It’s the episode you’ve all been waiting for, big number 100!* We take a trip down memory lane, starting with the radio show at WMAL. If you’ve ever wondered about Dave and Steve’s broadcasting timeline, and how that led to a podcast that’s rocking triple digit listenership, then you need to tune in to this very special episode of Plan For Life Now
*Really 101…they’ll explain
Steve:
Welcome to 101. It’s finally here, David. A highly anticipated 100th episode that actually got pushed to episode 1 0 1.
Dave:
It’s the 100th episode asterisk. And that is perfect for the 100th episode , right? That’s exactly what it should be.
Steve:
Darn. That Silicon Valley Bank, they bumped the hundredth episode. We had to talk about that last time. So we couldn’t do this grand 100th episode that frankly, I partially blame you a little bit for building it up too much.
Dave:
I did build it up too much, but that was all in sarcasm and I know, but so, and I put pressure on you to actually organize a show, so I apologize for that. But it’s interesting that in a podcast that’s financial stuff, that the 100th episode with whatever buildup was there would be bumped for something that happens by surprise. Cuz that is a big part of what we do and deal with is stuff comes out of the blue, it affects your money, uh, it affects your psyche. And, and that’s a big part of, of these 100 episodes quite frankly. So I think that’s, uh, that’s fitting
Steve:
What I mean. Let’s just take a second to reflect on this. I mean, think about, I, I don’t know the exact date of when Silicon Valley Bank went under. It was about six weeks ago or so, I would think maybe a little longer. And I mean, think about what fear there was at that time. I mean so recently of this contagion effect of there were gonna be more banks to fall. Now it just feels like everybody’s, eh, we’re back to normal. Kind of forgotten about that. Everything’s fine.
Dave:
Okay, I’ll take it a step further. If you were to interview a hundred people who followed the news a little bit, not just a hundred people whose head is in the sand and you were to say that bank that almost failed, that led to all that angst. What was the name of it? , not certainly less than I, I would say 15% would know Silicon Valley Bank. That’s my guess. So that’s what happens with these news cycles.
Steve:
I think you’re probably right cuz I, I think my wife who is very intelligent, much smarter than me, , I think she would struggle to come up with Silicon Valley Bank. Actually she would. You what? There was something happened,
Dave:
But at the time, as always at the time, my gosh, it is. You know everything about it and you’re worried. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. Maybe that was appropriate that this is the 100th episode asterisk because of a, a mini emergency.
Steve:
All right, so here was my grand vision that I had talked about and I knew this was never actually going to happen. But you know, as a podcast fan, radio show fan, I’ve heard how some of these radio shows, you know, of course they’ve got full-time producers and big production staffs and all that. You know how they do a big episode is they’ll go back and they’ll pull clips from old episodes and play dos and kind of comment on how funny, oh, look at what we talked about back then. So I knew that I was never gonna go back and do that, but in my mind I was thinking, wow, that would be really cool. So instead of that , what we did was we just wrote down some memories and it is kind of hard just to take you back through our history. I started doing the radio show, Dave, with you, was it 2007? I think it was.
Dave:
It was 2000. It had to be 2008.
Steve:
Eight.
Dave:
Well, it, let’s put it this way, the show that most people remember us doing started in 2008. And I know that because I, I think we did another show. Yeah, we were bouncing around a little bit. We weren’t always on W M A L, I was just bouncing around a little bit at different time slots. And then the 8:00 AM which is a prime time slot to do a morning show, the Sunday morning 8:00 AM came up during the, during the financial crisis and I saw what the price was and this is before you were doing it. I’ve been doing radio as a lot of, you know, I was a radio broadcaster, a morning show guy before financial way back when the world was all in black and white. There was no color in the world. It was that long ago . But basically, so I knew, I heard what the price was, I was inquiring, I knew the 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM slot had left and the price was a really good deal.
You don’t do these shows, do a lot of people think, oh they liked you and you’re on, have a radio show, financial planning, radio shows, no matter how big or small they are, how famous or or you know, not popular, they’re all paid things on the radio you pay. So I saw the price for the 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM slot was, was really deflated. It was really low in 2008 obviously because of the financial. And I said we, we have to do that slot. It’s a great deal. It’s worth it. And at that point you came on and did it with me. So that was, I think it was that show that anybody who remembers us, that one was 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM and that started, you’re right, we might have done something before that 2007,
Steve:
But yeah,
So, but I, yeah, I think you’re right. I think when I first came on, it was still primarily you were doing long-term care and I would come on and I would do one segment about, you know, financial planning, investment, whatever. And then I think when that 8:00 AM time slot, then we kind of flip flopped it and then we would do most of it about financial planning and then we would do one segment usually entirely on long-term care. Right. So we, I was gonna say we did that for a number of years all the way up until 2016 . And then that dynamic that you said, you know, when it was so cheap to do it back in 2008, by 2016 these radio companies said, gosh, we can charge people so much more money for this. And so it got to a point where it just, it, I don’t wanna say it wasn’t worth it cuz it still could have been, but it was less worth it to do it then,
Dave:
Right? It, yeah, it became less worth it, it became crowded. There weren’t that many financial planning shows on Sunday and there was, you know, not. And then by the time we were done in 2016, it was super expensive and the whole thing was watered down and it just wasn’t worth doing. Yeah. And that was, that was essentially the end of my radio, terrestrial radio that started in 1988 and ended in 2016, which is why my memory of a lot of radio things is I I have hardly, that’s a lot of years to be doing that with headphones on a microphone. Right. You know, part was real radio part was financial. So my memory’s a little fuzzy on all that, but that was the end of that. And then that was the beginning very shortly thereafter. Do you remember when we start? Well you do because this is about the podcast. What was, what was the first episode?
Steve:
Oh, what was it about? Oh man,
Dave:
No, I, God only knows what it was about. What was,
Steve:
No, it was like June. June of 2016.
Dave:
Yeah, so we started quickly.
Steve:
Yeah. So I mean it was, uh, you know, maybe within a month or so there. But yeah, you, you bring up something. Another important point was it was not only the cost had gone up so much, but it was the number of radio shows. I mean, when we were doing it back in 2008 or so, I, I mean you had some of those big mainstream type of shows. There were the Wise investors and Rick Edelman and, and things like that. And by 2016 there were a lot of weird investment insurance kinda shows out there. And it, it just, it I felt like, you know, we would talk to people, you know, and a lot of people, they turn on the radio, they’re listening for however many hours. They don’t necessarily distinguish between Dave and Steve or the next guys who come on or whoever. And so they would have these like weird financial concepts and ideas that it was so muddled that it, it just didn’t feel great.
Dave:
Well, and also I, you’re always, this has always been in the real radio world, it’s, it’s always something you deal with. You deal with compliance of your own. We had, uh, our compliance had to listen to our show at one point. We didn’t do it live because they wanted to listen to it. Right. And I think they listened to all these podcasts and make sure that whatever we say is, is protects us. Really, we never wanna say something that’s wrong. On the other hand, all these other shows were just saying stuff like you just said, it was just,
Steve:
It was, yeah. ,
Dave:
It was the wild, wild west. I believe one of the people on the station, one of those shows, I believe this person was arrested for fraud and all this other stuff. I’m not gonna mention names or anything. So
Steve:
He was, yeah. So
Dave:
That wasn’t good. Yeah, but that wasn’t good. So we would allude I know we would allude a little bit to, so yeah, well one of the things you might like about our show is we tell the truth , and that can be helpful to you.
Steve:
But you’re right that that was one of the things that I wrote down just, you know, I tried to come up with some list of memories and you know, actually a lot of them wound up being radio show memories and maybe not podcast memories, but you know, one of them was the compliance issues. And believe me, compliance is a good thing cuz you don’t want to have a scenario of that woman who won’t be named who was on W M A L who was doing not good things. So you don’t want that. You want the protection for investors, for clients. Um, but on the other hand, just to give you an example, I remember one time, you know, we were doing the show live and I said something about the tax-free nature of municipal bonds, right? And anybody who knows a little bit about investing, you know that the interest from municipal bonds is federally tax free.
But it all depends if it’s state tax free, where you know where the bonds are, what state you live in, blah blah blah. So I made the comment, municipal bonds, you know, are, are tax-free income and compliance came back. Well you can’t say that without fully explaining that tax-free income will depend on the state in which you live in and whether or not you have sold these bonds at a certain period of time, but blah, blah blah. It just, it became impossible. I mean, how do you do a radio show and you know, insert these footnotes in everything you say. So
Dave:
Those
Steve:
Compliance.
Dave:
And then one other thing we do have to mention, the one thing, this is my favorite rate, my personal favorite of all the years we did that show was the guy who wrote us letters. I believe I got two on a typewriter. Yeah. Now granted this was probably around 2012 or something. So 2020 12 most people didn’t have a real typewriter , he wrote letters on a real typewriter, . And he always tried to, and then he left a few messages too. And he is always saying how dividends, you guys always talk about all this other dividends, all you need is dividends. And then I would talk about, then I’d suddenly get into this voice and he became a character old man dividend. And since it’s the radio and you can’t see people, I’d do this character, Steve, why don’t you talk about dividends? And that just emanated from this guy pounding us with letters written on a typewriter and phone calls about why we don’t talk enough about dividends.
Steve:
Yeah. He would talk about how dividends were the greatest thing and you’ve gotta focus on dividends. And we would say, we would comment on it, on the air, say, yeah, dividends are great. I mean that’s a large part of investment returns are composed of dividends. But, you know, his his idea was that dividends were the be all end all. You didn’t need to talk about anything else, right. You didn’t need to have the overall financial plan, just focus on dividends. Um, and he was, he was so adamant and he would leave these long sort of rambling messages. Uh, so yeah, he became a character. What what about this? And I, I don’t know if you remember this or not because I, I put a note in the show notes here about the guy. Remember when we would do seminars and we would say, okay, we’re cutting off registration to 20 people or less, right? It’s got just 20 people or less, or I don’t know what the number was, but we would kind of cap the seminar numbers cuz we found just a better group. If you ever have 20 people in a room than if you got 40 or 50. And he would get really upset that we would say 20 or less, he would say the proper grammatical term was 20 or fewer
Dave:
.
Steve:
And he, and you know, it’s just, it’s hard to break your habits when you’re used to saying 20 or less, you know, and you go, we wouldn’t say 20 or fewer. And then he explained to us about how he had, uh, he’d been working with all of the local grocery stores because they have express lanes and the express lanes would say, okay, you can come here if you have 10 items or less. And he just, just, it, it just drove this guy crazy. It should be 10 items or fewer. These are the interesting sort of people that you get exposed to.
Dave:
Exactly. So we are basically, were being scrutinized down to the word in grammar. Well listen a few hours later and you have all this illegal stuff going on, and somebody being arrested. So we were held to a pretty high standard there at that 8:00 AM slot.
Steve:
Yeah. Um, one of the other great memories that I had was, uh, the time when you called me and you said, where are you? You know, we’re about to start the show. And I was asleep and I woke up and I was like, oh my God, all the clocks in my house got changed. They’re all wrong. You know, all they all all got changed. Well it was daylight savings time and I had forgotten that that was occurring. Uh, so yeah, I I think I made it there about halfway through the show that time.
Dave:
Yeah, that was funny.
Steve:
Um, we’ve certainly had our share of recording issues. This was, you know, with the radio show and the podcast, although probably more with the podcast where couldn’t hear, you know, one audio or another audio or you know, we would record an entire show and it wound up not getting recorded and have to go back and do it all again. Uh,
Dave:
It’s interesting though that our time on the radio moving into podcast was actually at the change really in radio from where it was then. Certainly boy, when I started all you had was radio 1988. I mean, when I started in radio, you were a radio. That’s why a lot of people knew who I was. And Radio Dave the Predictor by the way, if you a remember that way back in the day to how everything became less like we started just recording the show and nobody knew didn’t matter. We’d have to be live in the studio. So it didn’t, you never had a daylight savings time problem again. Yeah. To the point where we’ve led the podcast where as everybody knows, and quite frankly when you listen to radio, some people are not even in the city. You think they’re in. Yeah. Everything that technology has made, you know, your ability to listen to things, uh, easier and you have more choices and it makes the people doing the things like us, uh, it’s easy to do. That’s been one of the good things about time passing. And this podcast has been fun for us. So,
Steve:
And I, I don’t think our reminiscing would be complete if we didn’t mention our, our wonderful producer from the old W m A L days. Uh, Ken, what, I can’t even think of his last name right now, but Ken, uh, was Ken Hunter.
Dave:
Ken Hunter,
Steve:
Yeah. Was our, our wonderful producer who, you know, not only did a great job of, he would always put in sound effects and things like that to the show, but he is the one who was responsible for putting together the Barry Riff Holtz music.
Dave:
That’s right. Right.
Steve:
And wait a minute, there it is. , there’s the very riff. It’s all music. Uh, so that was Ken Hunter’s doing and when we left W M A L I said, Ken, can you send me the audio file, you know, isolated there. You can’t tell anybody I did this, but okay, here it is. Right. I’m hoping seven years later he’s, he’s not really gonna care about that. Ah, I think it’s okay. Alright. All right. Well thank you for sticking with us for all those episodes. I did want to da uh, touch on Dave a a couple of real topics, not that reminiscing isn’t real, but, uh, a couple of real financial topics and, uh, it’s mainly, uh, around a, another podcast that I listened to, um, called The Compounding Friends and they had Rick Edelman on their show last week. And whenever I talk to people about, you know, Hey, how did you get into this business?
You know, tell me your story. I talk about how I was in college and my aunt had this, this book that she brought over and it was called The Truth About Money. And this was Rick Edelman’s first, you know, big book there. And I read through this first time I learned about compound interests, about mutual funds, about, you know, all this stuff. And I was just, I was transfixed. I thought, you know, this is fantastic. Um, so, you know, I tell that story with, you know, this, this certain amount of reverence for, for Rick Edelman and you know, what he has done. Um, but those of you that know, he’s kind of transitioned out of, you know, day-to-day doing the, you know, financial planning, running the business and now he focuses on some other endeavors. And it was really interesting because he talked about these and the first one, uh, that he focuses on is longevity and how long we are all going to live.
And Dave, you and I have talked about this a lot, especially back when we used to do seminars where we would talk about, you know, Hey, you’re going to live longer than your parents did than your grandparents did. You know, don’t take this, you know, hey, all the men in my family die at 70 as I’m gonna die at 70. And you’ve gotta plan not only in your investment portfolio, but for long-term care that you’re gonna live a long time. Uh, and so, you know, he was really focused on this. He was talking to some of the hosts who were around my age, you know, early mid forties and he said, you guys are going to live to 120 and oh, that might be pushing it . I don’t know. I mean, you know, I who who really does know, but the, the whole argument is that nobody knows, but that might be pushing it.
Well, yeah, I agree. Um, but I think the idea is that, you know, he was talking about they’ve got these, you know, nano robots that’ll go in and, and you know, be able to, uh, remove plaque buildup in your heart and, you know, do all these amazing things that we’ve never imagined before. Um, and you know, life will extend much longer than we ever thought possible. And the repercussions for your investment and financial plan are that, you know, you can’t afford to be 65 years old and put all your money in a cd even if it, even if it is pretty attractive now, you know, with the current interest rates, you know that you’ve got a plan for living for a really long time.
Dave:
Right. Which leads to, I mean, um, you know, there are a lot of people out there who we’re on the same page with Barry Rid Hols is re obviously cuz we always read his stuff and ahead, let’s talk about that. He’s on the same page and Liz and this in this instant, Rick Edelman as well. But ultimately, you know, hey, lifetime income streams trying to come up with ways to, to provide them. And uh, some clients, obviously we’ve been through this a million times, they have them with pensions, others don’t, besides social security and how you put that together in your portfolio is really important. And if as we live longer and longer, you know, boy, that that becomes magnified. And then yeah. How you deal with long-term care, you know, the long-term care insurance boom that we can argue led to all this to begin with.
We talk about the podcast and everything else. Um, it’s not a boom anymore buying the long-term care insurance, but you can definitely make arguments that you still, you need it, it’s kind of a harder decision. But in any case, you have to plan for long-term care. You’re either gonna get some version of long-term care insurance, which I still think for a lot of people make sense. Or if you can’t because of health or you find it just to be too cost-prohibitive because of your age when buying it or whatever, you gotta come up with some sort of plan that addresses, um, these incredible healthcare costs as we live longer and longer. That is just like, you know, that is, that’s mandatory when, in my opinion anyway, that’s doing financial planning the right way. That to me is what our fiduciary responsibility. I I think it goes way beyond, oh, these investments are in your best interest. I think it’s more is this planning in your best interest?
Steve:
Yeah. But like you mentioned, I I think it has gotten much harder now that the long-term care insurance market has shifted, you know, away from that traditional coverage and more towards those life insurance policies, um, that frankly are, are not cheap. You know, they’re, they’re pretty expensive for the coverage. And the very last thing that I I wanted touch on that he talks about is anybody who’s followed him and what he is doing now, he’s very focused on crypto and you know, the blockchain and all of that technology. Um, and he can go on and on talking about how, you know, he thinks this is one of the greatest inventions. You know, you’ve got, uh, fire, you’ve got the wheel, you’ve got the internet and you’ve got crypto and don’t take that exactly, but you know, he’s got it somewhere, you know, along those lines.
And I, you know, that makes me sit up and pay attention because somebody that I respect, you know, doesn’t mean I have to agree all the time. Um, but here was my big takeaway when he talks about investing in crypto, um, he thinks it should be anywhere from one to 3% of an overall portfolio. And you know, he goes through all this, uh, crypto’s the future and blah blah blah. And you think he’s gonna say something like, oh yeah, it should be 20, 30, 50% of your portfolio. But I think he comes back to a very reasonable one to 3%. And I can get on board with that because you know, the rationale is, hey, if it crashes and burns and goes to zero, and even Rick, who’s a big believer, admits that that could happen. Right? That could happen if it goes to zero and you lose, you know, say 2% of your portfolio, that hurts, but it’s not devastating. Um, but on the flip side, if it goes up, you know, five or 10 times that it could make a meaningful difference in your overall net worth.
Dave:
I feel this just the reasoning, I think you’ve done a good job of explaining that interview you listened to because his reasoning is basically we’re all gonna live very long, however long, even me at 61, according to him, I’ve got another, well, I’m not as young as you, so maybe I’m only gonna live to one 10. Okay, . Um, so we have all this time, we already know one thing, if I was to say what’s a positive argument for crypto? And by the way, full disclosure, I don’t have any in my own portfolio. I’m not a , I’m not personally a big fan, but if I were to say what’s an argument for it, it would be the first thing that comes to mind is ai, artificial intelligence and the ability to put a lot of protection into something that right now, if we were to look back in history is in its, you know, super remedial stage similar to all those.com things that burst 23
Years ago or whatever. So, you know, there’d be safety in it, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s a brand new thing that’s brand new now, but not then and in the future. It’s just what it is. Uh, and it’s, it’s worth way more these investments than they are now. I get that. I see. If that’s the way you’re thinking and, and there’s nothing wrong with that, what can I say? You know? Yeah. The fact that he didn’t push putting a higher percentage in your portfolio is, uh, is that, would, that would definitely, I that’s best smart thinking.
Steve:
Yeah. And, and the next part of the discussion, which is too much to go into here is, is you know, the best way to do it cuz you know, some of these crypto exchanges are the wild west and they’re, there’s a lot of issues there. So you can say, Hey, I’d like to do this, but it’s really not easy for somebody with just a regular, uh, you know, i r a or brokerage account to be able to do that. So, um, the logistical issues are, are another part of
Dave:
It, but on just then we’ll leave this topic when, uh, people like us have the ability when there’s enough little bit of regulation Yeah. To be able to come up with something that consumers can look at and say, oh, I see that there’s something that’s regulated enough that the Steve and Daves of the world are recommending it or recommending. If you’re interested, that’s still, and the historical timeline is gonna be extremely early in this whole process as far as a long term investments concerned.
Steve:
That’s a big hurdle to get over is to, to have something that that financial advisors can help clients utilize. Uh, and we’re just not there right now. So. All right. That’s all I’ve got Dave. I think that was fantastic. I lived up to all of my expectations. I hope everybody enjoys listening to it. Uh, thank
Dave:
You. I’m so psyched that the next 99 shows there’s no pressure whatsoever and will continue to do the product that you’ve come used to.
Steve:
All right. Thanks for joining us and we’ll talk to you again soon.