Making Sense of Social Security

This episode is brought to you by the Bolden financial planning platform, formerly New Retirement Create a financial plan for free@bolden.com. Welcome to Bolden youn Money, a podcast where we interview experts from around the world about various topics that that our community cares about, spanning financial planning, retirement, and some of the macro things that are happening in the world. We might touch on that today where there continues to be a lot of market volatility. Today's guest, Devin Carroll, is an expert in Social Security and financial planning, and he's also a media mogul, which we're going to dive into. How that happened. He is the creator of Social Security intelligence, a YouTube channel, and also the author of a highly rated book called Social Security 9 essentials that everyone Should Know. He's built quite a following online and so with that, Devin, welcome to our show. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Steven. You're too kind. I'm not sure about the media mogul part, but it's my pleasure to be here.

Devin. It's been great to come to know you over the past several years now. Like, we've met at various conferences and fincon and things like that. And are you coming to us from Texarkana or are you somewhere else today?

Well, I'm actually in Missouri at the moment. I have a home up in the foothills of the Ozarks. That's why my office looks a little smallish, because it actually is. When we renovated this house, There's a little 8 by 10 room that I said, that'll be a perfect office. And my wife said, but it doesn't have windows. And I said, that's even better. No distractions.

No distractions. That's awesome. Well, I am operating in the garage with lots of windows so people can tell in the morning. And it's like super dark. Sometimes I start earth and like. But yeah, all good. So, Devin, could you give our audience kind of a quick background on your journey to becoming a financial planner and getting into Social Security and kind of what led you down that path?

Well, there's a lot of rabbit trails I can go down when we're talking about this, so stop me if I'm getting too wordy here. The journey is pretty interesting and I think it really harkens back to some of the old school mentality that's in the financial advisory planning space that unfortunately still exists to this day. So I was 25 years old. A friend called me and he said, hey, Devin, there's a recruiting event going on at this hotel. He'd seen this ad in the paper. And at the time, I was at a job where I was in sales, and I'd kind of reached the top of where I was going to go for the brief period. And I was young and ambitious, and I thought, man, I can do more, I can do better. So I told him, I said, yeah, I'll go to that with you. And so we go to this event. And it was a big brokerage firm that was looking for new advisors. And they're talking and they're taking applications that day at the event. They're wanting to fill out these applications. And so we both fill one out. And I got a call back, and unfortunately, my friend didn't, which it ended up being okay for him. He went back to engineering school and, and did well there. When I look back, the one reason they hired me was not because of my impressive academic resume. It was because I could sell. And I have had a demonstrated track record of selling. Now, at the time I was selling tires, I worked for one of the big national wholesale tire companies that actually sold tires to all the tire stores and some national accounts. But I'd figured out this little niche of all things, people that build trailers, right? Utility trailers, like the kind you pull behind your truck if you're going to get some sod or something for your yard. And I figured out that these people weren't really served and, and buying their tires. And so I went around to all of them I could find, and I started selling tires to them by the truckload, the literal truckload on paper, that looked really good looking at that. You know, this financial services company said, look, this guy can sell tires. We can teach them to sell investments. And so my journey in this space began at the young age of 26. So when I finally got my registration, just a few days after my 26th birthday, I got cut loose selling mutual funds. And it was interesting because back in the day, I still remember the managing partner at that firm telling us at one of the events, he said, guys, look, I'm going to make this very clear to you. The fastest way to find yourself out of a job is to start thinking you're a financial planner. You're not. Your job is to sell investments. Now, since then, that firm has moderated their tone because I think they've been able to. To read the room a little bit and understand, well, that's maybe not what people are looking for. So they've. They've taken this more comprehensive approach. But at that time, it was all based on sales. And So I spent eight years there. I figured out pretty quickly in the 2008 bear market, which was just brutal. It was horrible. I figured out pretty quick that, yeah, I'm not sure this is the way I want to build my business. And talking to granny out of her CD money and throwing it in a mutual fund so I can make a commission on that. I want to do this a little differently. So in 2010 I left and went independent. Now that's a lot of background information. So I'll stop there if you want me to or I'll keep going.

Well, I have a quick question. How many people or what percentage of the population of people in financial advice, which I know is very broad because almost anyone can say I'm a financial advisor these days, do you think started on that kind of path, like through the sales? And I know this is probably somewhat generational as well because like it, the whole industry used to be stock brokers were basically making money on trades and you know, or commission based stuff selling products. Yeah. Do you think that's a pretty common path for a lot of your peers?

I do. And, and I think that it still is, especially at the major firms. Because let's face it, sales is a big part of everything that we do. No matter what our job is, there's usually some aspect that we have to have good sales technique to be able to be successful in that job. Whether you're an engineer, whether you're a cpa, whatever it is, you have to do that. But I think that for a lot of people in our industry, it takes it on to a whole new level. Right. Because effectively what they're doing for a lot of these people is they're saying, okay, here you go, you're fresh, go hit the ground running. And I hope you can get enough clients to stay alive. And that's why one of the reasons is that we. And I've seen different numbers on this, but the failure rate of new financial advisors is 80%. The vast majority of them just don't make it. But I do think there's also a strong demand and I've heard from a lot of these guys that say, look, I don't want to sell, but I'm really good with people and I know financial planning. And you know, those are the kind of people that we're adding to our team because there is a fresh crop of people that's been coming out over the last few years that are not focused on that sales aspect, but they're still really good.

Yep. We're seeing this kind of advice first or advice only. There's many more people that have that orientation. They're trying to do the right thing. And there's more expansive business models because the business model used to be sale get paid on commission or aum. Right, that was kind of it. And now those are joined by some people just charge whatever. I'll charge you a subscription fee or a one time planning fee or something like that.

It's very interesting though, Steven, and this is kind of getting into some inside baseball of the industry a little bit. You're right. There's a lot of business models that have come out, whether it's advice only, you know, if it's hourly financial planning where we don't do asset management, we only do advice and then send you on your own way. So there's a lot of different business models and I think even within those we still see a fairly high failure rate because a lot of newer advisors fail to grasp what I said a moment ago. And that is that there is still an aspect to this where you've got to be persuasive. If you believe in your approach, if you believe in what it is that you do, you cannot expect people to just understand and to see what you do, read your website and go, oh yeah, this is exactly the value that I want, therefore I'm going to hire them. That happens sometimes, but there's also the persuasion that still has to be there. Some people call that sales and it may be a little bit of that that's still there. Give you an example, a friend of mine has this policy that he'll talk to someone once and then he is not talking to them again. They either decide they're going to become a client or they don't. But he's talking to them once and I respect that. I mean that sounds fantastic. But I can tell you that my practice would be substantially smaller if I didn't have some sort of follow up with those people who had inquired about my services that we'd talk to and just understanding that sometimes, you know, we're, we're planting an orchard, we're not out there planting something that's going to come up quickly and start producing fruit. It requires following up.

Yeah, I mean, I think the data supports that. Sales is everywhere. I think the majority of Fortune 500 CEOs came through selling like 80% of them kind of came to the revenue side of the business. And there's data that's like the sale is made when you're selling anything after like the 8th call or something like that. And the people who win in sales, yeah, they're persuasive and they're also persistent. There's the not giving up part of this equation as well.

Well, and one more thing to tack onto that, though, Steven. I know we're kind of getting maybe off track with what you wanted to talk about here, but when it comes to sales and how that relates to kind of a professional service sales like we are involved in here, there is a line that's there. And I think that people react, smart people, intelligent people, react negatively to some of the old sales tactics that were used just 10, 15 years ago. There's a major nationwide company that advertises a lot and they have some really good lead magnets they put out there for people to download. And once you download it, your phone is going to start blowing up. And I was talking to someone just earlier today that was telling me that their phone has been exploding with these people. And if they make what he called the mistake of actually answering the call, he said it is extremely pushy, very, very aggressive, and they're wanting to get down to talking about personal details that he said I just wasn't, you know, wasn't prepared for. So I do think it's still persuasion, but some of the old sales tactics that are out there, those are probably going to serve as more of a.

Turn off for sure. Now in the day, in the age of AI, where you can go on and just ask your question, like, when should I claim Social Security? Or is an annuity a good decision? You can get a lot of color yourself. And I think many more people are just showing up with. They're farther along the journey themselves, they're more educated, they still want to talk to trusted people. But it's, yeah, how do you build trust and credibility at scale? And I think that gets into some of the stuff we'll get into, which is like through mediums like this, you know, record one podcast and have three or five thousand people listen to it. It's kind of amazing, right? And people get to know you at scale and see what you're about and hopefully you're demonstrating value along the way. And then they'd be like, okay, this. And combined with other maybe more expansive business models, you know, I think the world is, is definitely changing. But yeah, so let's get back, you know, just to finish up with you. So you kind of got started in your mid-20s, eight years, you know, got to sounds like 2010, went independent and then it was like, Boom, fast forward 15 years and what's been happening in between. Oh man.

The years between 2010 and 2020 were years of confusion for me. I really struggled with knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up, especially in those early years, transitioning from a big established brand name company to an independent shop where it's just you, that transition doesn't always go like you thought it would. And I'll admit it didn't for me either. I failed to fully understand the power that that big brand name would have on a lot of my, what I thought were my clients and they weren't, they were clients of the firm. Once I landed and about two years had gone by and I knew that, look, people that are going to join me have already joined me. Now what are you going to do? And that was a fairly dark period because I had to really start thinking about my practice and you know, am I, am I going to continue in this business, frankly? And I had had to have those discussions with myself and ultimately decided that yes, I am going to continue with this business. And it was about 2012-2015 that I just focused on staying alive. It was in that period I was in the water, you know, and I often equate it to, I was floundering around, just trying to float, trying to stay up. About 2015 is when I felt like somebody threw me a life preserver that didn't even know they were doing it. And it was a friend of mine, a guy who is still my friend to this day, who is also the co host of my podcast, John Ross. We record a podcast to this day. He had just returned from an estate planning conference. And at this conference there was a speaker there that spoke on Social Security and some of the, you know, what they called at the time the advanced claiming strategies, which was effectively the whole violence of spend and the lower earning file then, then you, you know, restrict the scope of your application, so on and so forth. And he was asking me about this stuff and I'd never heard of it. And at this point, I'd been practicing for over 10 years and I'd never heard of this stuff. And it bothered me, it bothered me a lot. And I started thinking, well, wait a minute, if you haven't heard of this and you've never heard any of your peers, your colleagues talk about this, is anyone else talking about it? So I decided to dig in and I did. I started studying, learning everything I could about Social Security. And there was, there was something odd about it because coming from a guy who's not overly academic it resonated with me. It really set a hook in deep. And I couldn't quit studying because for some reason that became the light at the end of my tunnel. And I knew that if I could start communicating what I knew about Social Security, that that may be what would keep me alive. I started reading books on marketing and how to do some of the new marketing with digital space and, you know, blogs and YouTube and podcasts and getting to know some of those people, you know, visiting the conference where I ultimately met you back in 2017, learning all I could about that, and then launched the YouTube channel to absolute crickets. I put three or four videos on there that were atrocious. I mean, they were awful. Today I'm having to record this, as I explained to you before we hit the record button, I'm having to record this on an alternate camera because my good camera, the motor, quit focusing for some reason. But I'm telling you, the quality that we have today is so far ahead of the quality of those first YouTube videos. They were sad. They're not even on the channel anymore. I wish I would have just put them in unpublished or private, just so I could look back at those. No one watched those videos. And so I decided, well, forget this. I'm not going through all this trouble of making videos. I'm just going to be a blogger. That's still a big deal, right? And so I launched Social Security Intelligence and I started blogging. But all of this was really a way to help me clarify what I was learning about Social Security and then share it with others. And about a year goes by, and it was after one of the Fincon conferences, and it may have been the one in 2017, because that sounds about right. Someone was talking about YouTube ad revenue and how many views you needed, so on and so forth. And I came back and I decided, well, I'm going to check and see. And sure enough, my channel was approved for monetization. So I turned it on. The day after I turned it on, I earned $4 and some change. And I thought, man, well, that's $4 and something I wasn't earning before. But the other thing I noticed was that one of my videos had gone from having maybe 60 views and it was at 30 something thousand views. And I thought, what in the world is going on here? And I started figuring out that, okay, there is a demand for this information, so I'm going to make another video. And so after about a year break, I started making additional videos. And thankfully, at least in my opinion, they Got a little better. The quality kept improving and improving and improving. And next thing you know, Covid hits. And that's a big YouTube boom where a lot of people are at home watching a lot of YouTube videos. And this channel that talks about Social Security and retirement planning started doing pretty well. But it was all born out of me wanting to learn more and then to clarify what I was learning by teaching it to others.

I think this educational part of it and the authenticity is such a huge thing. And obviously you. And there's Rob Berger, Joe Kuhn. You know, there's various people. They all kind of start as, like, regular, pretty regular people. And I mean, they're experts and they're personable. It's so amazing to see that. I mean, I'm looking at your channel right now. You have 454,000 subscribers. You know, you roll out videos, and they'll get 60,000 views or 280,000 views. It's amazing.

Yeah, well, and it's interesting. Just a quick side note to anyone that may be listening to this, thinking, well, I want to start a YouTube channel. It's one of the most frustrating things I do to release a new video, because you never, ever know what's going to happen. You're being very gracious in looking at some of the videos that have gotten higher views. And, you know, I've got videos on there that have 2 million views. Back during COVID I walked into Sam's Club one day for something. I think I was returning something. And right as I was walking in the doors, I got a notification on my phone from YouTube. And I usually don't have those, but I noticed, man, that's kind of a strange notification. So I looked at it, and it said, you're in the YouTube trending list. And I thought, well, surely that's the. The localized trending or something like that, you know, some niche trending. No, it was the top 10 trending videos of all of those on YouTube. So it's certainly easy to highlight those successes. But, you know, here we are now, five years later. In two videos ago, I released what I thought was a banger video. Today, it has 4,300 views. So it's frustrating. And you can't go back and point all of it to the fact that, well, it wasn't good content that resonated, maybe, maybe not. So if anyone's thinking about YouTube, prepare for some frustration. But it's still working.

We have, I think, 4,500 subscribers, 1% of what you have. Anyway, so you got into Social Security and became, like, a primary source for that and that I also. Kudos on. Good decision. You know, it's like 80 plus percent of us end up claiming Social Security. And it's confusing. And there's lots of things. Also, I will say what you're communicating how, like, you discovered things, like, 10 years into this, like, I don't understand Social Security. I just had the exact same experience with HSAs. I've had an HSA for, like, whatever, 10 years, and I've always put money into it. I'm like, grant, I get the tax deduction. And I, of course, then, like, and I have a high deductible healthcare plan and kids, and I'm like, spending the money. Then we hired a guy who's like, our new director of sales, Jerry Hollis. Shout out Jerry Hollis. And he worked for a company that did HSAs and knows all that. He's like, hey, dude, you got this completely wrong. You know, you're like, hey, I thought I kind of knew what I was doing here, but, like, there's things that we all learn. I was talking to Nancy Gates, who's our head educator, and she's like, yeah, now I'm dealing with aging parents and friends. There's a whole world of complexity that you get into as you go through your life. You're like, you think you're not part of it? Nailed accumulating money. And then it's like, yeah, I got to think about Social Security. Then you got to think about estate. Like, it's complexities everywhere. And that's the challenging part.

Yeah, it is. There's always something to learn. And, you know, it is funny. And I think it's the mark of intelligence to realize that the more, you know, the more of a student you become. I hear that from some of my most successful clients when they'll say things like, well, you know, I don't know what I don't know. And I think that's a progression that has to happen when you're younger and, you know, your enthusiasm and maybe arrogance is that it's at the most, you think you know everything. And then as you age and get more wisdom and experience, at least the way it should work is that you start to realize that, oh, man, I still got a lot to learn here. And that's about everything, right? That's the way I am in financial planning. Sometimes talking to my team, my other advisors, I realize, how have I been doing this for 22 years and didn't know that?

That's ridiculous. One of my favorite Things is there's the competency matrix or spectrum. You know, that like, you're unconsciously incompetent and then you're consciously incompetent. Then you're consciously competent. Yes. And then you're unconsciously competent. And like one, it's like you got to have the self awareness. Yeah. That key part of, like successful people is they have the self awareness to understand where they are in this and be humble about learning. And many people that are the opposite of that, people that have failed are like, they're just way too confident. And people see through that now more and more.

I agree. I agree. The. The BS meter, I'll tell you in general, I have found, and maybe it's just the people that I work with now, but it does seem that people's BS meter has gotten a lot more tuned in. Maybe it's because of AI, because it's so easy now to fact check what someone is saying and, you know, plug that in. So, for example, if someone is telling you that the performance on this outweighs what the fees are, well, it's easy to go and check that it's not something that takes a lot of. A lot of data and using spreadsheets anymore.

I was prepping for another podcast and we're like, can we conference in ChatGPT to ask, can you explain stagflation? Like, I'm five years old, we couldn't get it to work. But I do think that's gonna be here imminently. Like, you'll kind of have this thing over here either in the call or listening to you be like, actually, you got that wrong. Or, you know, it's more like this. As long as it's not hallucinating. Right? Yeah. How are your clients reacting to and dealing with the current market volatility, since that's kind of the big headline here?

Yeah, it is. And I'm not sure when you release your episodes after you record them, but yeah, as we're sitting here talking today, the last few days have been wild. One day, I don't know if it was yesterday or day before. At this point, within about 15 minutes, we had a 10% swing in the market. It was just. It's just crazy times. And I'll tell you, I feel very, very blessed to have the type of clients that we do back in the days when I was at the big firm, you know, when I was talking grandma out of her CD money and putting it in a mutual fund when maybe she didn't actually need that. Markets like these were completely different than they are now. There was a lot of anxiety, a lot of, a lot of uncertainty, and people were exiting the market at the worst possible times. And now, you know what I've noticed, and I really started noticing this in the 2020 bear market. And then we had 2022, and now here we are in 2025, and I've noticed that our phones aren't really ringing or emails coming in with people worried about the market. And I think part of that's a testament to how we educate our clients initially and then some of the ongoing communication as well. But it is very, very, very rare that we have someone that gets concerned enough to make a drastic move. So a lot of what we're hearing right now is, all right, Devin, we, you know, and a lot of time this will be proactive on our part too, is to reach out and say here's the opportunity that we didn't expect, but now it's in front of us. So whether that's tax loss harvesting or it's Roth conversions, or some of the more tactical moves that align with the long term strategy, I think it's a beautiful time for that. And that's really the conversations that we're having with clients.

Yeah, that's great to hear. I mean, we see a similar thing in our community. We did a poll last Thursday as things started to kind of go really wonky. How are people seeing this? The majority was 60% ish. Like, hey, I expect volatility, I'm comfortable with it. And even another additional chunk where, like, I actually see this as an opportunity. So totally hear you. I think for people that are on this journey and do financial planning and they're educated and have been through it, they are more conditioned and better able to adapt than it was, call it 10, 20 years ago, which is a good thing. How about people outside of your clients? Do you feel like, pretty different, it's pretty different for other chunks of society where folks are, or do you think that that's kind of a universal thing where people are getting more adapted?

You know, I don't know. It's really hard to say. A lot of what I'm hearing from some of my colleagues out there is that they are having to play firefighter right now and they're having to spend a lot of time in talking to people. And I don't think it's that way with everyone. But you know, let's face it, if someone has been a diligent saver over the last 30 years in their career, I mean, they've seen a lot of this stuff already happen. They've been through a lot of really adverse markets. And so I think part of it is that they have adapted to it. But I'll tell you, the people that we see that the anxiety does get exacerbated some in these markets are the people that do not have a plan in place. So if they're still just at the advisor's office who. Their thing is, we do investment management, and they don't really have a plan where there's nothing to anchor them. Yeah, there's nothing that's there that says, hey, it doesn't matter if this happens. Look at the plan. You're still okay. Let's look at this in maybe a linear return that assumes that we'll never have those kind of returns. Or let's look at this under these assumptions with a probability of success. And, you know, let's look at it in a number of different ways. Let's run some additional scenarios. Let's reduce the balances by X amount. Which is one of the things, Stephen, that I love about Bolden is that you're able to go in there and just do a. You know, in a withdrawal, I can't remember exactly where it is, but it's in the section. You can just. You can just carve out a section of your portfolio and assume it's no longer there. Yeah, that'll let you see. Okay. Now, how do we look after we've just sucked out 100 grand in value, you know, a 10% drop, does that really affect us? And I think that kind of stress testing is critically important. And it's important to do before these kind of markets hit, because you want to have that confidence, and you can't have that confidence without clarity. And so you've got to use a tool that gives you crystal clear clarity. And I say it to people all the time, I can't have confidence for you. And at least the clients that I serve, I can't pat them on the back and say, don't worry about it, you'll be okay. They won't accept that. Right. They've got to see it for themselves. They've got to have that clarity. And I really appreciate that. And from that, they get confidence. And so when we get into markets like these, they're generally okay.

Yep, Totally agree with that. And we call ourselves Bolden, your financial confidence platform. And it is around this. It's about helping people get educated, get clear, and understand it. And then another quote we talk about. It's like plans are useless. But planning is indispensable. You get confident by thinking about these scenarios and what could happen in advance. And so you're like, I've got a plan A. Yeah, everything's hunky dory, I've got a plan B. You know, things go sideways a bit and I have a plan C. The bottom falls out, but like I still can be okay. Yeah. You know, some of our users also do the bucket strategy and things like that. You know, they're like rolling around with some cash on the sidelines and they're not too worried about it. They're like, okay, this is happening so I'm not going to have to sell or I can tap a hallmark reline or whatever they're going to do.

And you know, we, we really haven't seen an extended bear market since 2008. For a lot of the people that are retiring today, we're getting close to that 20 year mark and there's a lot of 65 year olds that were in their 40s in 2008. And for a lot of those people, they didn't even have all that much money then. You know, the people that might have a million, 2 million, 3 million today back then were likely still under a million and they were still working. They knew they had plenty of years left. And so I do suspect that if we get into an extended bear market, you know, the level of education coming from financial advisors to keep that confidence level high is going to need to be greater than it has been in the past few little bear markets that we've had. 20, 20, 2022. Those have been pretty quick recoveries.

Yeah, for sure. It feels like things are getting faster just in general in our society and with technology, the iterations get quicker and it feels like that has been happening for a long period of time. And so I'm hopeful that we'll get through the current volatility and the technology and everything else will keep cranking along here and recoveries will also be quicker, but we'll see.

Yeah, well, I've got my fingers crossed that your prediction comes true since you're.

A Social Security expert. Any top things that you think people should consider, you know, as they. Well, actually let me zone first one, how do you feel about Social Security? Because I believe that the trust fund is due to run out in 2035. I know the year moves around but like around that time frame and then theoretically if the trust fund got exhausted, we could see a 20% decline in benefits or 25%. Do you have any macro Thoughts about how that might play out?

Yeah, some. Although, needless to say, it's just a wild guess at this point, if we're looking at that 2033-35 timeline, when the trust fund is supposed to be depleted, I think there's probably only going to be one way that works out, and that is we're not going to see a cut. I just absolutely do not believe that current beneficiaries are going to see their benefits go down unexpectedly like that. That would be political suicide. And that's the one thing that politicians will avoid at all cost, is something that's going to cost them a lot of votes. With that said, I do think that Social Security will and has to change. And this is so interesting because it doesn't matter which side of the political aisle that you watch, they both love to throw around no changes to Social Security or no cuts or no changes. And in many cases that's synonymous. Right. Because just about any change you make to Social Security, unless you're increasing benefits or you're making it more generous, is in fact a cut. And you've got these watchdogs out there that are talking about how every little proposal is going to cut Social Security by this amount, and everyone's just scared to death of it. And here's the thing. Without changing Social Security, you are in fact, by default, cutting it. Because in 2033 through 35, whenever it actually happens, benefits are going to get cut. And so before that, we've got to have some sort of fundamental changes to the program. I don't know if one political party is going to be willing to sacrifice the upcoming elections to do that or not, but it's got to happen. You know, we could go into what. What I think is the most likely way that it's going to be reformed. But I don't know how deeply you want to get into that.

No, it's fine. I mean, I would say I agree with you. There are structural things that have to happen here. And, you know, I was like looking in a link to it in the thing, but the different options are there's an increase the revenue. Right. Crank up payroll taxes or increase the rate because we kind of put a ceiling on it. After a certain point, you stop paying Social Security taxes. They could raise that or open up more income sources and then the other side. Yeah, reducing benefits. I don't think I agree with you. They're not going to cut the payments that are happening, but they might delay it. We are living longer, so maybe they'll delay or open up like the age of the full retirement age or something like that. People understand that. I would think it's like, hey, if we used to live to 85, now we live with technology to 100, you know, which I think could happen. Then you're probably gonna have to work longer unless we get a lot more efficient.

Yep. You know, I'll throw out a revolutionary idea and I'd love to see this change, because I think this would be the change that would fix it. There's a couple of things that we could do. The first would be, what if we just took the program back to its roots of being an anti poverty program. What if we just said, look, for everyone born, you know, in, in 1980 or after, this is going to be your benefit in today's dollars and it'll adjust upward for inflation. It's a lower benefit than what you would receive under the normal formula. Now that is also known as a universal Social Security benefit. Right. Where it's flattened for everyone. But there's a think tank that has actually dove into those numbers and has found that if you returned it to the roots of an anti poverty system, number one, the people on the lower end of the scale would actually see a benefit increase from that, whereas the people that are on the higher end that would receive a higher benefit have time to prepare for it. And at least this way, when we're doing retirement planning for those people that were born in 1980 or later, right now we don't know what to do. Right. Do we include half the benefit, all the benefit? Do we cut it out completely? It's just, it's really difficult to know. And at least this way we would have some clarity around what the future may look like for that. You know, the think tank that did this said not only would this work, but payroll taxes could actually be cut in. So doing so that's one of the options that I personally would love to see. Would it mean a lower benefit? For you and me it would. But you know what, we have time to prepare for that.

Yeah, it's super interesting and it's never easy. There's also like, can we invest that money? And stuff like that. But for sure it'll be a big debate. Like we won't get into all the policy stuff, but I think it'll be, you know, it'll be a meaningful debate. But we do have to take action. This will have to change. And not just Social Security. We have to think about Medicare itself. Medicare is like an even larger program and more expensive and I think on a similar timeframe where it's like kind of in the early 2000, 30s could get exhausted and then the benefit level could end up getting cut by like 10% or something like that. Yeah. What are some of the best practices and insights that people should think about when they're. They're thinking about Social Security?

Well, I think some of it depends on the age group that's actually doing the planning. The age group that my firm helps are those people who are generally, you know, somewhere around 58 and above. Most of them are between 1 and 12 million in retirement assets. And so I think for them there's a different approach that should be taken than for the people who are, say, 45. If you're less than 55 right now, I would absolutely be applying some sort of discount factor to that. Because of the unknown. Right. Not because I know for a fact it's going to be cut. Just there's a lot of unknown there. So I would be applying a discount factor. But if you're over that age, maybe over 57, 58, at this point, you're probably going to be safe because the Social Security administration does have a long track record of phasing in changes, you know, so they don't just shock impact people that is either right on the doorsteps of Social Security or already receiving benefits. So I think it depends on the age group. And I'll kind of take up a sidetrack here and a contrarian view to what most people are saying about filing for Social Security. So for those people who are, you know, in that age group that I serve, looking at, you know, so if someone's in retirement age right now and they're planning out their retirement income, I find so many people that have read all of the articles that suggest that delaying Social Security is almost always the best, and I would at least encourage them to test the other filing strategies. Let's say that you're retiring at 62, for example. Well, if that's you, then, then that means that you have a choice, right? You can file for Social Security early or you can delay it. Now, the trade off here is that if you file for Social Security early, you would likely have to take less from your accounts, lower distributions. And if you delay Social Security, you're going to have to take more distributions. And so you really need to test that trade off based on the assumptions that you're comfortable using, based on how's that going to impact our ability to stay retired? How's that going to impact the taxes that we're going to pay. And how's that going to impact our portfolio balances? How's that going to impact us from a survivor standpoint? So if there's different ages between you and your spouse, or even if it's the same age, you may want to test what if something happens early to me, the highest earner. And so looking at multiple scenarios and testing that out and not just accepting some pat conventional wisdom answer of, well, the way you do that is either, you know, you delay until 70 and the lower earning spouse files as soon as they can. I just don't find that to be sound advice. And when I look at the data, that doesn't actually work out most of the time.

Interesting. That's because people can get higher returns by taking less out of their investment accounts. They keep a higher balance and hopefully capture market returns for that period of time.

Well, there is that. Right. So you certainly got the time value money approach that's growing there where for every dollar you take out, that's another dollar that can grow. But what about when the market's down? So now you're playing around with filing for Social Security earlier to help protect against that sequence of returns risk. So let's say that you retired and you didn't have that cash bucket in place and now you just find yourself with a 401k that you rolled over to your IRA and you're having to take distributions from that. Well, anything you can do to minimize those distributions is likely going to help you in the long run when the market's going down. So I think filing for Social Security can protect you on both sides of that. And that's not to say. And some people hear me say things like this and they go, well, Devin's the guy that thinks you should file early. That is not the case at all. At all. But I don't think you ought to be closed off to it for sure.

Yeah. One of the things we're looking at doing is these scenario templates where we would have kind of like help people see common things they might want to test for and that this is an example of that. Like, let's run your plan. Claiming early, claiming mid, claiming late. Another thing Joe Kuhn talks about this is like if you have a pension understanding, if you have like a survivor benefit or not, no one thinks, oh, I could pass away early. But it's, you know, what if the pension holder passes away early? Oh, by the way, that completely implodes a plan. You know, there's things that people just don't Think about and helping them kind of see what some of these risks are and how they can hedge against those risks. And then back to the clarity thing. Right. You're confident because you, like, I've thought about it. I kind of understand those big levers that are in front of me. And it is complicated because it's like Social Security drawdowns, the taxation, RMDs. All these things kind of come together for people. You have to think about it.

Yep. One piece moves four other pieces. And we hear that from the people who come to us all the time, you know, who are mostly engineers or former IT professionals that come to us and they're usually really good at spreadsheets, and they'll send us their very complicated spreadsheet in many cases. But the one thing that they really can't get dialed in on is the tax piece and having the different iterations that you really almost have to have the coding like a Bolden has or some of the other financial planning software. It's just really difficult to do that in Excel. And I know right now there's someone listening going, oh, no, I can do that, but it's not easy to do it. Right?

Yeah. And then you're spending all this time maintaining it. I think people are like, I have this killer spreadsheet and I build it so it's free. But I'm like, well, how many hours have you spent building it and how many hours do you spend maintaining it? And what are the odds there's a mistake in it? Right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's good. I'm glad people do this. But also, I think there's a lot of value in kind of having other people look at it. Before we move on from Social Security, any other things people should watch out for or consider as they approach retirement? Because that's our audience, too. It's kind of people that are 50 plus, 45 plus are getting closer to this.

You know, one of the things that. This is a very simple move, and it's one that I generally throw out as a caution anytime I get the opportunity, and that is that as you're approaching retirement, go get a copy of your earnings history, and now that's no longer on your Social Security statement. So it's becoming easier to miss mistakes in your earnings history, because now what they do with older decades is they truncate a decade's worth of earnings together. So you have to go and get your actual earnings history. And if you log into your SSA account, it's in about a middle of the screen and it'll say, download your earnings record here. You can click that and that will show you a year by year summary of what your earnings. But the reason that you want to check that is that we still continue to see multiple mistakes. And, you know, if you're in those higher earnings years and there's a zero in there for whatever reason, that's likely going to have some impact on your benefit. So you want to make sure that you've got all of those earnings in there correctly.

That's a great tip. Yeah, it's super interesting. Yeah, I know they used to publish that and I guess they've kind of buried it a bit.

It is a little buried. Yeah.

Pro tip. We'll look at that too. So it sounds like you've got your practice and you've got the media side of this thing. How do you see this unfolding over the next five years? Three to five years? Where do you want to be?

There's the oh, what do you want to be when you grow up? Question. Right. So I'll tell you, I got a lot of clarity around this. In 2020, here I was doing the YouTube channel. It was really starting to pick up because Covid was just an insane time for content creators because there was so much content being consumed. I mean, we had months where the revenue was just insane. I'd never seen that kind of money before coming in off of something like that. And I started to think, you know, maybe this is the time to go full time into this and just be a content creator. I'd seen a couple of other people do it who had left being a financial advisor and done that and seemed like it was going okay. And about that time, I actually received an unsolicited offer to buy my practice. So these two things were starting to line up. And I thought, wait a minute, is this just coincidence or is this just kind of everything aligning the way it should? And the offer was really good to buy my practice. I was pretty sure I was going to take it. And I let. I let my friend look over it, who's the attorney. He said, wait a minute, Devin, what about this clause in here, this clawback? I was like, well, somehow I didn't really see that. And so he started explaining to me the way that could work out. And long story short, I declined the offer. That was what gave me the clarity of what I wanted to use all of this media stuff for. I wanted to start using it to grow my advisory business. That's a different world now. Right? Because it's not on there giving this call to action every time, you know, call me at such and such number and we're happy to talk. It's about providing a lot of value and hoping that that value resonates with people enough that they're going to go out and look you up and occasionally giving a call to action.

Yep.

And so when we made that focus, then I knew that, okay, you're going to have to change the structure of the way you do your business. You're going to have to really get deliberate about creating workflows and processes and procedures that's very detailed. And you're going to have to start hiring staff. And I was shocked at how much hiring CFPs actually cost, you know, because I didn't know until that point that we were supposed to be making that much money.

Like, wait a sec. Yeah.

And so I started scaling up the team and hiring people and then as they would start to reach capacity, we would hire another one. And anyway, it just started growing from there. And so really the focus of all of our media content now is to educate as liberally as possible to give people as much value as we possibly can. And for those who are looking for a new relationship to seek us out, and if they don't, that's fine. I hope I've been able to help them now.

I remember as you were first ramping YouTube, I think we met in person at one of those times. You were like, yeah, I got to 50,000 views on something and I'll. Or 50,000 subs or whatever. And I was like, holy smokes. Like this is real. And then I feel like I talked to you again and you were like, just as you were thinking about this and it did feel like, okay, I'm going to become this content creator and forget this services side. When you think about the two sides, obviously you were making some money as a YouTuber from ad revenue. And then there's the practice, which is kind of more like, how is there like a ratio? Are they staying in sync or do you not optimize for the ad revenue?

Well, earlier in the show, we were talking about a video that I released not long ago that got 4,300 views. That's not the kind of video you release if you're really worried about revenue. Right. If you're really worried about revenue, there is a certain style of video that you release with a certain title, with a certain thumbnail based on content that certain people are looking for and trying to pique that curiosity. If you're on there Truly trying to educate alone, you're probably not going to get the views and so you almost have to separate them if you're going to be a content creator and that's where you're going to have some revenue coming in. You're going to have to approach that differently than you are if that becomes an avenue to introduce people to your services. And that's really what it is now. And so I do not care as much about the revenue anymore coming off of my content side as I do about what are the key results that it is producing for me. That said, I mean, yeah, the revenue is still nice. It's kind of embarrassing sometimes when you think about there's people that do full time jobs out there. That's not getting the revenue from doing that full time job that I'm getting from this media that I'm creating. So again, I do feel blessed that I'm able to do that.

Well, I think it's also the YouTube stuff, it's software, so you can scale super fast, but also it can change quickly too. Like, you know, you kind of live and die by the algorithm. Right. And yes, we're seeing all these bloggers in this, the world of AI being able to generate content. I was talking to one of the blogger folks we know and this is a guy who made a lot of money and he was like, yeah, the AI killed or, and Google, whatever. The SEO changes killed my blog business. So it's like done. But I think video is very different. Right. It's much more personal and it's much more unique to the person. Right. Because you're speaking directly to them. It is, it is changing rapidly.

And I do feel bad for the bloggers. I mean there were so many people that had left good jobs to become. I'm in a network of food bloggers and there are so many of these food bloggers that, you know, they, they left good jobs because this is really, this, this allowed them to stay at home and do the things that they wanted to do around the house, but also to have a good income coming in. And in many cases it was an income that was several times what they were making in their other job once they scaled it up. And then the SEO changes come in and then the Google changes come in and it just decimated so many of them. And I've seen them posting their numbers about what their, their ad revenue is on their site, which is one of the primary ways that they're getting the revenue is from, you know, if, if you've looked at a Recipe site. You know, there's a lot of ads, right. There's a whole lot of ads on a food site. And that's where they were getting their, their revenue from. And it's just, the traffic is just way down because now you've got the AI result that's probably giving you everything and you're never having to go to that site.

Yeah.

So I think that again, for anyone thinking about content, that diversity of content is also accurate. I'll give you an example. I know a lot of advisors who have a podcast who look at my YouTube channel with a little envy. And I was talking to one of them not long ago and he was saying, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start doing YouTube. And I said, well, hang on, before you do that, let me share some of my data with you here. Out of all of the people that come in to see me, about half of my new consults come from the podcast. And yet the podcast is about 7% of my overall content traffic that's out there on a monthly basis. And yet it accounts for half of the people that come to see me. So having that diversity that may switch one day. Right. But having that diversity of content is really important.

I will say it's just amazing though, now that 20 years ago our parents would never think that, oh, hey, you have a professional job, you have a profession. Like, hey, I write software and you deliver financial advice. But on the side, I create media in podcasts that get thousands or tens of thousands of listens and then videos that get. And it's like, I think it would be very hard for people to conceive that that's like, and that's part of the game and you have to do it all at least reasonably well to succeed.

Yeah.

Just curious about practice size. How many CFPs, how big is the Carol advisory now?

We manage about 152 households currently, which puts us at just around, I think we're just over the 200 million mark in assets under management. So, you know, for some people that's a small firm, some people that's a large firm. It just depends on your perspective, I suppose. But we've laid a lot of groundwork for the growth that we're starting to experience now and have experienced over the last year with those sorts of numbers. I mean, we'll be a billion dollar firm pretty quickly.

How quickly do you think you'll be a billion dollar firm?

Probably three years according to the projections.

That's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, you could be a venture backed version of this and well, I'll.

Tell you, the change that we made, that really accelerated things. Steven, after looking at the way the industry build and I know this is for advisors. There's some advisors who hate this, who hate that I did this. There's some advisors who won't even talk to me now because I'm one of those guys. We switched from an asset under management approach to a flat fee approach. And that I'm going to tell you is resonating with the people who consume our content. A lot of the more technical people, a lot of the more educated people, the people who are higher savers, they did not understand why they needed to pay six times as much simply because they have 6 million. As the guy who saved a million and received the same services, that has resonated. And again, I think that was part of our growth over the last 12 months and looking forward just at the things in the pipeline. God, it's just crazy.

Yeah, I think this is a shift. It's kind of like real estate, right? There was a whole real estate thing about hey, you know, I live in California, but I grew up in Rochester. Why do you pay someone? Because your house is worth more. You're paying a bunch more in transaction fees. It hasn't totally changed, but there's pressure and I, I don't think Aum model goes away completely. I just feel like there's going to be a much wider spectrum of offerings.

Right.

And people have more awareness, which is good. And there's going to be many more ways people can get onboarded to doing better. We were just talking about AI and impact our business. The way I was stating what way I see it is like having access to an advisor. If it's human or a service like Bolden or whatever or guidance on this journey, you will end up with way more money if you're more financially efficient. Right. And you're more optimized. So it's definitely good to get help along the journey for behavioral reasons and education, all that stuff. But how you pay for it and how it's delivered is going to change so much. Like mass media, AI like meeting people where they are. It's going to be completely different and it's going to be, I think way more accessible to many more people, which is net good for society. That's kind of how I see this playing out.

Well other two. And I think that therein lies the reason that advisors are really going to have to get skilled on the planning side. Because when our clients are coming to us now, they don't need us just to access a handful of index funds. Right. They need planning, they need tools. And unless that planning and tools is better because of the human guidance that comes with it than some of the tools that are available out there, like Bolden, for example, what's to keep somebody from just using Bolding and just buying index funds? Really? Nothing. Nothing at all. Because with both of those, they're going to be in great shape. But there are some of those people who want that additional guidance. And let's face it, there's a lot of advisors who cannot give any value on top of what Bolden is already doing. And so you're really going to have to get skilled and get up to the expert level if you want to continue attracting those clients in the future. I mean, AI is a perfect example. Right? So let's say that they don't use Bolden, that they use AI instead. I mean, it's building some decent plans. There's a lot that's being missed. But just for simple one off questions, it's making it much more competitive.

100%. It's super amazing. I mean, by the way, on that note, I saw that you added like an AI bot onto your. How is that going? What are you learning from that?

Oh, it's interesting. So for me, it's about data. I've always been a big fan of. I don't want to waste my time talking to people who's not a right fit. I want to talk to people who already thinks they may like the way that we approach business and planning and our model. As a result, I've put everything I can about our approach online on my website, caroladvisory.com part of that was, you know, I sat down with my team and I said, all right, tell me every question that we've been asked by prospective clients. Let's make a long list. And I'm going to put that on the website. And we came up with 47 questions and answers. Well, that's probably one of the longest FAQs out there. And the truth, you know, there were some people reading every one of those, but then some people weren't. And I started hearing, well, what about this? And I, you know, I want to say, well, that's in my FAQs, but here's the answer to that. So I got to thinking, what if they could go into this chatbot and ask it anything about me they wanted to. Almost anything. I mean, down to what I do for a hobby, down to what my firm, you know, where it's located and all of this different stuff. And I took all of my content that I've written on Social Security and I took all of the video scripts that I've released, and I uploaded all of that into this chat bot. And now watching the conversations that people are having with that is incredible. And I'll tell you, it gives me data on what people really want to know. It's really easy for us to sit back behind our desk and think we know the questions that our clients are going to be asking, but when they're not facing us and the things that they really want to know. You'll find out if you put a chatbot on your website, that's super interesting.

And how many people are. By the way, you're totally validating a discussion we had earlier about AI. I was like, we should do this so we can learn what are people really asking about it. And also, I love the fact that you ragged up, which is trained up on all your scripts and everything. And that's the thing you have is hundreds of videos and all these interactions and stuff like that. But what kind of usage are you seeing out there?

Well, let me give you an example here. And this is just off the cuff. In the last two days, we've had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 users that have had all of these different chats. And some of these chats are pretty long. Here's somebody that asked me, are you a member of the Better Business Bureau? And that was all they asked. And how do I schedule an appointment with Devin? Was one of the requests. You know, things like that is what's being asked? But then one of the big questions that's in here that I think a lot of people try to shy away from is, what are your fees? And that I would have to say, if there's one question that's asked more often than any of them, it's that. And so, you know, for the folks out there who think that, well, I don't want to put my fees on my website because I want to have a conversation with them and then explain my fees. I. Well, that's a waste of your time, and it's probably a waste of their time.

And you're missing people are just like, skipping over you because they don't find it.

Yeah, because it's not immediately clear. You know, I got into a little LinkedIn fight with a guy that I posted something about. I'd put my chatbot on my website. And I think he made the comment that something to the effect of, you should already know what your clients are asking. Something like that. And I thought, well, that's just ridiculous. How are we supposed to know? I mean, we're having to really make a big leap in assumptions here to think we know what people want to know.

Yeah.

But one way to find out is the chatbot, for sure.

Well, that's cool. That's super, super awesome to hear. Yeah, we've turned it on for customer support. We have a tool called Intercom, and we trained up. There's an AI version inside of it that we trained up on all our help stuff and a bunch of content. It doesn't know everything, but it knows about the product. And it is amazing watching people and what they ask. There's a basic admin stuff and then there's a bunch of, how does this work with Social Security? And what about RMDs? And they start asking you watch them go deeper in this thing. And also we watch is it giving good answers? It's not just only AI. We have human operators working in conjunction, by the way. This is why I don't think humans are going away, because what we're doing is innovating and watching and making the content better and trying to understand this. But we've taken away the busy work of just directing traffic to find the answers that are already written out there. It's pretty amazing watching the evolution. And it also just feels like this stuff is getting better. Definitely monthly, but in some ways it's almost weekly. I think you cannot sleep on this AI stuff, like how fast it's changing and what you can do with it.

You're absolutely right. It is amazing. And I think it's the firms that use this and who embrace it. And let's face it, there's a lot of fear out there about AI right now that I think Bill Gates said not long ago that it's going to replace most jobs in 10 years. It sounds like you don't necessarily agree with that, nor do I. But that's not just for me being a Pollyanna about it. It's that I think it's an additional tool that we can put in our toolbox to make us different than other firms, for sure.

All right, well, look, Devin, we are like an hour and 13 minutes into this bad boy of a podcast, but I think this has been great. Anything else you want to share with our audience before we let them know about your site and stuff like that, where they can find you?

Yeah, I just want to say, Steven Halp, I know I don't get the Chance that often in my content. But a lot of people know that I love Boldening. It's not because it's the perfect software, but frankly, I have yet to find a software that is perfect.

Right?

One that does everything that I want it to do, where I go, that's the one. Even in the professional level stuff that we use in our offices. But my goodness, having Bolden out there for people to start on that journey to clarity, to give them that confidence, I can't tell you how well you probably know how many people it's helped, but I get to hear it from those people. And they're not telling me this because I was the creator of this. They're just telling me this that just in a retirement planning discussion. So I'm so glad that Bolden is out there for people to use. I encourage all of my listeners, all of my viewers. If you haven't yet, at least get started there. And then if you hit snags, then you may want to talk to a planner, but at least get started there because that's going to make your conversations with a financial planner so much better if you already understand some of those metrics.

Well, thanks, Devin, but I'm supposed to be like, this is an opportunity for you to talk about what happens at Carol Advisory and stuff like that.

I'm a fan man. And you know what? A little bit envious too, because I've always thought there's something really neat about creating software in releasing it. Although I've watched how hard you've worked over the years, I'm not sure that I would have had the same tenacity that you've had.

Well, I think it goes both ways. We're definitely envious of your but also appreciative of what you're doing kind of in the mass media side of things and experimenting with different channels. And it's awesome that you've had success. And it's getting easier to create software. So, you know, we have to always be thoughtful. And it's also getting easier to like get out there and create content. But I think a lot of it still comes down to like, why are people doing it? Are they authentic people? They have good intentions? Do I feel like I can trust this person? Like, they're going to be on my side. And I think what is so interesting, especially a lot of this does get back to the business model. By going flat fee and being transparent about the fee structure, people kind of get the value. I mean, I totally understand why people do aom. It's an incredible business model.

Oh, yeah.

Negative churn, right? We do better when you do better. But, like, yeah, I mean, we also do. If you're charging percent of assets, if the market's down, you're still making money, you're not making as much. But I just think it's more aligned to be kind of like, charged like a CPA does or a lawyer. It's like, hey, I charge you a fee for the services that I provide. It's not based on your work, your net worth. It's just based on the service that we're providing.

Yep.

All right, well, with that, Devin Carroll, thanks for being part of this podcast. You know, we'll link out to your firm and to your YouTube channel and appreciate all the good work you're doing and for the right reasons. It's great to kind of catch up on this as well. Just personally kind of hear what's been happening and hear the life journey. It's cool to kind of get that perspective. And for everyone listening, appreciate your time and all feedback as well from both Devin and I. Appreciate comments and reviews of the stuff that we produce. So thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Stephen, for having me.

It.