#17 Eoin McGee - How To Get Rich In 2024

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financial planner.

Okay, all right, all right. Financial planner Owen McGee, a fellow Irishman. This is the second Irish guest that we've had on the podcast, and we're 20 episodes in, so that's disgraceful. We need to get more people from the home country, but we're out here in Marbella, and today we're learning all Things Money. So I'm really excited, and one of the reasons I love doing these podcasts so much is I just get to have cool conversations where I find out a lot about stuff that I want to know. So tell me, first of all, how does one become a financial planner?

I think the question more like— if I can change your question slightly— why does someone become a financial planner? And it's very personal for me. Yeah, very personal for me as to why I became a financial planner. And actually, you know what, I'll give you the story because I've got time. But times before— but we do have time. When I was 2, my dad had a heart attack and he had a quadruple bypass. And when I was 6, he had another heart attack and he had 3 stents put in. And when I was 8, he had another heart attack and he had a quintuple bypass, 5 of them.

Oh my God, he's setting records here.

And he was, oh, and actually did set records, but he was only 48 at the time.

What?

So he had his first one at 42, then 46 and 48. And he turned to the doctor and he said, look, like we grew up in, depends if it's a job interview I'm going into, I grew up in Castleknock. If it's a fight I'm going into, I grew up in Blanchardstown.

It's one or the other, right?

So we grew up on the border between Castleknock and Blanche, and Dad used to cycle every day to Morehampton Road in Donnybrook. He used to be over and back. He looked after himself, wasn't a drinker, wasn't a smoker. Well, he wasn't a non-drinker, but he wasn't a big drinker, and he wasn't a smoker, kept his weight down, looked after himself. He was 48 years of age, and he said to the doctor, he said, "Boy, like, I've had 3 major heart incidents in the last 6 years. What am I doing wrong?" And the doctor said, "It's 2 things, Michael. One, you've got sticky blood. It's just hereditary. You can do nothing about it." Right? But he said, "The second thing is stress." And he said, "What do you think is the biggest stress in your life?" And Dad kind of sat back and kind of, mm, not really sure. And eventually, he kind of came to the conclusion, it's work. And Dad was nothing to do with financial services, wasn't a financial planner, nothing to do with it. And the doctor said, could you afford to give up work? And Dad kind of sat back and kind of went, mm, not sure. Did a bit of digging. And it took him about 2 years to get his head around it. But what he did discover was somebody along the line, and a financial advisor— we might go into the difference between an advisor and planner, right?

Yeah.

But someone somewhere along the line had sold him an income protection policy. And what that meant was he, because he was, he had to give up work on medical grounds, he was paid 75% of his wages until he was fit to go back to work or he hit retirement, whichever happened first. So at 50 years of age, Dad gave up work. Yeah. Right. And I was 10, he was 50. And I'm gonna be honest, Dad is dead 3 years now.

Sorry to hear that.

And if he died at, give you that again.

Hey, kind of like a truth. Yeah, go on.

Dad is dead 3 years now. He died at 78 years of age. And I absolutely believe because he got good advice, because someone sold him an income protection policy, we got an extra 28 years out of that.

Wow.

Right? And I'm not saying at 10 years of age I said, oh, I want to sell income protection for the rest of my life. But as I came out of college, I got offered a job in Irish Life. People at home might— will be familiar with Irish Life. They happened to be the people who were paying him his income protection. And I very quickly realized, I want to do for other families what that financial advisor did for my family. And that's why I became a financial planner.

Wow. So it's like there's an emotional thing there, you know?

And you know what, I don't think you can do— like, when I came into this, and this is just to jump on because I've mentioned it twice now, the difference between an advisor and a planner. I'm going to be really generous here, right? Really generalize it. A financial advisor will sit down with you and spend long enough with you to figure out how do they sell you the bag of products they have in their bag. How do they fit them into your life, right? A financial planner sits down with you, talks to you about you and your life and where you want to get to, what you want to achieve. And at the end of that, they might then go off looking for products to fit into your life. It's not the other way around. And that's the difference between a planner and advisor.

There's more of a holistic kind of approach to it. 100%. Yeah, that's what I get from it.

Best job in the world, Rob. Yeah. Like, if you think about who else, and you probably get, with some of the work that you do, I'm sure you get a bit of it, right? But literally, I get to talk to people about their finances. I get to talk to them about their health. I get to talk to them about their goals, their values, their objectives, and then we build a plan around them achieving what they want to achieve. And I get to check in on it once a year to see how it went. Like it's just, it's, and every time a client is making a big decision, they run it by me and we sit down, we say, right, how's this gonna impact things? What's the long-term impact about what you're about to do? And what you're trying to do is you're, people think, oh, you must be miserable with money. I'm not miserable with money, right? It's about making sure that the money you have is supporting the life that you wanna live. And it's about the money being separate, that it's a support. It's not the be-all and end-all. Like, money is useless to you if you're not managing it properly. It can absolutely destroy your life, and it can make your life very, very comfortable. But you don't get exponentially happier the more money you have.

I'm loving this. I'm loving this. I was like, I'm in for 2 hours of corporate talk. But I'm already motivated. I've got good energy. And I know what you mean. People, you know, I do some cool things. I have an amazing life. I do, I go on cool holidays. I have a nice villa in Marbella. Best thing I do is when I transform someone's fitness and they tell you how much you've changed their life. That is worth more than anything. So I can, you know, fitness and finances, these are two of the biggest parts of life. So I can understand where you're getting from.

But isn't that the thing, Rob? Isn't it like, I'm sure you love lifting weights, right? I'm sure you love doing what you're doing, But actually, I would imagine if we scratch the surface a little bit, what drives you in a work environment is the same thing that drives me. It's about helping other people.

Yeah. And it sounds like corny and cliché. Oh, of course they'll say that. But it's actually true that once you get into these occupations and jobs where you do have the opportunity to help people, it is just the ultimate feeling. And so on that, right? Okay, I'm pumped, right?

Good energy.

I go to you, I sign up, I say I need some help, my finances. Where do we begin?

Yeah, and it's interesting because like, I've— people who, who don't know me at all, right, won't know that like I've presented a TV show for the last couple of years on RTE. For people outside of Ireland, that's the equivalent of the BBC in Ireland, right? Um, but I presented a TV show called How to Be Good at Money, written a couple of books, do a lot of corporate speaking, but I have a private practice as well, right? And private practice is about helping the individuals, right? But what I would say is, is that sometimes, particularly after the TV show, people often think, oh, he helps people who are really struggling, because we always had people who are really struggling. But actually, in the private practice, it's about the people who are doing really well more so than the people who are struggling from a day-to-day point of view. Because commercially, it has to be about that, right? But you can also have great impact. But what do we do when someone comes in? Like, we have a couple of different— like, we've 23 working for us in the business now, 23 of us working together is what I prefer to put it, right? And what we do is we have 3 different offerings. I do the private client stuff. It's great. And that's who I deal with. And then we've got Choice and the Premier, and there's 3 different offerings. But if you're coming into me, what people are often really surprised about is in that first meeting, we'd call it a discovery meeting, is what we call it. In that first meeting, we don't talk about pensions or investments or any of that crap, right? We talk about you. What's important to you? Where are you trying to get to? What is it that you want to get out of life? And we have 2 really key questions, and I'll actually give them to you, right? So the first question we go to, and actually, you know what, right?

Maybe you don't want to share this, but I'm going to throw it at you, right?

Let's go. If you were 75 years old, you were 75 years of age today and you were looking back on what is now 2024. Yeah. What stuff, if you don't do it between now and then, would you be disappointed you didn't do, Rob?

Would I be disappointed?

Yes.

So I wish I did more of? Yeah.

Or I'm talking about achievements, I'm talking about experiences, I'm talking about, I don't know, like, did you want to play Augusta?

Did you?

Yeah. Did you want to go to a— I'm sure you've been to Six Nations or whatever. Did you want to go to— what, what is it that you're kind of going, I'm 75 years of age now, I thought I would've sometimes.

So this, I love what I do so much. I actually kind of asked myself that about the last 10 years. I go, what would I wish I, 'cause I just turned 31 and I'm like, what would I, you know, wish I did more of in the last, from 21 onwards? And I actually wish I uploaded more YouTube videos. I actually wish I worked more.

Right.

'Cause I love what I'm doing so much.

Yeah.

Whereas other people would probably say the opposite. I say, you know, I wish I, yeah, just uploaded more and you've made more content and worked harder. But I'd say most people would kind of say the opposite. Okay.

Yeah.

But I'm definitely a 1% case.

You're trying to dodge it there, right? So let's put you back, you're 75 right now. Think about it, you're 75 years of age. Between 31 and 75, what stuff do you expect is just gonna happen? That you're just gonna do, that you're gonna, if you wake up at 75, you go, Jesus, I absolutely thought I would've got to do that. It just never happened. And you know what? I can see you're struggling with this. And I tell you why you're struggling. The reason why you're struggling is because you're probably living your best life every day.

Yes. Right.

Sweet life. So if you could just say, you know what, if it could just repeat today, tomorrow, I'll be grand. I'll come to 75 and I'll achieve it. And I like you're out here in Marbella and you've made a choice to be out here and you got engaged recently.

Yeah.

That's all going well, I assume. And all of that stuff, right? Brings it together. We're just saying just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Like keep doing this. Yes.

That's all. That's my honest answer.

Yep.

To be honest. But maybe then maybe I should dream bigger. It's like the first thing that came out my head, I was like, maybe, you know, buy, another villa or maybe like buy a supercar, but then that's kind of materialistic and I don't really care that much about that. I would say maybe just grow my business more because then I'll get more feedback from amazing people and I'll get more people into the gym, which is my ultimate goal. Yeah, so that's what I'd probably say.

And it's interesting because when you then plug it a little bit, we would have— we get a lot, a lot of winners. We get a lot of people who just sold their business, like obviously with the media that's going on. You win the lotto, you've never had the money before, you kind of go, oh, or you inherit a big chunk of money or you sell your business for the first time and you you become super rich very quickly. We get a lot of those people who would come to us because they've never needed this advice before, and they're going, where do I go? Oh, there's your man off the telly, we'll get him. Yeah. And we get a lot of that stuff, and particularly with lotto winners, because it's such a kind of a spiral of whoa, bang, you've got loads of money, right? And it can actually destroy people, if I'm honest.

I actually heard it ruins more lives than makes them.

Absolutely, 100%. One of the things that I will always say to somebody who has come into me new money is take a step back, just have a think. What made you happy last week? Because what's going to make you happy next week is exactly the same thing. You just have more time to do it now. And when you've got everything you want financially, you have to really concentrate on the stuff that really makes you happy. And actually, you mentioned supercars, right? Yeah, you might buy one. The one— the first one might be lovely, the second one won't make the same impact.

Yeah.

And you just continue to chase that and chase that. I'm not saying don't buy a supercar. You want to buy go buy a supercar, right? If you've got the money, it's not going to bankrupt you, go for it, right? But actually, I promise you, the, the moments that you spend here behind me sitting on the couch with your partner are much more important than the moments you're gonna have sitting next to her in the supercar.

Exactly. We actually, like, we have a friend here who owns like a supercar garage and he lets me take one whenever I want, like literally. Yeah, I know. I'm like, he's like, take it for 5 days. And on day 3, I'm like, oh geez, we've gotta crawl back into this thing again. Porsche GT3 and an Audi R8. I'm like, Linda, I can't do Mercadona in this. I can't get groceries in this. So I completely know what you're saying.

And what I would say is, is that's the important thing. And there is actually research that shows us that you, like, when you get to a certain level of income and wealth, right? When you're on a very, very low wage, it's miserable, right?

Yes.

If you can't make ends meet, you're really miserable. But then you kind of, and it depends on what country you're in, about €60,000 the last time I checked. That's what I, I read, at around €60,000, €70,000. It's probably gone up now with inflation. The last time I checked, it was around €60,000, €70,000. Happiness gone up for inflation. But now you're at a comfortable level, right? And they're— but if you get to— if you're— let's say the figure is €60,000. I should have really checked, right? Let's say the figure is €60,000. Someone on €120,000 isn't twice as happy as the person on €60,000. Yeah. Now, they might be twice as happy as the person on €30,000, but it doesn't get exponentially better as you go up the scale, right? And people will often look, and they're trying to retain something, trying to retain something. And that's great, we need to We need to have things we're driving towards, but don't hook your happiness on what might be in the future. Let me actually jump back a sec because we talked about 75 looking back. That's the first question we asked.

Okay, brilliant. I really like that one as well. I'm gonna have a good think about that.

The two of you will be sitting here later, right? You'll be talking about what is your 75 thing? But this one, there's a friend of mine, Claire, right? And at 30 years of age, Claire got cancer. We were talking about dad's heart and now we're talking about cancer.

That's life. That's life. This is a real podcast.

Cancer, actually very good story given that I was walking along the beach this morning and I was, looking at the waters and geez, I'd say it's cold in there. I remember one time, so Claire got breast cancer and she had a mastectomy, right? But that's a side issue now, we're gonna do a separate story. I remember we were down in Ross Lair and Claire and I were getting into the water, it was freezing and she was not going, water was so cold. She goes, Jesus, thank God I've only one nipple.

That is the definition of half glass full, guys. One nipple left, half glass full.

But anyway, Claire got cancer at 30, she had a mastectomy, it was staged, Stage 4 cancer. 3 years later, the cancer was treated, it was gone. She never said she beat cancer. She said they treated it, they got rid of it, the drugs did it, got me sorted out, I'm good. But I've had stage 4 cancer. I'm 33 years of age. I don't know if you've ever had anyone touched off cancer before.

Yeah, my mother had breast cancer as well, quite badly.

Yeah. And Claire says, I'm 33 years of age, it's going to come back, it's going to get me. And she's like, I'm going to do stuff, right? And I remember I was sitting on her bed and the cancer had come back. Now Claire is dead 8 years this month. Yeah, at the end of this month she'll be dead 8 years, right? Remember sitting at the end of her bed and Claire said to me, I'm really lucky. I'm like, the cancer was back and I'm looking at her and I think we're at that point, we're at the stage, we're kind of going, you're going to die, but nobody's talking about this yet, right? Nobody's talking about you dying, right? I remember sitting with her and going, Claire, explain that to me. How do you think you're really lucky? She goes, she had 3 years of health in the middle, right? At 33 to 36, she was healthy. She said I lived more of my life in the last 3 years than I would've in the next 30. She did Glastonbury 3 times. She did a rave on a beach in Ibiza with the girls, right? She married her boyfriend of 16 years who was a father of her kids, right? She, and actually I remember her at her speech, Claire typical at her speech, it was 90, 100 of us at the wedding. 'Cause there's no randomers here. And I just thought that was a lovely, that was during her speech, I thought it was a lovely, everyone was there with intent. Everyone was there because she wanted them there and he wanted them there. But she did loads of lovely stuff, right? And she did it. This was before mindfulness was a thing, right? But she was really mindful about what am I going to do with my 3 years. And she said to me, Eoghan, ask your clients. So every client that comes into us, one of— in our first meeting, in that discovery meeting, I ask them the Claire question. The Claire question is, if you had 2 years to live, you've got your full health, and forget about money, what are you doing for the next 2 years?

Wow. Now that, that's one I could definitely answer because, you know, sometimes I do wake up and you know, I, I quit my 9 to 5 to have more free time, but now I work 24/7, 365.

Yeah.

So I'm like, you know, over the next 2 years, you know, I would love to travel. Me and Linda love traveling together and just do a Claire on it, to be honest.

But it's been—

she had an ideal 3 years.

She did. She had an amazing 3 years and she really enjoyed it. And like, she wasn't— she— I'm not going to pretend she wasn't miserable at times.

Yeah, of course.

But she made the absolute most of it. Yeah, she really did. Actually, I tried to go to Glastonbury next year and was trying to get tickets and queued for tickets, couldn't get tickets. Yeah, no, apparently it's the most popular concert in the world. It's like, it's incredibly—

that and Burning Man.

She got them 3 years in a row. What? I'm like, some god or whatever you believe in was looking after you. Like, hell in God's name.

The Glasgow gods.

Yeah, she did the first year in a tent, and then she said, I'm never doing a tent again. She did a camper van for 2 years, then they drove over, and there was a couple that went over. But no, like, and that's a really good question for us to kind of check in on ourselves. What are you going to do for the next 2 years? You're going to be dead in 2 years' time. Forget about the misery and everything that you're leaving behind you. Finances are okay. What do you want to do for the next 2 years? And it's really interesting when I ask the 75 question and people say, oh, I want to achieve this in my career and I want to do this, I want to do that, and then you ask the 2 years. Some people like you kind of struggle where they're actually, they're doing what they want to do every day, right? So they find that question a little bit harder, right? But oftentimes the contrast between what they say, if I hit 75 looking back, what do I want to achieve? And you've only got 2 years, what are you going to do? And you know what's really interesting? 50/50 in round whether people are going to retire, like give up work or not give up work. Some people say, no, I'm going to keep working, I love what I do. And other people, I'm out the door, I'm gone, I can't wait to get out the door. And you know, I often think if you're, if you're really keen to get out of work and you don't want to work anymore, it's not an awful place to be. Like, we're lucky. Yeah, we're blessed. Like, we— I said very holy, keeping blessed in God.

That's good. I'm a holy man.

Um, but like, how lucky are we? You love what you do. Yeah, I love what I do.

So I basically, I about 8 years ago, I was in a job that I hated so much.

What were you doing?

I'd wake up every day so depressed. So it was, I don't wanna name the company. Yeah, that's all right. You know, 'cause I quit. So it was actually something to do with nutrition.

Okay.

And I thought, that's why I thought I would like it. And at the end of the day, it was just a desk job and it was 9 to 6 every day. And like, you know, if you'd leave the office early, everyone would be looking at you like, oh, look at this guy. And I'd be like, run out the door. And so it was the hours, the lack of freedom, and just, I thought to myself, I was like 21 or 22 at the time. I was like, this can't be it. Like this can't be the end of the road.

Yeah.

And then so one day, it took me 3 weeks to build up the courage, but one day I walk into my boss's office and I go, look, I want to go full-time in the fitness industry. I want to start my own coaching company, personal training business. I want to be on YouTube. I want to be talking about all these topics that I want to be talking about. And he was like, awesome, go for it.

Yeah. He was like, you're absolutely shite at work.

You're doing nothing here. He was like, I saw you riding past hands on your laptop the other day constantly. So he was actually super cool. Like, I actually thought he was a visionary and he saw something in you.

He just wanted to get rid of you.

Yeah, he was probably like, now I don't have to write him a severance package. So he was super cool. And then he was like, right, go on your way. And I couldn't even tell my family that I quit my job. And so for a week, I was pretending to like go into work. I was just in the gym trying to figure it all out. And then, so that was, you know, 8 years ago now, and things have blossomed, they've gone very well. But so I know the feeling of absolutely hating what I want to do. And I was honestly, I don't want to go into graphic detail, but I was super, super down and depressed. And I thought like that this was just going to be my life for like the next couple of decades. So that's why I'm so grateful. And every day, so another thing, I suffer from severe imposter syndrome. I think someone's going to bust in the door any minute and be like, 'All right, the jig's up, it's over, get back in that cubicle.' So that's why every day I'm just very grateful and happy.

And you know what, it's funny, in 2018— geez, I'm getting very deep. You know what I mean? I flew over last night and with my buddy Johnny is here with me, and we had a few beers last night, so you're getting me very emotional and a little bit hungover.

I definitely had a few this morning as well. No way, you're on holiday?

We had, we had one just at the corner there a few minutes ago, but just the one.

No wonder you couldn't find the house.

But we, um, 2018, 4th of May, I, I wasn't locked, right, but I fell out of a taxi. I, I don't know what happened. I think I collapsed getting out of a taxi. I smacked my head, cracked my skull in 3 places. 4th of May, uh, woke up in a hospital bed the next morning, had brain surgery. Yeah, I had cracked my skull and massive brain bleed. And, uh, I came out of that— I'll never forget, actually, that was on a Thursday night it happened. They put me into Portlaoise because I was down with Carlo at a a work thing, right? Down to Carlow, they put me into Portlaoise, they left me overnight. The MRI people came in at 9 AM, right? They scanned me and said, 'Balmount, quick, Balmount, quick.' They were trying to sort of chop her out, they were trying to do this, and eventually it's, 'No, it's going to be quicker in the back of an ambulance.' They put me in an ambulance, sent me up to Balmount. I got surgery that afternoon. And I, like, you know in a film, right? Do you ever see a film where you're, you're looking at it from inside their eyes and they open their eyes?

Yeah, it's like, yeah, and then the eyes are flashing.

Yeah, and that's what it was, like the scene changes and I could open my eyes on the back of it back of an ambulance and then my eyes would close and then I'd open again. I'm looking up at the ceiling of a hospital, right? And then you're being dragged into surgery, you're being wheeled into surgery. And I remember, but anyway, Saturday morning was the first time I properly woke up. Yeah. And I woke up to, there was a doctor and a whole pile of team around the end of the bed. And I didn't realize at this stage that I was still on watch. They were ready to bring me back for surgery, right? Because they didn't know if they got enough of the bleed out or if it was gonna bleed, continue to bleed, or if it had worked, right? And the doctor was standing around and I said, sorry, doctor, can I just ask you something? When you're ready. And he was talking to them, he wasn't talking to me, right? And he goes, yeah, just one second. He was off. I said, um, when can I go back to work? Nice, and he's grinding. He goes, he goes, sorry. And I said, when can I go back to work? And he said, I don't know, 6, 8 weeks. And I said, no, sorry, Dr. Can you tell me exactly when I can go back to work? Like, I work for myself. And at that time we had 3 in the office, me and 3 others in the office. And he said— I said, I really need to know when I'm going back, you don't understand. And he said, no, you don't understand. I have you here alive. And he walked away.

Damn, mic drop.

And I went, oh, right, okay. And that was the first time I realized just how serious it was. And I sat there for probably the next hour or two just thinking about stuff in my life. And I said, what do I want to change here? What stuff has to change? I made some massive decisions, but I made some business decisions as well, all right? And one of the decisions was I spent more of the next 3 months worrying about work than I did worried about my health.

Yeah.

I said, I'm never in that position again. And one of the things I did was I realized I'm spending a whole pile of time— I call it my media work. So media is TVs, books, corporate speaking, whatever, right? All going on. And you're on the radio a couple of times a week, you're doing loads of stuff, right? And that's my media work. And then my private practice is the other thing. And I was trying to give 100% to both, and I wasn't. I was giving 40% to both.

Yes.

And I was wrecked, right? And I I would suggest that's what led me to collapsing and hitting my head, right? I said, right, first things first, I'm never being in a hospital bed again worrying about will the business still be there when I get back to it. Nice. So I appointed a guy, he's with me, Colin is with me 3 months— sorry, 3 years next month. And I said to him, I want you to come in, I want you to run the business. I was thinking about selling it, right? Yes. It's too early to sell it. I don't want to sell it. I love what I do. I really don't want to. Someone needs to come in and take the potential. I said, I want you to come in, I want you to run the business. And he was kind of, oh, you're always going to undercut my decision. And I'm telling you, I'm not, right? I just want to be a financial planner. I just want to deal with the clients. I want you to deal with HR. I want you to do accounting. I want you to deal with central bank. I want you to deal with all. I just, I love dealing with clients. I'll help you at board level, but you'll run the business, you'll make the decisions, and I'll support you. And I'll deal with the clients.

You just have a chat about, you know, your Clare years and what you want to do. Survive the fun stuff.

And I want to change I don't want to wake up in a couple of years' time and say to myself, I messed up the media opportunity, it's gone. And I messed up Prosperous, which is the name of the company. I messed up Prosperous because I didn't give it— so I want you to look after Prosperous. I want you to make the most out of it. And actually on Christmas Day this year, I sent him a text to say, thanks for the gift of letting me see Prosperous reach its potential.

Nice. Say that was very nice to receive.

Yeah. And we're not there. Maybe it was, he never told me.

We're not there yet.

We're on such a path, like we have 23 staff now. No, right? We will, we will have 31, I think, is the plan by the end of this year. We'll have 40, but then we'll probably plateau off at 40 or 50 staff the year after, right? He is absolutely— he's all about policies, procedures. He's all that other stuff I hate, right? He's all about getting the structures in place. And you know what, he did say to me about a year later, he goes, I'm surprised how much you just let me take the reins. Yeah, I really didn't believe it. But I, I, I didn't have the skill set he has. I recognized Prosperous needed that skill set, and I just took a step back and said, you'd go you. You go make the most of it. I'll support you whatever way I need to, but I'm just here. I'm a financial planner. That's what I want to do. Because when I was happiest in my career was back in 2001, 2002. I was working for Irish Life, which happened to be the same people who sold the income protection to my dad.

There you go, all comes around.

I was working for them, and I looked back when I was sitting in that hospital bed that morning on the 5th of May, which is the day after, right, the 5th of May. I said, when was I happiest in my career? And it was Irish Life. And then I said, why is that? Because I was just dealing with clients.

You're just chatting, chatting away. Yeah, I always say outsource the stuff that like you really don't have to. For example, no one can jump into your body and talk on TV, or they can talk on the radio or do a call, but someone can do the accounts and the writing and everything. So it's stuff that you just can't get other people to do, you do it. But if you can outsource it, do it as soon as possible.

I don't know if you've ever read the book The E-Myth And if you're ever thinking, if anyone listens to this who's ever thinking about going into business by themselves, right? So if you think me, take me as an example, I was a financial planner with Irish Life and then I went off and did a couple of things with some of the banks and a couple of other things. And I said, you know what, I'm a financial planner, I want to do this for myself. And I set up in 2008 and very quickly you realize, whoa, I just want to be a financial planner, but I know I'm hate— yeah, and marketing and everything. I went into a partnership first, then did 2 years of that and then went out on my own, on my own in 2008. But the The book, The E-Myth, is The E-Myth, and the tagline is why small businesses fail. Yeah. And the main reason small businesses fail is because someone has a skill, right? You're a PT, or you're a financial planner, or you're a hairdresser, right? It doesn't matter what it is. And you say, I'm going to do this for myself, and I'm going to keep all the profits for me.

Yeah.

And then you step out of it, and you're no longer a hairdresser. You're everything. You're marketing, you're sales, you're accounts, you're HR, you're everything. And people don't naturally have that skill set because they're really good hairdressers, or really good PTs, or whatever it is that they are. but they doesn't naturally progress into being a really good business owner. And it's a great book for reading in terms of you're thinking about, I would always say people come to me and say, I'm thinking about going out on my own, what do you think? Read that book and see what you think first.

Okay, nice. The E-Myth.

The E-Myth. That one. And the other one I give to people who will do, and we have a stack of them in the office, is Start With Why. I'm sure you've heard of Simon Sinek.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah.

I watch all his podcasts every single week.

And if you want to cheat—

Kinda looks like you.

Okay, fair enough.

I'll take that one. He's a handsome guy.

And if you want to cheat, people who don't know Simon Sinek, the G-code there is to look at his TED Talk.

Yeah, that's how I found him.

He's just superb. Like, he's really— and they're the two books I would say anyone starting on their own— Start With Why changed my business completely. I'm actually— if you think about you, I'm fairly sure you were one of the first to adopt YouTube.

Yeah, I was the first Irish fitness YouTuber. That's my claim to fame.

Yeah. And what I would say is, people I'm sure were looking at you going, ah, here, like, what do you think— who do you think you are? What are you doing? You've got to put a bit of backlash.

Yeah.

It's no different, like, in the financial planning world in Ireland, right? Or financial advice world in Ireland, whatever way you— whatever label you want to put on it. We charge fees, right?

Oh yeah.

And most people will just take commissions, right? And we have— I'd love if the entire industry was just fee-based, right? We do take commissions, but not upfront commissions. We take what's called a trail. It doesn't matter, we're getting too technical here. But we were an early adopter. We weren't the first, but we were an earlier adopter after I read Start with Wise. And now fees are the way it So, because I want the client to sit in front of me, I'm going to charge them a fee for what I'm giving, for the advice I'm giving them. I'm going to build a financial plan for them. And I want them to have confidence that I'm not doing it to sell them a product at the end of it. Yeah. My lights are going to stay on with the fee, right? And if a fee comes out, or if a product comes out of the back of it, great, fine. We'll look after that. We'll implement it. We'll do it. One of the things actually I was thinking about, we've been working on some— I spent a lot of time over and back in Dubai in the last 2 years. And I get a huge demand from Dubai for clients.

We're going next week.

Yeah, yeah, it is a bit Wild West out in Dubai from a financial services point of view.

I have some funny questions on that. We'll get to that, but go on.

It is, it's a bit of a killer. Like, you're out there and someone— like, I have seen things where people are taking 25% commission, right? And 25% commissions, you mean you put, you invest 100 grand and they're taking 25 grand in fees, right? It's Wild West. And not only that, I have seen it, I actually seen the documents, but this is another contract where there's early exit penalties, right? So you put 100 grand away, and if you take it out early, there's a 40% penalty for taking it out early.

If you're in like a different country or something, if you're not—

no, if you just have the product with them, you're still in Dubai, and you say, oh listen, I need to take that money out, I'm taking it out earlier than I told you I was going to take it out, and they'll hit you with a 40— so 100 grand, they're going to take 40 grand off you. And then I looked at the T&Cs and said, what's early? What, what define early? The first 25 years was early.

That's ridiculous.

It's just— it's— and it's what— but anyway, we looked at setting up out there because we're getting so many inquiries. We were over and back and over and back. And actually, one of the things we've decided now is it's just that because it's such Wild West, you're up against— you're up against this because they can pay stupid things for offices and staff and everything else because they're getting 25% of your money. And I just wouldn't do it like that. It's wrong, right? So I just wouldn't do it like that. So it's not a level playing field. So we are putting a model together at the moment where we're doing Prosperous International.

Nice.

Right? And what Prosperous International will do is it'll be the private client service. It'll be a set fee on a year-to-year basis, right? But we won't do tax advice. We won't do legal advice. We won't do any product implementation, which means we can deal with you wherever you are in the world. We'll just do the financial planning. We'll just do your 75 looking back year 2. Here's what your long-term financial future looks like. Like. Now, if you change this, this, and this, here's what your long-term financial future looks like, right? Here's all the stuff you want to do. And for you, like, Rob, I don't know where you're at, and I don't need to know where you're at, but one of the things that we hook everything on is financial independence. Yes. At what point in your life have you created enough wealth that you never have to work again? You never have to worry about money, right? What age are you going to be? Are you going to be 35? Are you— were you there at 25, right? Where are you on that scale? And if you change this, this, this, is it going to be 33 instead of 35, or it's going to be 37 instead? So you talk about buying another villa, right? You buy another villa and you get 3 grand a month off it, right? Does that make it 34 or 36?

Yeah.

What's the long-term impact of the financial decisions you're making today? And what we're, what we're doing with the, with the Prosperous International is we're saying, right, we get so many inquiries from abroad, and it's because of the social media, right? The Instagram in particular.

Like, is that, is that your main, like, marketing where it comes from?

Yeah, like I just, I think we've hit 100, just over 130,000 a year, up at what, 650, 700? Yeah, yeah, I'm at about 130,000, but like if you look at this, I was at 400 in December '19.

Yeah, your account's going crazy.

Oh, it's nuts.

That's how I found you and I DM'd you and I was like, hey, let's get you on the podcast.

And we, we, but because of that, you have a lot of Irish abroad who are kind of going, 11% of the world's population claim Irish heritage.

Yeah, it's good. Do you know why? It's because of the famine when we all We all got out of Ireland because we ran out of potatoes. And now there was a stage in America in, you know, 19-whatever, whatever year that was, where it's like 1 in 10 people were actually Irish. So that's where it came from.

And now 11% of the world's population. So 1 in 10 people. So if you're in a room, a bar in Bangkok— well, if it's a bar, it's probably more like 5 in 10. But if you're in a room in Bangkok, 1 in 10 of those people in that room are going to claim Irish heritage.

I'm not surprised. Even out here in Marbella especially, like, we do not feel home. Homesick whatsoever. We're like, it's too many Irish.

Yeah, but it is lovely.

Now we really like it.

I was walking on the promenade this morning and you just clock an Irish accent, you hear it, and you just kind of go, yeah. And you don't even say, like, they're being in conversation, you don't even say, you just kind of feel home.

Yeah, I know, we love it.

Like, and what I would say is, is because of the social media following, because of the, the increase in that social media following, we get a lot of inquiries from abroad and we're saying, how do we feed that, right? And we have regulatory issues in terms of So if there's product to be done, we'll tell people how to invest the money. We just won't invest, for an international client, we won't invest the money for them. We'll tell them this is what the way you need to do it and—

Give us a fee, you know?

Yeah, pay the fee and we'll sit down with you however often you need, but at least once a year. And that's the way we work it. So that's in development at the moment, but I think it's hopefully ticks that box for the international clients who are coming at us.

Nice. That's more of a straight up way to do it as well. Things get messy with percentages. Yes. So back to the money talk.

Yes.

Do you have a set of rules for money that you follow? Are you talking about day-to-day stuff?

Are you talking about— long-term stuff because of two different sets of rules.

Day-to-day, let's begin.

Day-to-day stuff. Like, one of the things people— like, when I get stopped in the streets, nobody ever says, oh, can I just ask you this question about myself? They always say, can I ask you a question for a friend?

Yeah, it's a private thing. People are very sensitive over it.

We are a country that does not talk about money.

No, which I think is terrible.

I'm going to come back to that now in a second, right? But one of the things that I would suggest that people— and people kind of go, that's just too simple, it's too straightforward, what are you talking about, Owen? Getting to know the difference between your conscious spending and subconscious spending is the biggest game changer you can have, right?

The amount of carryover with diet.

Yeah, and actually a lot of this stuff, yeah, a lot of this is crazy. And I guarantee you the stuff that it's very, very—

I'm actually serious. It's so— the one of the best, um, there's a book on it, there's also a TV series on it, and it's called Mindless Eating, right? Okay. And so So I was like talking to a coach and he was saying he was having a problem with a client who was just secret eating. That's actually the name of a TV show, Secret Eaters, right? And what they do is they get a group of people trying to lose weight and they put TV cameras or CCTV cameras in their house. They don't know about it.

Right.

And they go, tell us in a food diary how much you're eating. And then it shows them themselves how much they're actually eating.

It's mind-blowing.

They say they're eating 2,000 calories, they're actually eating 8,000. Wow.

It's like, honestly, Not even close.

So it's crazy. And I presume spending is insane.

And actually, when you're talking about that, I often wonder about, like, a chef must be the toughest job in the world because they're tasting all day.

Like this. Yeah.

Imagine the amount of calories you're getting in there.

I know.

It must be just— and that's subconscious eating.

It is.

Subconscious spending, right?

Mindless eating.

I might talk about subconscious and mindless, but subconscious and conscious. Subconscious— conscious spending is going into the shop to buy a Diet Coke.

Yeah.

Subconscious is walking out with a packet of crisps as well. Yes. You didn't mean to buy the packet of crisps. You just saw them, you picked them up, you grabbed them, you bought them, and now you're eating them walking down the street, right? So what I would say is, if you can get on top of your conscious versus subconscious spending, you'll be shocked. Like, if you take March 2020, right, just as we were all going into lockdown, right? In Ireland, we were all going into lockdown, right? And in March 2020, as a nation, Ireland saved €443 million, or put into savings, right? All the households combined, not companies, just individuals in Ireland saved a total combined $443 million. And we're kind of averaging $443 million.

Yeah, that's huge.

In the first month, full month of lockdown, which was April 2020, think about what happened, right? We stopped driving to work. We stopped going out for dinner. We stopped grabbing the packet of crisps. We cut out our subconscious spending completely. Think about even when you went to the shop. I don't know if you were here. You were still over—

we were in London, which was peak lockdown. It was super curtain twitchers. You know, it was really locked down.

Even if you'd think about what happened when you went to the supermarket. You queued up outside 2 meters apart, you went in, you got out quick before you got COVID, right? Yes. But you had a list, you stuck to the list, and you got out quick as you could, right? So we— it was very, very conscious spending. There was very little subconscious spending. Instead of saving €443 million like we did in March, in April we saved €3,000 million. We saved €3 billion in the month of April 2020, the first full month of lockdown. Down, right? So don't underestimate the power of the difference between conscious and subconscious spending. And what I would say is, if anyone's listened to this— and I, I have spoken about this loads of times, anyone who follows me, this is not new, but it still doesn't make it less important, right? For the next week, after whatever day it is you're listening to this podcast, right, for the next week, every— don't change your spending habits, but every time you spend money, take out your phone and put into Notes: Diet Coke, €2.20, packet of crisps, €1.50, right? Don't change your spending, just list out what you spent money on and how much it and whether it's 80 quid on jeans or whatever it is, right? Every time you spend, a week later, take out your phone, take out a pen and piece of paper, and something happens in our brain when we take out a pen and paper, right?

Big on journaling.

Yeah.

Go on.

So take out a pen and paper, write a line down the middle of it, and write conscious spending, subconscious spending. Or some people find it easier to get their head around it, added value to my life, didn't add value to my life. Yes. And categorize everything that you've spent money on. And put them on one side or the other. And you know what, your first coffee of the morning might have added value to your life, but did your seventh, right?

Did it really make that much of a difference?

And what you've got then at the end of that is you've got a list of all the stuff that you spent money on last week that added no value to your life, and you can cut that stuff next week and you're still gonna get the same enjoyment out of life, but you're just gonna have more money. Yeah. And but the trick, and this is where it really changes things, it's what you do with that extra money. You can then spend that on reducing debts or doing something else, or you can spend it on stuff that adds value to your life. Yeah, it's— you're not— I'm not looking at decreasing your spending, I'm just looking at stripping out the crap out of your life that does nothing for you.

Yeah.

And that is the key to me, the first starting block. That's the key thing that you need to get your head around. And people would say to me, oh, you must be miserable, like, that's horrendous, right? No, I do this. It's no different. You probably calorie count from time to time.

I do. Oh, exactly. Yes, I'll do like week where I'm really accurate. And it's so funny, I, I didn't want to bring the flow there, but when I'm start working with someone, I say, hey, you know, don't change your diet, just keep a food diary for the week. And now we know how much you're eating, so now we can adjust from there. It's like this, so similar, it's crazy.

Yeah, it is crazy. And then you've got little tricks that do— and actually, it was the thing that you engaged in me first, because I was looking back before I came in today. There's little things then that you can help yourself with when you're not on a full-on I'm counting my calories or I'm counting my spending, my confidence.

You know, you've given yourself good habits and you know how long a piece of string thing is you learn it, you get it right.

But then there's little tricks. Like, one of the things I'd always say is don't save your credit or debit card details to websites you use, right?

Yeah.

Like, you have to create that barrier to spending. It's no different, I suppose, to bring it back to food. Don't have sweets in the house. Yes.

Oh my God, if there's something like that I just absolutely love and it's in the fridge, I'm eating it.

You're just going to eat it. Absolutely. Yeah. And what I would say is, is you need to be— there's a thing called hic and click. Thursday evenings, 9 PM, And it just is proven, right?

Yeah.

Thursday evenings, 9 PM, hick and click is hick and click, right? So you've had a glass of wine, right, or beer or whatever, and you just shop online.

And no, we've, we've fully done that before. We have came in from a date night, we're in a good mood.

As long as it's not a supercar, you're off.

Yeah, I'm sure you can do that in a transaction.

But what you need to do to prevent yourself from hick and click, or to prevent yourself is don't make it that. If you're sitting on the couch and you're ready to buy something, you physically have to get off the couch, go find the credit card or the debit card. I don't like credit cards. Yeah, go find it. I don't have a credit card.

You'll be happy.

Yeah, I don't either. Yeah. And people are shocked.

Irish people don't. It's the guys, Americans watching this, they are shocked at that. Irish people, I know hardly anyone with a credit card.

But also people come to me, oh, I need a credit card because I'm going to the States.

I feel like I don't get— I really don't get it. I really don't get it.

And it's just, it's one— I'm not a fan of credit cards.

Yeah.

Now in the States it's different because they really incentivize with points.

Yeah.

All these different things, right?

Mass consumerism.

It's not an Irish thing, but get yourself off the couch. And then some people say, I didn't need to get off the couch, I know the 23 digits, I know the 16 and the 4, the date, the month, and the 3 digits. That is a toxic relationship. You need to get out of it. Get rid of that credit card or debit card. You need to get rid of it, right? But create those barriers. The other barrier, and this is the one you engage with me online first off, was 72-hour rule. 72-hour rule is a key, right? So if you see something you want, put it back. 72 hours later, if you still want it, it was probably something that was gonna add value to your life in the first place. Now I'm not talking about bread and milk here, right? I'm talking about the pair of jeans or the runners or whatever it is, the shoe, whatever it is you wanna buy. Put it back, 72 hours later, if it's still on your mind and you still can afford it and you're still happy to buy it, maybe it was something that was gonna add value to your life in the first place, so go for it. Now, a couple of things can happen here. Right? One is 96 hours later you remember. Well, tough, you need to start 72 hours late— 72 hours again, because you would have remembered after 72 if it was really important to you. The other thing that can happen is, is— and this is the probably thing that happens most— is 12 hours, 24 hours out, you find something else that's better and you replace it and you start the 72 hours. I'm not saying necessarily cheaper, I'm just saying suits you better, right? And then people would say, what happens after 72 hours? I remember, I go back, back and it's gone. That was destiny. Tough.

Yeah, I should have had— exactly. Yeah, let it go.

That's fine. And it's not going to dramatically change your life. And those little things have massive impact, massive. And people don't pay them enough attention. Um, that's the kind of, kind of a whistle-stop tour of some of the short-term stuff you do. Long-term is different.

Okay. And so, so with the long-term, right, so what's more important, learning to save money or learning how to make One of the things Warren Buffett is—

I'm sure most people know who Warren Buffett is, but just to give everyone— he's in his 90s, he's worth over $100 billion.

He—

99% of the wealth he has today, he didn't have at 50 years of age.

There's still hope for us guys.

At 13 years of age, he started investing.

13?

13. Yeah, and he's probably one of the most successful. Now, he has an unusual circumstance in that he's enough money behind him now, he just doesn't buy shares. He buys shares and takes place in the board, so he impacts the business, right? He has said to his wife, when I die, just buy the index, just buy the stock market as a whole. Don't go by the individual. S&P 500 is what he's told his wife. And the S&P, for people who don't know what the S&P 500 is, the 500 stands for for the largest 500 companies in the US stock market, the FTSE 100, largest 100 in the UK, the iShares FTSE All-World Index, I think has 26 in it now, the Euro Stoxx 50, top 50 in Europe, right? So, the 50 is the— or the 500 or whatever, that's the amount of companies that are in it, right? And he's told his wife, just buy the S&P 500, right?

Yeah. Simple as.

Simple as. Just do it, right?

That's what I actually do myself. Yeah. And funny enough, you're actually— you are reading my mind. I have like these random topics. I've got a few topics jotted down, and we're just clocking them off. So with the S&P 500, the way I use it is eToro. Not sponsored. Wish they were.

Right?

You know, hit me up, guys. But a lot of Irish people or Europeans, because it's like an American index, they can't. So what would you recommend Irish people to invest in?

Now, the problem with the S&P 500— there's not necessarily a problem. Like, it's a great start, right? The thing you need to be aware of is if you're right now today— my stats may be slightly off— right now today, I would suggest if you're only investing in the S&P 500, you're ignoring 41% of the world's stock markets. OK. Because the US stock market represents 59% of global market cap. Very technical, but it represents about 59%, 57%, 59%. It kind of changes from year to year, day to day, in fact. So you're ignoring a whole pile of countries that aren't invested there. Now, people, particularly US citizens, will say to you, yeah, but we have— like, Intel is all around the world. And there is an argument for that, but when I buy With the way we would invest clients' money is we would buy the entire world. We wouldn't buy just the US. We'd have emerging markets in there. And we don't try— like Warren Buffett, and just to come back into the reason why I brought him up, Warren Buffett says something. He was asked by a journalist at one stage. Journalist said to him, Warren, you're 90-odd years of age, one of the richest men in the world. We can literally see— you have a playbook left behind you as to how you got rich. Why doesn't anyone copy the playbook? And his answer was brilliant. He said, because nobody wants to get rich slow anymore.

Nice.

I just— that really captures the way we invest clients' money. Get rich quick, lose it quick. Get rich slow, lose it slow. Yeah, right. And nobody wants to get rich slow anymore. The way we invest clients' money and the way I invest my own money is incredibly boring, incredibly simple.

Also, no one wants to be bored anymore. People will happily sit down and they will— I'm not exaggerating— 8 hours binge watch on Netflix, 8 hours. But they will not put 2 hours into learning about finances or reading some of the information that Warren Buffett puts out for free. You don't put one hour into it. People don't want to be bored. They're not willing to be bored. I think it's because we're actually overstimulated in today's day and age. I call it TikTok brain. They can't concentrate on anything more than 10 seconds when they could change their life.

It's crazy. And to me, investing should be simple. It should be boring. Because your life is not about investing. Your life is about living. The investment is just a vehicle to help you support the life you want to have, right? So make it simple. Make it boring. Let it tick away. Sometimes we'd have a client who'll come in and say, you know what, I want to buy this stock, this stock, and this stock. And typically, right, I'm going to be very generous here, you have a husband and wife sitting in front of you, and he wants to go mad, and he wants to do all the crazy stuff, right? And she's brought him in to see me because she wants me to stop him doing that stuff.

OK.

Right? And I'm being very generous there, and I'm sorry if I offended anyone, right?

Doris is a 90% male audience. Know your audience.

What we would say there is, right, I'd say, you know what, you can take 15% of it, and we'll call that your bingo bucket. You do whatever you want to do with that. And I'm going to take 85% of it, I'm going to invest it simple and boring and straightforward. And a couple of years' time, my 85% will be at 100%, and it doesn't matter what you've done, it'll be bonus or it'll be gone, and it doesn't matter. And that's what we would let— and there's a general rule of thumb: never invest more than 15% of your money in, in any one single thing. And I'm not talking— people say, oh, so don't put more than 15% in the S&P 500. No. S&P 500 is the top 500 companies, right? And therefore, it doesn't matter. But we would be very— we have a little bit of a twist. We buy the market. We buy it, and we do a little bit of a twist on it, because it's been proven by academics over years that if you tilt it in certain directions, it can get you better returns. But we're never picking a fund manager. We're never trying to beat the market. Fund managers are an interesting thing. So we have these guys from Harvard, or Yale, or wherever they've come out of, right? Teams of them, there's 20, 30 on a team, and they're looking at the S&P 500. Instead of buying all 500, what they're doing is they're buying the best 470, and they're avoiding the 30 losers, right? 60% of fund managers fail to beat the stock market in any given year.

I'm not surprised. It's astrology for dudes.

Yeah, no, that's what it is, right? And actually, if you stretch that over 30 years, less than 1% of fund managers will beat their own benchmark, their own stock market, over a 30-year period. It's complete— like, it is possible. Possible to pick a good fund manager. It's just not probable.

Yeah. So you have some good bets.

Yeah. And that's exactly it. And when you buy the MSCI World Index, or you buy the entire stock market across the entire world, you wear the house.

Yeah.

I remember there was a buddy of mine— and this is actually— he lives in New York now, but he was sitting with a CFO of a global company, right? And he's in the States. He's sitting in front of the CFO. They're talking about investing money. And the CFO says, ah, you know what, I think the stock market's a little bit funny at the moment, and I'm not sure I want to put my money into the market right now. Now, I'm not about timing. I'm all about time in—

Yeah, I can tell you're not.

Yeah, exactly. Time in the market, not timing the market, right? And he turned around, and my buddy said to this guy, he said, how would you fare? Like, you've got the worst kind of scenario. You think the stock market's going to have it tough. You're the CFO of this global international company. If those kind of doomsday events happen, how will your company be? Oh, no, we'll be fine because we've got this, this, this, and this in place. And he goes, right, you're one of the 500. You're the CFO of the 500, right? Do you not think the other 499 CFOs and CEOs have exactly the same plan as you? Do you not think they all thought about this as well? He goes, well, OK, right, and put the money into the market. And what I would say is, if you try and time the market, it's a loser's game, right? You're absolutely— you put the money in when you have you take it out when you need it, and you try and put a long time between the two. And if you do, you will be OK. OK, nice.

And so now, as a financial planner, what do you invest in?

So I am incredibly simple, incredibly boring. I buy the market, but I tilt it ever so slightly. So what we have— what's been proven over very long periods of time, right— and very long periods of time is very important— is that if you tilt towards small stocks— this makes sense, right? Smaller company— I'm not talking about corner shop small. I'm talking small relative to Alphabet or Google or whatever you want to call it. Today, right? Small relative to them. Smaller company, a bit higher risk, therefore you expect a bit more return because you're taking a little bit more risk. So tilt towards small companies. Also tilt towards value stocks. So value stocks or value shares— what we know about the stock market is the stock market overreacts. It overreacts in the positive, and it overreacts in the negative, right? And a value play is a play on the overreaction on the negative. So if you think— let's go back to the Irish audience here, right? Ryanair— everyone will know Ryanair. Most international people will know Ryanair. Air, but they might know Aer Lingus as well. It's now owned by British Airways, right, so that group, right? But Ryanair about 12 years ago tried to buy Aer Lingus, right? And at that time, the share price had been driven down so much that you could buy Aer Lingus on the stock market for €650 million, right? But if you sold off the Heathrow slots, the airplanes, the buildings at Dublin and Cork and Shannon, the, the actual assets that Aer Lingus owned, you could buy it on the stock market for €650 million, but you could sell assets for €750 million.

Guys, if we all just give me a million, we can pitch in together and buy Aer Lingus.

Come on. And what that is is a value play, right? So I know over long periods of time, value will give me a little bit more, right? I'm not picking— it's pure maths. It's simply, is that a value stock? Is the value of their shares, of their total shares, worth less than the total value of all their assets? That's a value play. Some of them will fall. Fall against the wayside. They'll actually fall apart. But if you have enough of them, you're buying loads of them, it doesn't matter, right? And the reason why I keep going back to long term— from 2010 to 2020, value was underperforming, and dramatically underperforming compared to the rest of the market. And around '17, '18 in particular, lots of my peers were saying, oh, value investing is dead. And if you Google, is value investing dead, you'll get loads of articles that will say, yeah, value investing is dead. But we stuck with it, because the long-term data said this is the right thing to do. And the current data is just noise. Unless the current data changes the long-term data, we're going to stick with it. 2020 to 2023, Value Investing has dramatically outperformed.

Nice.

Right? And it just shows you, if you stick to what's boring and simple and don't try and change— the other thing we do tilt towards is profitability. So if we have two companies that are identical, identical. If one's more profitable than the other one, we're going to go with the more profitable. Yes, that's— there's a couple of other little things that go on in the background, but it's simple, it's boring, straightforward, and it works, right? And I'd be well known when people who don't have an advisor, they say, where should I put my money? Yeah, no-brainer, 60/40, right? So Certified Financial Analysts worldwide are asked, if you don't have someone telling you what to do with your money, what should you do with your money? And they said, no-brainer, 60/40 portfolio. 60% goes into stock market, 40% goes into the bond market. Bond market is just where you give a loan of your money to companies and to governments.

And so let's say, you know, you're in Ireland, where do you go to do this? Is it on an app? Is it in the bank? Is it on a website?

Prosper Study.

Yes, yes, please, please.

One of our offerings actually is— and it's something that we hadn't— you see, when I was just me and 3 others, right, yeah, I only dealt with high net worth individuals. Yeah. And now I still deal with high net worth individuals. Because we have a team there, we now have an offering for kind of good earners, or what we might sometimes— you might call them a Henry's, High Earners Not Rich Yet, right? Okay. And there's a couple of different acronyms and stuff that you can come up with and different things. But we have, we have my service, then you have another one in the middle, and then we have a thing called Choice. And Choice is booked out at the moment, I think 3 or 4 months. Um, Premier is booked out, which is the one in the middle, about 2 months or so in advance. You can't get into the diary. And those two offerings have been a game changer because now for £300 You can say, I have €200 a month I want to put aside, or I have €5,000 sitting in a bank account. I'm not going to use it for the next 5 years. What should I do with it? And you come in, we do a choice, we'll implement it, we'll get it done, we'll get it sorted, right? And that has worked incredibly well. Like, it's— the demand for it out there has been huge. And it was an area that before Colin came in and started running the business, we weren't servicing at all.

Yeah. And now I would imagine that does really well, you know.

It does, it does really, really well. And it's It's great to be able to service that element of the market. The no-brainer 60/40— 60% shares, 40% bonds. You put your money into that, right? Let's say you gave me 100 grand today, right? And I put it away in a 60/40 no-brainer portfolio. And we tilt it towards small and value and profitability. And we did all that, right? One year from today— doesn't matter. You take any 12-month period from the last 100-plus years, right? One year from today, there's a 25% chance you're down.

25%?

25%. If we didn't talk for 3 years— there's a 15% chance you're down.

OK.

If we didn't talk for—

Keep going.

Yeah, if we didn't talk for 5 years, there's a 0.4% chance you're down. Take any 5-year period over the last 100 years, only 0.4% of them were negative 5 years later. So there's a 99.6% chance over a 5-year period money invested in a 60/40 portfolio will have made you money.

How much roughly, like, ballpark? I give you the $100K, 6 years onwards, how much?

And this is where people go, Right. So one of the things is when we're building a financial plan, when I'm sitting down with you and Linda, and we're going, right, what does your life want to look like? When are you going to reach financial independence, right? If I put that portfolio in front of you and you brought it off to 9 other financial advisors, wealth managers, financial planners, whatever you want to call them, and you tell me what this is going to do in the next 10 years, right? They're all— you're going to get 10 different— me and 9 other different guesses, right? Right. They're all guesses.

Yeah, of course. Of course.

Like, I can tell you I tell you, over the last 20 years, a portfolio like that would have done 7.3%, right? When we're building a financial plan, we guess 4.5%.

OK. OK?

The reason why we guess 4.5%—

because if I guess 4.5% for you and we get 6%, it's not a surprise.

Your plan works. Yes, exactly. If I guess 8% and we get 6%, your plan blows up, and you and Linda are back at work.

Yeah, so always kind of lowball it.

Always lowball it. We know our guess is going to be wrong, but always be on the right side of wrong.

OK, nice.

And that's the way we build it out. Been 7 or more years where you would have lost money in a 60/40 portfolio.

So even like if you go like, let's just round off to 10 years. Yes. And that's— you're looking good.

You're pretty much foolproof. 7 years, 7 years and a week, 8 years, 15 years. Now if you look at— I don't have the stats off the top of my head for the S&P 500, which is what you've brought into the— onto the table today, right? If you look at the MSCI World Index, where you invested in the entire world's stock market, all right, there has been a 21-year period where you'd still be down 21 years years later.

Which period was that?

Uh, it actually was fairly recent. It was kind of— I think it finished in kind of '17-ish. It's, it's very— it's, it's a very recent period of time, right? And you're looking at going, wow, 21 years. Most clients will pull the plug. Yeah, they won't, they won't, they won't hold out. They will not hold out. And people say, oh, investing, that's really risky, isn't it? The biggest risk to any investment going wrong is you.

It's not the investment, it's paper hands.

It's you doing the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong And that's what's going to kill us. And people don't get that. Like, if you think about 2008, if you get me 100 grand in 2008, and you put 100% into shares, right, the world stock market, 18 months later, it was down 54%. So, you were down 46 grand.

Most people would freak out.

Freak out. It's going to hit 30. It's going to hit 20. I'm going to lose all my money. You own— like, typically, when we're putting them together, you're probably going to end up exposed to 14,000, 15,000 different companies, 15,000 different CFOs, CEOs, boards of management, everything, right? These are the best companies in the world. And you're looking at a 46 round and going, I'm going to hit zero. All of them are going to be wiped out. I'm never coming back from this. This time is different. That's what always happens, right? And people get it stuck in there. And the media really drives that, right? People pull the plug at 46 rand. Yeah. And said, I'm out of here. Stuck it into a bank account and never ventured into the stock market again. You left that alone on the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis in 2018, it didn't go from 46 back to 100. It actually went up to 230. Yeah, I wasn't sure.

No surprise.

You just left the thing. Alone. And that's what we need to— you set it up right at the start, you put it in when you have it, you take it out when you need it, you put a long time in between, and you invest and forget. That's what's important.

Yeah, invest and forget. I love that one. And so where does crypto come into this? Come on, where am I putting my Bitcoin?

Okay, right, so crypto is an interesting one because when you look at crypto, in 10 years from now, we'll all be sitting around going, do you remember that crypto thing? Yeah, remember, they all lost this, they lost— or we'll all be sitting around going, Do you remember we didn't think crypto was going to take off? And I haven't got a clue where we're going to take it.

Yeah, I was about to ask, what's your personal take on it? Because it's really just down to the individual, what they think.

And to me, right, I keep talking about buying the world stock market. And we talked about the S&P 500, the FTSE 100. Now, just to explain very briefly what market cap means for anyone who doesn't know what market cap means, if you could imagine a share, let's say Google shares, right? Imagine the shares in Google are worth €1 each. €1 each. OK, so you can buy a share in Google for €1. And imagine in total there's 1,000 shares in Google available in the world.

Yeah, everybody fighting over it.

So if you own the 1,000, you own Google outright, right? So 1,000 by €1, that means the market cap of Google is €1,000. Now, if the share price goes to €1.50, right, now the market cap of Google is €1,500. 1,000 by €1.50 is €1,500. So you can buy Google for €1,500 in that example, right? The way I invest money for clients and for myself is on a market cap weighted basis. Basis. OK, so the S&P 500 is the top 500 companies in the US based on their market cap. Yes. So they're listed. And actually, we have a problem at the moment— well, a problem, it's not a problem. The Big 7 in the US at the moment is taking up about 25%, 30% of the market, depending on what you do. So the S&P 500, 7 of the stocks in that are making up 25% to 30% of the entire stock market, right? So you're kind of, whoa, so that's a big concentration on 1 company or 7 companies, right? That's the way I buy the market. I buy it on a market cap weighted basis. When you look at Bitcoin and crypto and everything else, if you look at it on a market cap weighted basis, how much of the financial world do they represent? Interestingly enough, a couple of years ago, they were down at about 0.5%. Then they rocketed up to kind of 4% or 5% of the world, right? And now, they've dropped back down again a bit. I'm not sure where they are right now today. So, if I were to invest in crypto, So because my rules are I invest on a market-cap basis, I'll only buy them as a percentage of what they represent in the world. OK? But for me, I just don't know where it's going to end up. And if you go back to olden days— and I mean old, old times— if you think about it, it used to be a thing. I had sheep, and you had bread, and we swapped x amount of bread for my sheep, and that's how it worked, right? And then we wanted to bring Linda in. Into it, right? And Linda wanted the sheep and you wanted the bread. And then there was something, you were selling wool or something, right? And now there's a three-way deal and you go, oh, this is starting to get complicated and I don't want any wool, I just want bread today and I want some— And then what happened was the emperor came in and said, you know what I'll do? There's a coin in the middle, right? And it's worth, let's call it a euro, just for the simplest. That's a euro. And I promise you, if you give that to Linda and Linda gives it to me, it'll still keep its value at €1. Yeah. Okay? And that's what— so what happened was this piece of metal became a thing that everybody trusted. The problem with crypto is there's no central bank involved.

Yes.

It's not enough for 10% of the world to accept that they trust it and they can pass it around.

Yeah, because money is kind of like— money is like just— it's just kind of a thought-up idea based on trust. Absolutely. Like, if everyone stopped— have you seen that Venezuela, you know, the dollars and industry, if everyone just stops believing in it, well, then that's it.

And the problem is you need everybody to believe in crypto. And what really damaged the crypto boys, if you want to call it, is some of the problems that they've created and some of the fraud that's gone on. But also, when you're coming out with Banana Coin—

Yeah, I know. That's—

And all of a sudden, you're just going like, this— like, the underlying technology of crypto is fantastic. It's not what— it is fantastic, right? But how do you know which one you can trust?

Exactly.

How do I know if you come up to me with one type of crypto and I come up to you with another, that yours is worth this. And you know what? A currency should only go up and down in line with inflation. Yes. Whereas this goes up and down based on where people think it's going to be in 10 years' time. We're guessing where it's going to be. And until all that settles down, I just kind of go, it's just too much. I'm not going near it. It's not for me. And you know what? People will often— it's mad because you've mentioned crypto now, right? You will see the crypto boys coming at us online.

Yeah, bro, he hasn't a clue what he's talking about. Yeah.

You know what, guys? I haven't a clue what I'm talking about. I don't know where it's gonna go, but it's not for me. Happy to get rich slow.

Yeah, I've actually invested a good bit in crypto over the years and I've made like profit off it and I pulled it out and I bought this house.

Nice.

So, you know, I just did it on my app on Binance and but like it was like, you know, it's super volatile and luckily I think I like just, my friends tell me to do it. I started putting in like $2,000 a month out of my account. Like dollar cost average, and I pulled it out when it hit $60,000. And I was like, oh, I want to buy a home, I'm just going to use all this money I have in crypto. Then it went up to like $69,000, and then, you know, went back down. But I still believe, like, if you look at the last couple of years, it's trending upwards but extremely volatile. And again, I don't know.

But you see, that's, that's absolute— and I'm not denying people have made serious money, but most haven't. But most, most— and lots of people have. I'm not— I'm just it's not for me. I'm happy to do it. It's no different. Like, you mentioned before we hit record, Linda lives in Kildare. You could have went to the Curragh. You could have bought the house on the winnings you made in the Curragh, right? I'm just saying it's a similar game, OK? You did really well. Lots of people have been completely cleaned out by it, right? And there's a really— I think I've pitched it once or twice. And if anyone wants to come back at me, pitched it once or twice to some of the TV channels where I'd love to do a proper, proper crypto.

Yeah, I think that would go off. Like, all the Netflix series coming out, they're like the most viewed series.

I think that the angle I would take on it is, is I'm not convinced, convince me, right? I deal with people's money all day, every day. I'm not convinced. And it's not that I, I just, I don't know where it's going to end up. Yeah, I'm no different than bringing clients' money to the Curragh. I'm not going to bring— Curragh is a racecourse, by the way, for anyone who doesn't know. Yeah, bringing clients' money to the Curragh, I'm not going to bring it to the crypto market because, yeah, we're just not sure. Yeah, let's just get rich slow, lads.

And so on, touching on property there, what are your pieces of advice for someone who, especially in Ireland or any country, that wants to get on the property ladder. Do you advise it? Like, you know, is it rent versus buy? Like, I want to know. Yeah, what age do you even recommend someone buys a house at? Should they?

So a home and a house are two different things. Okay, right. So I think the average age now in Ireland for buying a home is 32 years of age. Yeah. And that's if you even get it. Like, it's— and it's going to just go up and up and up. And then we hit a point where you're now 42 and 52, right? And the mortgage term is too short. You're never getting on the property ladder.

That's, that's what I was saying to some members. Like, it's crazy. So it's like you're in this position where if you're not like perfectly primed to get a mortgage at like 32, then you've missed your chance. Yeah, yeah, crazy.

Because most mortgages have to be done by 65, sometimes 70, but 65 would be standard enough. And just to— if people come, what difference does that make if you're 45 or you're 35? The difference between a 30-year mortgage and a 20-year mortgage is massive in terms of the repayments. You might not qualify for it if it goes down. What I would I would say is buying a home is a very emotional purchase, right? And I'm sure you went through the emotion of buying this place.

Oh, big time.

Yeah. And it's a very emotional purchase. And I would always say people will often come to me. I do a thing on Saturday on Instagram where I stick up a question box, right? And we'll get thousands of people. Like, literally, I'll get somewhere between 800 and 1,200 questions every Saturday. And as I go through my day, I will answer as many as I can. I kind of jump in and out as I go through my day. And one of the questions that comes back time and time again is, I think the property market's going to fall next year. Right. Right. When you're buying a home, there's 3 things you need to get right. First is, can you afford it? Do you love it? And are you happy to stay in it for 15 years or more? And if the answer to those 3 questions is yes, buy it. OK. Nice.

Because they're 3 good rules.

Yeah. In 3 years' time, next door has gone down by 50% or 10%, or it's gone up by 50% or 10% or whatever it is. It doesn't matter. You love it. You're staying in it long term. And you can afford it. Afford it. So what difference— it's a home. Now, when it comes to buying investment properties, whether it's an apartment to rent out or a house to rent out or whatever it is, let's just, just go along that line for a minute. I'm not a fan, okay? And the reason why I'm not a fan is because I think you can get the same, if not better, returns doing other things with your money. Really simple, really boring things with your money, right? But my problem with it is you can't bring a brick into Brown Thomas.

Yeah.

And what I mean by that is you've got that for €400 grand, it's a 4-bedroom house, it's worth €400,000, you need €100,000, you can't bedroom. Yeah, you have to sell it all or you haven't. And actually, the amount of clients who come to us in their late 50s, early 60s, kind of looking down the road of giving up work, and they're kind of going, 'Oh, it's not should I keep this property, like, does it make financial sense to keep it? I just want rid of it. Will I be okay if I get rid of it?' Wow. Because they just don't want anything to do with it. And you know what, you're 31 years of age, if you have a couple of rental properties, you'll be happy to go on pull the washing machine out and replace it on a Saturday afternoon. But when you're 62 and 72 and 82, it becomes different, right? And lots of people just want to offload them. So we would have what we call a negative property bias. If you already have a property, we're really slow to tell you to sell it. But if you're thinking about buying one, we're really slow to encourage you to do it. And what I would say there is you can take your money, you can invest it. Remember, the investment is a vehicle to provide you with the life that you want live, right? And if the life that you want to live is to go and replace the washing machine every Saturday or every once a year, whatever it is, great, that's the life you want to live. And some people do like that and they enjoy it. But we have— I think it's in our 70%, somewhere between 70 and 80% of people in Ireland are accidental landlords.

Yeah, I feel like Irish people, they— it's like a cultural thing. We think that owning a home is the be-all end-all, and it's like we're kind of socially conditioned into being like, this is I must do, even though it's not the case.

And let's not, like, let's not get too political on this, but let's—

oh please, let's face it, right?

There's a couple of things going on. First of all, government over the last couple of years have encouraged big corporates to come in because, you know what, they can build houses. We need houses, right? We are built— this year we're patting ourselves on the back because in 2023 we're going to have built 30,000 houses, right? We need about 60,000 houses. There's a vacancy there of around 320,000 units. So we're behind in supply of around 320,000 20,000 units. There's all these big plans that we're going to get to, like, start building 60,000 houses. In 2007, 2006 and 2005, we were in 90,000 houses, 90,000 units, houses, apartments, whatever it is, right? 90,000. And we're patting ourselves on the back at 30,000, and there's a shortfall there right now already of 320,000. Like, we are nowhere near where we're getting to, where we need to get to. And that's why, whether we like it or not, government had to encourage the big corporates to come in who could throw out a thousand units and do it from their own finances and not rely on the local banks. And one of the big problems the local banks has been, because of 2008, they're much more prudent. And you go, okay, I'm gonna build 100 houses in this field. They say, here's the money for the first 10, see how you get on. Here's the money for the next 10, see how you get on, right? And that just really hampered the kind of local developer that was building in the local town. Yeah, really made them— made it much more difficult for them to actually just go at it and employ people and know that they're gonna be okay and go for it, right? They didn't have the same confidence that they would have had in years gone by. We have ended up in a situation where there's serious lack of supply.

Oh, so, so for anyone listening who isn't from Ireland, I've lived in London, South Kensington, nice area, Marbella. Dublin is the most expensive place I've ever rented in, and even day-to-day living, cost of living, it's crazy, you know. And buying a home, like, I was, you know, went to go buy a house. I looked at Ireland first because that's where I'm from, and I was like, I can either get, you know, a detached villa with a swimming pool, or I can get like an apartment that I hated in Dublin, an area I didn't like. Yeah, it's crazy for anyone listening, but it is.

And it is, and it's a unique situation.

It's super unique.

We really, really want to own property. I know. Yeah, we just have this thing, and it doesn't matter, we're not happy, but we're not set up for long-term rent. Like, 82% of people people who live in Berlin rent.

Really?

82%. My figures are slightly out of date, but it's 80%, whatever it is, right? Huge. Why? Because they know they have what we call security of tenure. You paint the wall, you're still going to be in it when the wall needs to be painted again. Yeah, longer term, you have security. They'll do a 20-year lease. Why? Because if you look at the day the wall came down in 1988, the Berlin Wall came down in 1988, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, fairly sure, someone correct me if they want, but I'm sure it was Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, went in and bought a million units of property.

Nice, quick, quick mill.

In, done, gone, right? And now your landlord is not the bloke who has his grandchild's communion next Saturday when you need the washing machine replaced. It's a corporate, and they want a 20-year lease, and they want to leave you sitting in there.

Yeah, I remember when I was living in Dublin, one of the most annoying things was every year I'd have to move out. Like, it was such a nightmare, you packing up everything, going. It actually made me become such a minimalist, but it was just a bally—

the amount of landlords who had kids coming back from Australia and moving into the gaff.

Like, no, I swear to God that happened to me one place. I was in Foxrock, actually. I was actually in it for like 2 years or something. And first of all, on the second year, my rent went up like £500, or it was even £1,000. And then the second year here. Like, my landlord, he was a good lad, you know, but he was like, I am selling up. He's like, you gotta be out in 2 weeks. I was like, what? Like, crazy, super weird.

Sorry, for— again, for people who aren't aware of the rules from Ireland, or people outside of Ireland, there are rules around who— when you can throw a tenant out. And one of them is, is if you're putting a family member into it. So this is what— that's what I mean by people coming back from Australia. Yeah, I was coming back from Australia, my nieces or nephew. I saw that. Do you ever see that meme? Actually, it was a great one, starting a new job next week. Deadly. I have all my grannies and granddads back again.

There you go.

It's the same with the landlords. Yeah, that fella's granny and granddad's gonna die again, right? Yeah, but it's the same with the landlord. It's someone else in the family coming back from Australia and they're going to move into the property. But it's a nightmare. It's a tough one. And what I would say is homes is one thing, investment property is another thing. There is a place for it, and, um, sometimes the maths works really well. But what I would say is, I'm just— investing's boring.

Yeah, what age were you when How old were you when you bought your first home?

I was 19. What?

Yeah. We have got it tough.

I am slacking, my God.

I was 29, so 10 years.

Yeah, no, I was 19. Yeah. And I, yeah. Where was it? I bought in Lucan. Ah, nice. Yeah, I bought in Lucan.

There's a good gym there.

Yeah, I bought in Lucan and lived there for a couple years and then moved down to Kildare and lived there. My ex-wife and my kids still live there. I don't live with them anymore obviously 'cause they're my ex.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's a, property is not something that really ever floated my boat. Like, yeah.

And so if someone, right, they're in Ireland, they want to go get a mortgage, what are some things that they kind of have to show to do it? I like, so I was actually going through the mortgage process myself and it was, I was just jumping through so many loops. And again, I didn't want a place that I just wasn't excited about. I ended up getting a mortgage in Spain, right? Easiest thing ever. They didn't, they were like, yeah, whatever, just give us this amount 'Show us your last year.' Yeah, take it. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

And it's interesting because we're all supposed to be in Europe and should be the same.

That's it. I, I didn't even need a Spanish bank account. They're like euros, they're like, 'That's fine.' Yeah.

And it's, it's really— they do put us through the mill to do it right now. It is the cheapest money you'll ever, you'll ever get, right? You will. Like, and that's because they have the property in the background and rates are going up, but it's still the cheapest money you're going to get, right? And the— what my general rule of thumb when it comes to borrowing money is the the more hoops you have to jump through, the cheaper it's gonna be. Right?

Okay.

So if you think about some of the online, like if you mortgages at the moment are probably 4 or 5%, car loans are probably 8, 10%, right? Then you go up to overdrafts around 15 to 17% ish, credit cards, 20, 20. You see how it's getting easier at the more expensive?

Yes.

Yeah. Then the ones that people really get caught out on are, you know, these kind of online shops, right? And like they used to be the, I won't mention the name, right? But it used to be the catalog that came through the door. And now it's an online shop. And you buy everything from a TV to a pair of shoes on it, right? What people don't realize about that is that is not— they are not selling you a pair of shoes. They're selling you a loan. And they're charging you somewhere between 42% and 44% interest on that. If you leave €1,000 on your account with them for a year, it's going to cost you probably £420 in interest. They're not selling you shoes. They're selling you a vehicle to give you a loan, right? And that's really simple. I remember Todd was speaking at an event one day. And a woman said to me, oh no, but I love that company. Like, my young fella's TV broke in his bedroom and I was looking at one in the local shop and I really wanted to buy that one. And it was like £1,600. I was like, £1,600 for the young fella's TV in his bedroom? But there was one there, it wasn't the one I really wanted, it was £1,200. I only had £1,000 available to me on the thing. And I rang them, they just put up to me to £1,200, no problem. They gave me, increased my limit to £1,200. I bought it and we did the maths. I did the maths there and then. We did some rough maths. How long to take to pay them back £1,200? She ended up spending £1,700 on that TV when you included the interest. She should have just bought the one locally for £1,600, which was the better one.

Yeah, I'm like, they're all the same anyways. Yeah, we bought the cheapest one, that was big. I'm like, I'm looking at the same shit.

Yeah, the whole thing was she was being sold the loan, she wasn't being sold the TV.

Yeah.

And the easier it is to get the loan, the more expensive it's going to be. What do people need to— sorry, to come back to your original question— what do people need to do to get a mortgage? Now, it doesn't mean if you decide today that you want to buy a house tomorrow and you've got a bit of savings to together, you might just walk in and get the loan. But ideally, right, 2 years before, you should start thinking about it. All right, what should I be doing? What, what does it look like? You go into a mortgage broker— we've actually just this month have gone back into mortgages in Prosperous. So I, I was doing mortgages up until we started in 2018. I said, you know what, it's not our bag. It's a real relationship killer, like trying to get a mortgage across the line for someone, particularly when, like, you come to me, I'm doing your mortgage, me and you are sitting here, we're shaking answers. But then I'm relying on a department in one of the big banks who doesn't care about you, doesn't care about me. And you're going, am I useless? And I'm going, they're not telling me, I can't get the answers from it, sitting on someone's desk up there and you just can't. So it was a real relationship killer. And I just said, you know what, if we're not going to do it perfectly, we're not doing it at all. And I pulled back out of it.

Yeah.

Now Colin has put the processes, the procedures, we've just put someone new in who's got great experience in the mortgage side, loves doing mortgages, and we are going back into the mortgage market again. And we're back in it right Now, but what I would say is get sitting down with a mortgage broker. People say, why go to a broker? They're going to charge me a fee. Let them charge you a fee. You walk into a bank, you walk into a bank. You walk into a broker, you walk into all the banks. And that's the difference, right? And people say, oh yeah, but I can see online that that's the cheapest rate. I'm good for the loan. I'm going to get the cheapest rate. I can see online that that's the cheapest. Yeah, but what happens 6 weeks in and the rates change? The mortgage broker will switch you to the other one. The bank will say nothing. They're not going to tell you that the rates have changed. You haven't drawn down the mortgage yet, right? So you need to— You need to— if you can get someone to look at your finance and say, look, how much do you think I'm going to be getting? Have a look through my bank statements. Is there anything there that's kind of standing out that I need to sort out? Do I need to clear that loan, or will I just leave the loan there? What do I do? And they will be able to look at it and say, yeah, these are the things. Because typically the banks will only look 6 months.

Yeah, we were just 6 months.

They look at the last 6 months. But if you're 2 years out— one of the ones that catches people out a lot actually is betting.

You know, I was gonna bring that up. Yeah, I'm like, so I've never bet. My dad was a terrible gambler, right? Nearly ruined his life. And so that's instilled in me. I just never bet. I placed a bet once, lost it. I was like, that sucks. I've never done it. Why? Like, why is it like betting? I'm like, they'd probably look at my transaction, be like, 5 AM, he's buying a round of drinks. Like, is that not worse?

You know, the thing about it is the way the bank looks at it is they're looking at it going, he's willing to bet with his own money? Is he gonna bet with ours? And what I mean by that is, is he gonna take the mortgage payment next month and use that in the bet, right? If you're doing it for yourself, what is he gonna do with our money? And that's the way they're looking at it. Now, what I will say is people say, I bet and I got my mortgage, no problem, right? I'm not—

still, I know I'm very anti-betting. Yeah, it's obviously for the reason I just mentioned, but I think like house always wins and it just doesn't visually look good.

It doesn't look great. Yeah, but you're you know what it is? It's an absolute easy excuse if they wanted to say no to you. Yeah, it's a really easy— just if you want to bet, walk into the thing, use your cash. It's a little bit like the 72-hour rule, it's a little bit like Hikn Click. Physically walking in with the cash, yeah, you'll, you'll have a different relationship with the bookies than just clicking a button on your phone, right?

Yes.

So don't do it. If you want to bet best, that's your call. I, I would be on your—

do it old school, guys.

Go in with the, you know, the paper. It's more fun like I'm not really on your page when it comes to betting. I'm not a gambler at all. But what I would say is, is that just don't give them the excuse. Yeah. Don't let it be on your bank statement. Just leave it off it.

Okay. Yeah.

Nice.

I remember when I was also talking to like AIB or whoever, so I was there like, what do you do for a living? And I was like, I'm a YouTuber. I'm a fitness coach. You know, I have a pancake company.

Yeah.

A fitness app. They were like, are you making this up? Like, they're like, So that, I nearly got laughed out of the place as well. So they were probably like looking for a betting slip to get rid of me as well.

Yeah, this, it's nothing to do with your occupation, to do with your bets.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's, and you will have people who will have lots of betting going on in their account, they get their mortgage no problem, but it's a really easy excuse for them if they want to use it.

There you go. And now I want to go over to education, which is a big one in Ireland as well. I'm sure that's something that, you know, you're very well educated, I presume. Uh, did you go to college? What do you what do you think of today's, you know, college in today's day and age? Think it's as useful as it was? And what's your experience with third level education?

I had, well, I did a QFA, Qualified Financial Advisor. That's the thing that lots of people do. They think there's about 14,000, 15,000 of us in the country in Ireland. Um, but then I did a postgrad and I did it through UCD at the time, and it was in financial planning. And that allowed me to sit what's called the CFP exam, the Certified Financial Planner exam. I don't know how many there is now. I'd imagine there's about 1,000 of us, but at that time there was about 400 of us had got through the CFP. And CFP would be globally recognized.

Wow, that's impressive.

Yeah, but you have to do the postgrad to be allowed to sit the CFP, and you have to have 3 years client-facing experience before you're allowed to sit it. And that for me was— what it did for me was, interestingly enough, it kind of confirmed to me that I'm doing things right. And I know that sounds very, oh, I was great.

Yeah, you know, okay.

It gave me the confidence that, you know what, Owen, you're on the right path here. And I really got a huge count out of that CFP program and postgrad. I could— and just give you an idea where my head sits with education, right? That was a means to an end. I sat the postgrad, got to do the CFP course, got my stamp. Now I'm a CFP, to do a certain amount of hours every year to keep it up, and that's fine. I could do another— I think it's 7 months or 8 months— and get a full-on master's, right? I couldn't be arsed.

Oh, so I was having that conversation yesterday. I go, the amount of people I know who are avoiding real life.

Yes.

They just want to live at home for another year and they're like, I'll do my master's, I'll do this, and they keep adding things on and it's like, just go ahead and get the experience.

Now what I would say is, is if I was back and I was 20 and 22 and I was thinking 7 months for master's and hadn't started my career yet, there is research that shows us that, you see, it's difficult for you, you have rose tinted glasses on here, right? I don't know what you, how far you've gone.

I dropped out of college, did first year in DIT the business management, failed all my exams and said I'm gonna go do bicep curls instead.

So you, but you see, you have the rose-tinted glass in terms of you've managed to create this role for yourself, you've created that, and therefore you're looking back. There is research that shows you get your master's at an early age and over your career you will make significantly more money. Okay, okay, so the research backs that up and I wouldn't deny that, right? For me, would I go back and do the master's now? Like the post- grad was because I wanted to do the CFP. I wanted to get the CFP designation. I wanted to be the best you could be in terms of education for what I do in the country, right? And then in fact globally recognized. To do the master's would just be an ego rub. Yes. Honestly, I might go back just out of the interest and do it, but I don't really have any gra to go and do it. I don't have any love to do it.

Yeah, I like that. You know, Melinda was throwing Irish words, so like, master laba.

Yeah.

I would.

Yeah, so I— education I think is incredibly important. I'm not sure that anything teaches better than the school of life though.

Yeah, that's, that's exactly what I think as well. And I learned more about business in my first year. So my belief is if there's something like a role that you want to go into, you got to do it, you got to get, get the stamp. And medicine, you want to be a doctor, obviously accountant, lawyer. But there's some courses that are just a whole lot of nothingness.

Yeah.

And I think they're their way.

And I think some of the, some of the younger adults coming out of college now were completely robbed of what I think is probably 60%, 70% of the importance of college, which is the social element.

Yeah, completely.

Like, if you think about it, like secondary school, you make a whole pile of mates and they're probably still lifelong mates now, right?

Oh, completely.

College does the same for, for people as well. And I think they've been robbed. Like, I was talking to a client's son recently, and I think he'd done a total— like, he was in third year, I think, in college. I think he'd done a total of 12 in-class classes.

12 in the year?

Yeah. The number's going to be wrong.

That was me.

But yeah, different reasons. But it was like, wow, you are just like— you're, you're just not getting a whole element of what college was all about. Yeah.

And so another question that I get a a lot is I get this constantly when I put up a Storybox. It's in it every single time. And someone asked me, Rob, should I quit my high-paying job to go pursue my passion, chase my dreams, even though it's probably going to make me less money? What advice would you give that person?

It goes back to the question we ask in first meetings all the time. What would you do over the next 2 years? The Claire question, right? What would you do over the next 2 years? And the people who say I would give up my job immediately— now sometimes give up my job, I enjoy my job, I like it, I'm giving it up because I just want to more time with family or do this or whatever else, right? And that's fine. If you're miserable in your job, you spend far too much time at work to stay in it. Like, you spent— like, look at you. You were in a job that you didn't like with that nutrition company. Yeah, you were miserable. It didn't matter what other things you tried to plug into your life outside of the 8 or 10 hours in work that you were doing, the 9 to 6 that you were doing. Yeah, it doesn't matter how good the rest of your life was, you weren't happy and you were never going to be happy in that job. And I would always say life is for living. Get yourself out, do what you want to do, because life is far too short and it can change very, very quickly. And I, I, like, I'm a financial planner at the end of the day, right? But ultimately, I do believe the money follows you if you're doing the right thing.

Me too. Me, I, I truly do believe that. And especially, you know, if you're doing something like this, people can actually tell straight away if you're into what you are doing. Like, there's an energy transference and people can detect it so quickly. So if you actually go out and do something that you're passionate about, you want to do, you don't mind waking up and doing it every single day, people will feel that and they will more likely be to hire you.

So, and it's like, you know what, my Q&A on a Saturday on Instagram, right? You stick it up there. What I love about that is, but there's no benefit to that for me. Well, you might say, oh, you get your followers. It does. But actually, why am I doing it? I'm doing it because you're getting to answer someone's question that's in their head that day, right? You're getting to take something away from them that's bugging them or they want answers for, right? But ultimately, and we're going to come— I said I'd come back to this earlier on— over the last 10 or 15 years, Ireland and the world, right, has got good about talking about mental health. Okay, it's all right. Like, me and you could turn off the mic and you could say, you know, I'm feeling a bit shit today, and we could have a chat about it, and there would be no— I would walk out the door and I wouldn't think any better or worse. Maybe think a bit better of you. He was open about it. He wasn't feeling great, right? And we talked about it. And we're two blokes, and it's become OK to not be OK. And that's a brilliant thing. Ireland in particular is a country that still has a taboo around money.

Oh, completely.

And what I've been— I've been on this mission over the last, particularly over the last 18 months, to try and get a country that doesn't talk about money talking about money. Because one of the things that COVID taught us was doing it together makes it easier for everyone. Saw. Yeah. Okay. And what I would always say, and anybody who's listening to this now, do me a favor. And I'm asking you, your listeners, right? Do me a favor. Talk to somebody in the next week about money that you've never spoken to about money before. You don't have to say, show me your bank statements.

Yeah, that's what I was about to ask. I'm like, how do you open that conversation?

I was listening to Rob and Owen having a chat. We don't talk about money. How are you with money? What's your relationship with money like? Does it keep you awake at night or whatever? Just ask any questions around money. And let's get a country or globally, whatever, talk about money that we don't talk about. Because what we, we know statistically, every 3 to 5 years we have a recession-type event. Yeah, right, big stock market crash, recession-type event. There's always one coming. And if we've had a chance and we've got those networks created where we know we have people to turn to when times are harder to talk to about money, if you set them up in the good times, they're there in the bad times. Yeah. And I just think that it's something that we can really— and you'll be surprised when you start having the conversation. That's why people come up to me on the street.

Yeah, it's not the nicest feeling in the world. I bet you it's the best feeling in the world.

Brilliant. And it's lovely. And yet what we have is a country that's not talking about money, talking about money. And that's, that's ultimately what you're trying to achieve. And you're trying to get people not to have money control their life, but that they control their money.

I, I love what you said about relationships and money, like how do you improve your relationship with money. So the biggest thing for me this case, now this might sound a little bit woo-woo, I don't care, I'll just throw it out there, is I think you have two mindsets. You can have abundance and scarcity, okay? And when I was just starting out, afraid to hire people, afraid to give a percentage, you know, afraid to spend, I actually earned a lot less. And then once I started getting an abundant mindset, started getting kind of, you know, hey, you know, I'll put some here, I'll put some there, then I ended up earning a lot more. So for me, having an abundant and a scarcity mindset with money was a big one for me. How do you kind of look at your relationship with money?

From a relationship perspective, I, I— what I would suggest is, back to our exponential thing, 60 grand, 120 grand, 120 grand, you're not twice as happy. It's when you get that relationship with money where you really feel like you're using it. And I'm going back to where we started, adding value to your life. Yeah. Like that's when you've really conquered that relationship between you and money, where it's not keeping you awake at night, where you're saying, I have enough of it there to be able to do the things that I want to do. There's nothing really holding me back financially, right? Which is a great place to be, and many people aren't there, but there's nothing holding me back financially. And you know what, if you could really imagine a situation that if I won the lotto, it would be nice, but it wouldn't make a massive difference to my life. And trying to get your life to that level where you're saying, yeah, you know what, I'm in a good place here financially. I can do whatever I want to do. Nothing's holding me back. I know the long-term future is looked after, and I'm enjoying today. That's where you've got that perfect, perfect relationship with money that is not controlling you at all. And you know what, I do believe what you've talked about there, where I know it's very kind of airy, kind of like it's kind of—

it's a little bit like The Secret. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you, if you actually just imagine it and get there, I do believe there's something to that law of attraction thing and getting it right. And just be careful because sometimes that law of attraction suggests to us that if you do it this way, you're going to get there quicker, right? Just be careful about the quick, quick fixes. Yeah, they won't last. And be boring, be simple, be straightforward, live within your means today. And you're— if you just keep doing what you love doing, you will get to where you want to be. And I'm a strong believer in that. But you need— and the core of all of this is you need to be happy what you're doing, you need to love what you're doing, but you need to be doing it for the right reasons, right? We have 23 people working in Prosperous because Colin has put the procedures and policies in place, but because at the core of everything we do, our core— one of our core values is always do the right thing for the client, even if it's not the right thing for Prosperous.

Nice. I've got to let you know, you're not morally bankrupt over Prosperous.

And we have, we have it written up on the wall. Like, it's there. Everybody, every one of those 23 people know we always do the right thing for the client. Always, right? And once you start from that, it makes everything else so simple in terms of— if you've got one of those 23 people has to make a decision, they know if they make the decision and it's in favor of the client, it was the right thing for the client to do, we're not going to give them shit for doing it. We might tell them not to do it that way again, but this is why I made that decision and I was empowered to do it. And you need to think about that for yourself as as well. If you're doing something that you really think is adding value to other people's lives, it'll just exponentially grow for you.

Boom. Owen, where do the people find you? I— we need more of this.

Yeah, so Instagram is probably— Instagram is an interesting one because years ago I was talking to somebody, they said, 'Oh no, Instagram wouldn't be for you.' I said to you, I had 400 followers in December '19. Lockdown hit, I started putting up content then. Yeah. And we're up 131,000 as of today. Getting about 1,000 a week is what we're growing. Let's see what happens after this one.

Yeah, there we go.

That's probably the central hub for everything else that goes out from there. Do a lot of public speaking. I've spoken in Dubai, spoken in the States, spoken a lot in Ireland, in the UK a little bit. Funny enough, UK is a funny one. It's not as much, right?

Yeah.

Um, but I love that corporate speaking stuff.

Oh, you know what? So I actually, I put on last summer, it was probably Marbella's biggest business event, and I'm going to do it again. It was on June 3rd last summer. I'm probably going to do the same again. I'd love to have you speak at it.

I would absolutely be delighted to do that. So that's where they're going to find me. There you go, guys. I'll be back out again.

Yeah.

And, um, you know what, we talked about education. One of the things is we have so much abundance of education. Make sure you get it from the right people.

Yeah.

Instagram's a strange place. You can get lots of people who'll tell you, here, buy 6 properties all at the same time, right? And let's be careful about that stuff. Um, we have my 2 books there, and actually that first book, uh, How to Be Good with Money is what it's called. That is the best-selling personal finance book of all time in Ireland.

Damn, no way! Yeah.

And, uh, then the second one is more about our relationship with money and where we go with that. But like, there's loads of information out there. Get out there. But Instagram is the probably the point of contact to go to everything else. Nice.

But look, I'm feeling really positive after that. Like, it was very uplifting. I'm feeling very motivated going into 2024. Thank you so much for being my first guest of the year.

Thank you, Rob.

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