got experience in the corporate world, and now he is going to come in today and educate us up and starting and Coaches and new entrepreneurs on what in the world to do with our money. This is going to be such a good episode. Thank you for coming on, Aryeh.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Lindsey.

Yeah, yeah. I think this is going to be such a good episode. I mostly, to be honest with you, you are the second second male that I have ever interviewed on the podcast.

Feeling honored. Feeling honored.

Yes. Yes. You definitely should. I think that it's going to be a nice pattern interrupt in our series here. So go ahead and introduce yourself, Aryeh. Tell us a little bit about— a little bit about you and about what it is that you do.

Yeah, sure. So I took the, I guess, more old school traditional path in my career in the beginning. I went to college, got a degree in finance, and had said to myself, what did I really want to do? And I think when I was young, I didn't realize it, but it was very clear to me I was really good at business, but I didn't really know that at the time. And when I was a kid, I played a lot of sports, but I also collected a ton of sports cards. And sports cards were like my stock market. I would watch the player, watch the value of the card, see the correlation, and then try and get the card before it went up in value, trade out of the card before I could, before before it would get out in the price guide that the value had gone up. And so I was definitely in my, when I was a teenager, doing a lot in the sports card space. And I was like, okay, I like numbers. I like the analytics of it. I like, I wasn't so much like, hey, I want to be out there as a YouTuber or as a TikTok creator. I just knew like, hey, I could see something, see the value, and then basically make money on where the direction was going to head. And so I was like, "Okay, the Wall Street stocks seem like something I want to do." But in college, I learned that it wasn't what you kind of dream up in the movies and all this different stuff. And I started to really learn all the different roles that you could do at an investment bank, because that word just sounds like one thing and it could be something else. Ultimately, I went to work for a big, large investment bank right out of college, got the job I wanted. And within probably very quick, short order, I'm like, "Oh, this was great." I focused on getting— I worked at JPMorgan, so it was one of the top banks. And I'm like, "This isn't so much what I really thought I wanted to do, but I thought I did." Until you get there. And I was investing personally, but what I started doing was actually I got married young, so a couple years after I was working, and within a year or so, my wife was and I were expecting. And when she was pregnant, she was exhausted. Like, she'd be asleep by the time like 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock rolled around. So here I am, I get home late, she'd like pass out within a couple minutes. And I'm like, at home. And like, what am I going to do now? So I actually started building an online business in the e-commerce space.

Wow. What do you do in your spare time? I just build businesses.

Yeah. And like, it was just like a thing. It was almost like a hobby, but it was like a hobby that made money. And then it started to grow and e-commerce businesses started getting bigger and I started learning online marketing. Okay, I need an email list. I need to be able to market to my customers. And I started expanding different industries. And, you know, in the beginning it started with eBay, then it became on Amazon. Then I started, you know, hey, I want to own the customer, right? So email marketing and all the different things. And my career continued to grow at the same time. Like, so I moved to investing in startups. So I worked at a venture capital firm and what we call private equity firms where we buy private companies. And I spent many, many years doing this. And to this day, I still do have this full-time job.

Oh, wow.

And what I found was that I was dealing with more and more online entrepreneurs. And they came from a totally different background. Some people came to this place because they didn't want to have a 9 to 5, they want to work for themselves. Some people left corporate because they didn't care if they worked more, but they just want to work for themselves. Or some people didn't realize they had created a job, they thought they were building a business, right? So like, I started helping people like, hey, just understanding the differences. And what I found more and more was as people were finding success online and making money, they actually had no idea what to do with it. And not only did they not have— know what to do with it, per se, the online marketing space markets to these people of— they market what I put in quotes like solutions, right? Like, hey, I'll teach you to day trade options, or I'll teach you to flip homes, or I'll teach you how to fix homes and then flip them, or whatever it is, right? And most of these things, not all, but many to most of these things are really now— they're actually not passive income investing, they're actually active new job income-producing things, right? And so people start to get sucked into the lure of something, but ultimately don't understand the downsides, don't realize what they're trading time-wise. And so ultimately, at first I started working primarily with very high earners, people who were making hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars of profit, not just top-line sales, but like they're sitting on this kind of cash and they don't know what to do with it. And I started just advising them And then I started giving them access to— one of the things I do is I see a lot of deal flow. So today my day job is I consult for very large investment firms. They hire me to value businesses and value investments. So I tell them what a business is worth and I tell them why, and we know the levers to make it worth more. And then I look at real estate deals. And so I started giving a lot of online entrepreneurs access to things that I was personally investing in and reviewing and saying, "Hey, you can invest side by side with me." And then it became clear that there was a bigger need where people are just like, "I don't even know the first thing about how to think about my future." If you're sitting on $10 million because you're doing so well, I wouldn't say it's hard to mess it up, but your future is pretty set, or you could do a lot of things with it. But if you're sitting on like $25,000, maybe even less, you don't necessarily know how you're going to get to the point where you're sitting on $10 million outside of growing your business. Like, how can that $10,000 or $25,000 become $100,000, $200,000, $500,000 while you're growing your business? And so the mistake I also see a lot is that people have this idea that, like, they're— I don't know why, but they're trained like, okay, build my business, and then after I've built my business and it's doing super well, and maybe even I sell it, then I can start to invest in the future. While really it should be a simultaneous thing. Build my business, and while I'm building my business, invest for the future. And so that's really what like I've, you know, kind of begin to, you know, last bunch of years been focusing on helping people with.

Wow. Oh, it's so needed. Yeah, we, so my husband and I are actually in the process right now of closing on our first rental, like rental property. Because like, we were like, wait a minute, like, I run my own business. He works a corporate job. In sales, and he's very good at it. But we both know that like, we like, I don't want to do this forever, right? Like, I want to be able to like kick back and like, hang out most of the time, you know, so we're like, okay, like, we have to start making these decisions now to like support that lifestyle, right? So like, even though like our, of course, our piggy bank can grow some more, but like, let's take some pennies out to go like put it in this thing that's going to make it grow faster. So that was like sort of our idea behind that. So Okay, so this is really good. How did you get— how did like the online entrepreneurs find you? Like, how do you— how did you start reaching them? Because it kind of reminds me of what is the guy who has a podcast and he like goes daily and he like, like gives you like the stock tips and stuff? There's probably a lot of those.

There's probably a lot of those. Yeah, exactly.

I can't, I can't tell you definitively just because that's sort of what you do though. Like, like Daniel does this. He like listens to the this podcast every day and it's like, here's what's happening with Apple. And like, you know, is that sort of what you do?

So it's interesting. I'll tell you why I don't, and not because there's anything wrong with it. The challenge is, is that if you are going to give people stock advice, specifically stocks, right, you now have to know everything. So, so part of my career, during my career path, one of the things I did was, is I was a stock analyst. Both for Wall Street firms. So at UBS and Bank of America, I used to write research reports on certain stocks. So the way it works there is you cover a sector and then you write these daily notes or you put out, you know, weekly calls and all this different stuff. And so basically you're saying, okay, this stock today is $10, I think it's going to go to $15, here's why, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

That's so much responsibility on you.

Yeah, yeah, there was a lot. Yeah, there was a lot of stress with that job. And then I moved to a firm where we actually, we would invest the money and we would buy it. We wouldn't like publish research, but we would actually say, okay, I think here's my conviction, here's why, blah, blah, blah. And I found is over time, I personally enjoy investing in private companies versus public, right? So Apple, Facebook, Amazon, these are publicly traded companies, meaning like you and I can buy a share or many shares on the public stock market. But if I wanted to buy a portion of your business, your coaching business, right, that's a private company.

Because it's not listed, right? It's not like approved or whatever. Okay.

Yeah. So, so when, when people have podcasts or people recommend specific stocks, the biggest thing that— the biggest challenge with it isn't that they could be right or wrong. Obviously, you can always be right or wrong. But the way to think about stocks is the easiest way to make this correlation is I'm going to create like an analogy. Okay. Think of If we take, for example, today is Thursday, September 23rd, when we're recording this. So Monday was whatever, the 20th or the 21st or something like that. On Monday, the stock market dropped a lot. It dropped about 3%, 3.5%. And if you think about that for a second, what you're basically saying is if Apple stock that day was down 3%, The company magically was worth 3% less than it was the day before. Does that make rational sense? No, it actually doesn't make any rational sense. So the challenge is that the business is worth something basically, for the most part, for a set period of time until some new information comes out. But on a daily basis, the stock market has willing buyers and willing sellers. And when there are more buyers than there are sellers, the prices go up. But it doesn't mean that the inherent value of the company actually went up, but the stock price is going up. And so it implies that the value of the company is going up, but really it's not. It's just, it's a function of more buyers than there are sellers. And so I say Mr. Market, I say the stock market is like, he's this crazy dude. Some days he's in a great mood and he gives you more money than the thing's worth, and some days he's in a bad mood and he takes He's only willing to give you less than it is. And so that's why when you talk about public things, it's good to explain what's happening in the market. If I sat here and I had a podcast that said, "Okay, the market was up today because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," it's good to learn, but it's not going to teach you necessarily, hey, what you should do based on it. And so the reason I don't love always focusing on the public, I invest a lot in the public market, but the reason I don't like teaching it is because so many things can happen that are not in your control.. And people just need to understand that. And so when you go out and you make a recommendation, and let's say for the next 6 months, the thing just goes down, down, down, down, down, down, people are like, oh, you're terrible. You don't know what you're doing. Yeah. But then the 6 months after that, it goes, you know, up 3 times as much. Oh, now you're a genius. So it's about long-term perspective and that kind of stuff. So most of what I do is more, uh, bigger picture. And I do explain Um, like I even have like a free Facebook group where I just like— I haven't been super active, but during COVID I was very active, like giving like daily or weekly updates on what's going on in the market. And just like, hey, this is just so you understand what's going on. Like when, uh, AMC and GameStop were happening, people didn't understand what was happening. They were like, oh, I don't know, this is crazy, or whatever it is. Or like, okay, let me just ride it and whatever it was. And I was just like, listen, you can make money or you can lose money, but here's what is actually happening. So I was kind of like giving the backstory. So people at least understood.

Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's good stuff. Okay, so if you focus on like the long-term picture, what I see like in clients that I work with and like, you know, friends that I have in the space, and like, you know, the coaching space is growing, but ultimately it is another job, right? Like I'm trading my time for my money. So whenever you have these online entrepreneurs come to you and they're like, hey, like I want to start building this, I want to think about the long-term picture, like What do you tell them to do? Are you like, hey, like, let's make a 10-year plan? Like, what would you say to them? Or like, what kind of questions would you start asking them to make a plan that's like fit for their life?

Yeah, no, totally. So I think the first thing I tell everybody is like, it's called personal finance for a reason. It's personal, right? And just because it fits me one way doesn't mean it fits you the same way. So one of the things we want to understand is like your risk tolerance, like how, how risk averse are you? Or how much risk are you willing to take?

I'm like a 1. Yeah. I want my money to be there.

Right. So, and so a lot of people are like, I worked hard for it. I don't want to lose it.

Right.

Yeah. But at the same time, like, you have to understand that the money needs to grow. So the way, the way I kind of explain it is like, think of your dollars are like little soldiers.

Okay.

Okay. They're gonna go out to, let's call it war, okay? But before they go out, they're going to go recruit more soldiers. And so when they go to war, what they do is they don't kill anybody, they just take more soldiers home with them. Okay. Okay, right? And so now you—

So now it's like a game of Go Fish.

Yeah, it's almost like Risk, you know, like you want to conquer more, right? Like, okay. Um, yeah, so, so Go Fish is, yeah, but I have to go and take from you. But here it's not, I'm not necessarily taking, right? It's okay. It's a function of like, hey, there are other soldiers hanging out doing nothing, right? They're sitting on, sitting around on the bus stop and doing nothing. My soldiers want to go and recruit them. So now they can work for me too, right? So I have work. You could be a worker. It doesn't have to be a soldier. It could be like workers, right? Okay. So I have workers and they go out and they find more workers for me. Okay. And so I can go send them to like dangerous areas, but they can come back with a whole lot more workers, or I can send them to a little bit safer neighborhoods and they'll come back with fewer workers, but it'll still be growing. So when I talk to people, the first questions I'm really asking is like, how do you feel about risk? How much are you willing to wake up in the morning and find that you're down? If you get into cryptocurrencies now, you wake up one day and you're down 20%, are you freaking out? Or do you have the longer-term view and say like, hey, listen, I'm okay with Bitcoin being down 20% these next 6 months because I believe that in a year, 2, 3, 5 from now, it's going to be 10x, or it's going to be 5x, or it's going to be 3x, whatever it is. So the same with stocks. If we're looking at stocks, I tell people, if you're going to invest in the stock market, you should not need that money for 3, 5, 10 years. And it's not that you can't get it. It's just that like the mindset is, if every day you're looking at how much it's up and how much it's down, you're going to drive yourself crazy, right?

Literally nuts. That was, that was Daniel during COVID Like we had nothing else to do. So he's like sitting on the couch, like on Robinhood.

Yeah, every single Which is what blew Robinhood up, right? Like, I mean, in a good way, right? Like, it's because people were doing that. And, and some people made a ton. And the truth of the matter is, we, we never experienced such a short, you know, in 18 months, the stock market basically did 100% return. So if you were doing it, like, you almost didn't have to do anything correct. All you had to do was deploy the money and boom, you know, literally me.

So, but I did, like, I've like doubled my money. And it's just been sitting there. And I'm like, I don't know what else to do with it. So I'm just gonna ride it out. So is it true that the stock market will like always goes up? Like, do you think that like, it just like will inevitably continue to go up? So I mean, like, yes, we're gonna have dips, right?

But like, so okay, so like, let's back up.

Okay. Okay.

Let's go to 2008. Right? We had like a massive correction in 2008. I know, like, it's It sounds like, for me, it feels like yesterday, but reality, it's 13 years ago, right? So like, it was a long time ago. That correction, if you look at what it wiped out, and how long it took to get back to where it was pre-'08. So if you look at the '07 peak on a chart, it basically took to like the middle to late 2010 to get back to that point. So we saw a massive correction, a 40% to 60% correction, and then we saw 2+ years to maybe get back up there, maybe even like 2011, actually. I'd have to look at a chart. I'm doing this all off the top of my head. From that dip, we experienced— Typically, you see historically, if you look at history, stock markets generally work in 7-year cycles, 7, 8-year cycles, meaning you tend to see 7, 8 years of up, then some sort of correction for, call it about a year, and then you start to see again 7 years. So what we call a distress cycle is, that's like a typical timeframe. Heading into COVID, we had entered basically a 10, 11-year unprecedented bull market. We had not seen it down year in, in what he called in about 11 years. So heading into COVID, we were in basically uncharted waters. In COVID, right, from like, call it mid to late February to basically March 23rd. I remember this, we saw a 20 to 40% correction, right?

Oh my god, it was so bad.

And then we literally saw inside the next 6 weeks, like a literally not just like a V-shaped recovery, but like, I don't know, like a hockey stick straight up, right? Yeah. Anyone who's been in the market 10, 20, 30 had never seen this. And so the question really becomes like, is that the new normal? Meaning the next time we see massive correction, is it quick, painful and quick? Or is it like the old stuff? And that's just long and drawn out? Yeah. And there's no way to know. But the reality is, is based on the amount of money that's out there now, meaning like, you know, people who took unemployment, people who took PPP, people who took EIDL, people who just like poured money in or whatever it was. Now you have these child credits that the government's giving out, right? So there's just tons of cash that's entered these things. So the real question is, is like, do we no longer see long drawn-out dips, but rather like fast and furious, and then we move on? And there's no way to know, right? Like history would say one thing, but we have no idea. There's no way to know. So when I tell people like, hey, they come to me and they're like, oh, what should I do? I'm like, listen, you need to take a long-term approach, right? So should stocks, can stocks go down? Yes, they can. If you would ask me this 10 years ago, I'd say, yeah, we should expect like a dip in a couple of years. And then we didn't really, yeah, obviously we saw a big opportunity last March, but Outside of that, you have little dips here and there, but we haven't seen like a real market correction. Historically, you'd see 15% to 20% corrections every few years, and it's healthy. It's normal. And so there's no definitive answer. I can't tell you like, "Oh, you know what? We're never going to see that again." But at the same time, the reality is I will never call the top, I will never call the bottom. You will never call the top, you will never call the bottom. And so my number one advice to people, and this is tangible to anyone listening, regardless of how they think about things, is what we call dollar-cost averaging, meaning we want to always be investing. That way we're buying at the top, which may feel bad, but we're also buying at the bottom. We're being consistent, just like a podcast does well when it's consistent. Email marketing does well when it's consistent. Organic marketing for coaches does well when they're consistent, right? Consistency trumps everything else. It erases mistakes. It hides mistakes. Same with investing. If you are consistently putting $10, $100, $50 a month into the market, you're going to buy at the top, you're going to buy at the bottom. At the end of the day, your returns are going to look better than the guy who tried to time the top or trying to time the bottom. And that's why when someone comes to me, they're like, hey, I'm sitting on boatloads of cash. Yeah, I'm not like, dump it all in. I actually want you to kind of ease it in because you're gonna buy at the top at some point. And but if, if you only put it in once, and it turns out that's the top, that sucks, you know. So, you know, like when you look at the long term, if you can consistently be putting money to work, whether it's in the stock market, whether it's in real estate, whether it's in whatever, but you're consistent about it, your returns are just going to end up naturally looking better.

Yeah, that's exactly what— because we know like the housing market is like crazy up right now. So we knew that like buying the house that we just bought, like we're paying quote unquote more than like what we would have paid for it 2 years ago, you know, or even like 12 months ago, right? So but we— but that was like something that we were okay with, because we're like, okay, if we don't purchase it. Like, this is money that we're like kind of losing in the meantime, right? It's like, yeah, we could wait and see what happens in a year from now. But guess what, those next 12 months, we're not going to be making the profit off of that same house, you know. And who knows if in the next 12 months that the market's going to go down, right? Like, we don't really know. Right.

So that was— and housing is a funny thing in the sense that like one of the things I think your average person doesn't understand is one of the drivers— real estate has a few drivers, right? Like the supply and demand is always a driver for pricing. But housing has another driver, and that is interest rates. So interest rates are at all-time lows, right? So the mortgage that you got on that allowed you to borrow more money cheaply. Right? So, so let's say you needed $200,000— let's say it was a $400,000 house. I'm just making up numbers. Okay, it was a $400,000 house. Okay, so, so you bought a $400,000 house, and you had $200,000 that you wanted to put into it, which is very high, like that's a 50% loan-to-value, meaning like you're putting in half of the equity. So let's hypothetically say that that was the case. Okay. So you could borrow $200,000 for 3% right now, probably even a little bit less, whatever it is. If you— if the housing market was where, where let's just say the interest rates moved to 5%, the cost of that $200,000 would be significantly more. On a monthly basis. If you looked at your monthly cash flow, you'd be like, oh, I don't even know if we rent this out, are we gonna, like, we're gonna get squeezed here and there. And so what that does is it makes that house come down to like $350,000. Because people can't afford that house as much because they can't borrow as much. They have, they have to come up with either cash or pay less. And so the interest rate component of the equation for housing is a huge factor. So likelihood is a year from now, interest rates will be higher than they are now. Okay, like, based on yesterday's Fed meeting, they said they're getting prepared to raise rates, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so if we raise rates, naturally, prices of housing should moderate to flat, to come down a little bit. Okay. And so there's no— again, it's like the stock market, right? You can't pick the top, you can't pick the bottom. But to your point is, it's like, okay, listen, I may have overpaid. Let's say I bought this $400,000 house. And really, a year from now, it's only going to be like $340,000, $350,000, $370,000, whatever it is, it's down 10%. But there's a few things that are going on. A, you would never be able to borrow the same amount of money at the same cost, it would cost you a lot more. B, you're building more equity because you're slowly kind of buying into the house, right? Like the mortgage is getting paid down. And at the end of the day, if you plan on holding it for a number years, it really, really won't matter. Yeah, you know, but the single-family home, like rental single-family homes has its— has a whole separate challenge. And that is like, how much do you and your husband want to be doing in terms of time allocation to this, repairs, even if you hire like an outsourced, you know, management company, you have to stay on top of them. So there's different, there's different things you have to like juggle. But I definitely say like, listen, certain areas of the country, housing has gotten completely out of control. Yeah. But it doesn't actually mean that it's going to come down that much. As rates rise, it should normalize, you know, flatten to come down. But there's no way to know because it goes back to the supply and demand thing. If there's still more buyers than there are sellers, prices will still rise even if rates, even if rates go up.

Hmm, yeah, that's so good. Because I mean, and like you were like ABCD is the fact that we're technically like not paying for it, you know, like the renters will be paying for it. So that was the other handoff.

That is the hope. That is the hope, right? Right. Assuming you have no vacancies and assuming you have no massive repairs and, you know, right, right.

That is the hope. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. So far, so good. And like you said, I think it is personal, right? Like it's a personal decision. So and diversifying it, like that's another thing is like, okay, that, that's one piece of the pie, right? Like don't go put all of your eggs in one basket. Yeah, yeah, like that's one piece of the puzzle, you know. So, okay, so Aria, if a new coach— we're just gonna say coach because that's who's mostly listening right now— if they were like, all right, help me, like I've just made $50,000 from this launch, or I'm sitting on this cash right now, um, what would you tell them to go do first?

Okay, so again, obviously personal. Um, the first question really is, is how much do they have set aside for what— let's call it like an emergency fund or sleep well at night fund, or like, okay, basically, like, let's say their coaching business fell apart in 3 months from now. Could they self-sustain their, their personal P&L, meaning like their personal expense side of the equation, for 3 months? Or would they be like, holy hell, I can't pay rent, I can't pay groceries, or whatever, right? So always have at least 3 months in cash that's not growing, right? Just like as a— so you don't, you don't have that panic. Yeah, you could always sell something, you could always do things, but it's, it's definitely better to kind of like think about that. Some people are super cautious and they want 6 months, some people even more and they want 9 or 12 months. Okay, just think about that for a second. Like, that means like the extra 6 months worth of money that's sitting in that bank account is doing nothing, literally. Like, it's, it's actually losing money to inflation. But we won't get into inflation. Because we could do economics class, 6 boring hours on that. We're not going to touch that. Okay. So as we think about this person, right, so if they, if they have their expenses for the next few months, the next thing I would say is like, hey, do you have any planned large expenses? Right? So like, are you looking to, you know, do you want to go to Hawaii next summer? Do you, you know, want to furnish a house or whatever it is? Because It's fine to invest that. But again, going back to the, hey, if you put that in the market, or if you put it in a house, you may be down in value. And you have to pay. Yeah. Are you gonna be okay with that? And did you need that money? So thinking about how you look at these next, you know, 12 to 18 months is going to be different than, than, you know, futuristic. But if you're like, hey, this $50,000 is not money I need anytime soon, right? Like, this is a 3+ year kind of thing. And it goes back to like, how much risk are you willing to take? How much thought do you want to do with this? How involved do you want to be? Right? Like some people, when you start talking about stocks, like their eyes roll back, they're like, I don't want to hear about this. And that's fine. And there's a lot of passive things you can do at low cost. Okay. And so one of the big things that people don't realize, this is like another thing that like, if you're not educated, you didn't even know to know, And that is that there are fees involved with a lot of these things, and fees ultimately can really destroy the long-term value that you're building. So you can have what we call like low to no fee things out there.

So like what? You should tell us.

Okay, so like, um, so there's, there's two differences that I've also learned that people don't understand. There's three things people don't understand the differences between. Stocks, single-name stocks, right? So the Facebooks, the Amazons, the, you know, whatever stocks— Apple, pick the company that you know that's public, right? That's a single-name stock. You're basically owning a portion, a small fraction of that business, okay? Next is something called a mutual fund, and then the next is called an ETF, an exchange-traded fund, okay? And they're all different. They're all publicly available. Anyone can go and open a Schwab, you can open a Robinhood, you can open a Webull, you can open TD Ameritrade, whatever you want. You can open the accounts. And there's obviously, when you open these accounts, there's two types of accounts. There's taxable and tax-deferred or tax-exempt. So this is like retirement versus taxable trading stuff. And again, we can spend like 15 minutes talking about that, whatever, but we'll focus here just on tactically these three things. We're going to stay focused. So when you open these accounts, you can buy a stock, And the industry has basically moved to no commissions, meaning I can buy, you know, some Facebook shares, whether it's 1 share, 10 shares, 100 shares, I can do it and no one will charge me any fees for that. Okay. Mutual funds historically didn't charge fees to buy them. But what a mutual fund is, is it's basically a basket of specific stocks. So we're going to use the one main basket, which is the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is the main United States index. It represents the 500 largest United States companies. So the Amazons, the Facebooks, Microsoft, Apple, all these guys are in the S&P 500. Okay. And what it is, is it trades daily based on how those each individual stocks are doing. That index will move in tandem. So if you have like the majority of those stocks going up today, that index is going to go up today. Okay, so if you have it in a mutual fund, you can get it through like a Vanguard or even Fidelity or Schwab. They all have their own, and they basically— there's no such thing as the S&P 500. Like, you can't buy it. You buy it through a vehicle, and the mutual fund is a vehicle, and it's called an index mutual fund, and it charges very little fees. We're talking about 0.03% type or 0.05%. Okay, so we're talking about what we call 5 basis points. 1% is 100 basis points. It's So this is 5 basis points. Okay. And the downside of a mutual fund is that it only trades once a day. Meaning if you place an order, and the market's down, and you're like, hey, buy, I want it now. Okay, it will actually buy it at 4 PM. So if at 9:32, the market's down, you want it now. And by 4 PM, the market's up, you're actually going to buy it when it's up. That's how a mutual fund works. Okay. The same with, the same with selling. Like if you have it and it's up and you're like, I want to sell it now, and you put in the sell order on a mutual fund— again, there's only mutual funds— and by the end of the day ends up down, that's where it will sell. It will sell at the down or up, whatever it is. It's, it's at the close of the day. Okay. And the industry was created so that people who don't have enough to buy lots of shares could buy fractions, and you can, you can buy $50 worth, you could buy $100 worth, whatever it is, and it's a lower end, you know, barrier to entry effectively. But there are lots of mutual funds that are not the S&P 500 that charge instead of 0.05%, they charge 0.5%, or they charge 0.85%, or they charge 1.2%. And, and so those fees are taking away from your actual returns. An ETF, an exchange-traded fund, is a newer vehicle. When I say newer, it's probably somewhere in the 10 to 20 years old, but they basically replicated the index funds and they made it act like a stock. So it trades every second, just like a regular stock. And so you don't have to wait till 4:00 PM to transact. If you sell it at 9:32, it will sell at 9:32. If you buy it at 9:32, it'll buy at 9:32. So if you wanted— the difference though is also that most of the time you have to buy— now again, we've moved to a world where you could buy fractional shares, but most of the time, like pre-Robinhood, you couldn't. You'd actually have to buy at least one whole share of this exchange-traded fund. So Vanguard was created, I don't know, in the '70s, '80s as a firm that said, "Hey, let's look out for the little guy and let's charge little fees." And so they have mutual funds and they also have ETFs, exchange-traded funds. And their exchange-traded funds, so VO for example is the ticker for the S&P 500 Vanguard ETF. And that one's probably one of the lowest fees. It's like 0.02% or 0.03% in terms of fees. But what people don't know is like, hey, you're told like, "Oh, go get this thing from Merrill Lynch or JP Morgan," or whatever it is. And it turns out that that fee in that mutual fund is like 1.2%. And it's just, they're taking money for not doing much for you. And most of the time, like if you look historically, those things underperform the S&P 500. So might as well. So if you came to me, if someone comes to me and says, hey, I'm having this coach, I just had this launch, I have this money, start simple. In the index, S&P 500, and you can get this in an exchange-traded fund, the ETF, or you can get it in a mutual fund, and you don't have to have single-name risk. Meaning like if you only buy Facebook and Facebook has a bad 3 years in a row, that's going to stink. But if you buy the S&P 500, you're going to balance out 500 companies, right? So even if Facebook has a bad run, Microsoft and Amazon may kind of counterbalance that.

Okay, so that is super helpful, I think, for a lot of the listeners because they're like, okay, cool, I can go to Vanguard or Fidelity, or what was it?

You could probably even get it on Robinhood or Webull or—

okay, and you would get a mutual fund, like go into a mutual—

like, like, where you can get the ETF, the exchange traded—

okay. And that would help them like build that wealth for the long term and not go get a rental property, right? Or not go and start an e-com business that's going to require more of their time, right?

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. And the rent and the rental property, the huge difference, right, is like, even if you, even if you buy a $100,000 house, you're going to need to write a much larger check than if you want to put $100 into the S&P 500.

Yep, absolutely. Wow, that was so good. So good. That was super tangible. Thank you so much. I think that we could talk about this like for hours, literally, because I'm just like soaking it up. I'm like, okay, well, like, tell me what kind of savings account I need. I feel like I just got like a free like coaching session. So thank you for that. My pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us, Aria, where can our listeners— do you still have your free Facebook group? Or do you hang out on like a different platform mostly? Where can they come and learn from you and soak up this information?

Yeah, so I have all the above. So on Instagram, I'm Aria, @AriaTheBusinessman, one word. Facebook, the group, I have to actually have to remember, I think it's called like Your Investing and Business something like that. I actually don't even remember. Like I said, I don't promote that group that much. But if you Google my name in, you know, if you search my name in, what do you call it, in Facebook and you look for like Your Investing, it should come up. Okay.

I'll link it in the show notes, everyone, so don't worry.

Okay. I'll send that to you. Awesome. And then the other place is like I have my own podcast called Inside the Lion's Den. Inside the Lion's Den. Inside the Lion's Den.

Oh, Inside the Lion's Den. Okay. And you talk about all these things in there?

I talk a mix of business and investing. Okay, awesome. And I do some introvert interviews of business owners, like to kind of understand like some of the challenges they face. We really focus on like the Lion's Den being a dark and unknown place. We focus a lot on the things you didn't even know you didn't know when you got—

oh my gosh, isn't that. So is it like beginner to like medium level friendly? Like, yes.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay. If we're like, what's an ETF? Like we would fit in? Like it would be?

Yeah. So I don't— it's funny, like I haven't really broken that down on my podcast. But a lot of people have asked for those types of things. So I've done— I did a whole segment on investing. There are a few episodes there. And I talked about real estate investing. And because I invest a lot of syndications, like so large, like 200, you know, unit apartment deal complex. So I broke down like the numbers and explain things in there.

Okay.

And then the two other— the websites you can find me is futurefundme.com. And the other one is solutionadvisory.com.

Okay, futurefundme.com and solutionadvisory.com. Yeah, we're gonna put all those links in the show notes, y'all. So like, you can pick your poison and just go there. There you go.

Awesome.

Well, y'all, I hope that you all enjoyed this episode. I hope that you were like taking notes I definitely was. Thank you so much, Aryeh, for coming on. I've really enjoyed this. And I think that our listeners have too. So thank you for coming on.

My pleasure. It was a great time.

Yes. Awesome.

Awesome.

All right, everyone, we will see you in the next episode. Go leave us a review. Say hello over on the Gram. And we'll see y'all later. Bye.