Welcome to another edition of Let's Talk Money. I am happy to announce this week's guest. It is Average Joe from the Personal Finance blog famously known as the Free Financial Advisor. If Average Joe has ever commented on one of your blog posts, or if you have ever had the opportunity to listen to one of his weekly Podcasts, then I am sure you already know that he loves to laugh and has an incredible sense of humour. Without further ado, let's jump into his interview.
Please provide an introduction about yourself and your blog including when you created your blog. If comfortable, please share if you are married and how many children you have.
Although theOtherGuy and I created our blog in April of 2011, we really didn’t post seriously until October. We’re those idiots who thought “giving advice on the internet” was a novel idea.
Initially, our goal was to create an insider’s view of the financial advisor’s office. We’d share some of the ugly guts of a financial operation...kind of like the “behind the scenes” videos you’ll see about restaurant kitchens, but with less bread and shouting.
In September we changed everything, and really took off October 1st. We still wanted to blog, but didn’t care about being so serious. We both believe that attaching a little humor to the serious topic of money management helps people learn, so we switched directions and created a site about two things: 1) money; and 2) whatever the heck we thought was interesting or funny, like the time my son parked our car on a mailbox.
As for me? I was a financial advisor for 16 years before selling my practice. I loved the job, but wanted to pursue my other interests in life. I’m married and have two children, Nick and Autumn, who are 16 years old.
If anyone would like to donate toward their education, I’d be forever grateful.
I only blog anonymously now because of a non-compete contract I signed when selling my biz. I’m currently getting permission from the gentleman who signed my contract to use my real name here, since it really isn’t competition.
You may be surprised when you find that I’m not Justin Bieber in disguise.
We started the Worst of the Free Financial Advisor podcast because both OG and I listen to them and had done radio. Plus, I love listening to podcasts and definitely thought there was room for a more casual, fun show instead of the serious, hard hitting interview or topical shows out there. We’re aiming to be like the Car Talk of the financial podcast world. We largely fail at this, but it’s fun and we’ve gotten good reviews so far.
How did your mom and dad spend money and how did that affect you?
My parents are wonderful people who will do anything for you, but are spenders. My dad worked hard to secure a generous pension from GM, so they never had to save much to live comfortably. We moved quite a few times and property appreciation helped us afford bigger and bigger homes. Largely, my parents lived the rat race life of bigger and better toys.
I realized when I got to college and knew zippo about money that I had some serious learning to do. I fell in love with people on television who knew little tips and tricks to save on a shoestring. That led me to financial planning as a career. Because I came from a place many people do (clueless about money), I could explain concepts in a beginner’s lingo.
What is your view point regarding money? Money is meant to be saved? Money is meant to be spent?
I’ve always thought beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?
As an advisor, my job wasn’t to say “you should do it this way because that’s what’s important to ME. It was to help people reach their goal of either saving or spending more.” So if your goal is to save more...fantastic. If your goal is to spend...let’s make sure to save some for later.
Personally, I’m an experience lover. I want to travel and enjoy life, and I want these experiences to be first class. I can’t have everything, so I have to save carefully and be frugal in areas I don’t care about as much. We live in a home we can afford, keep a budget-for-busy-people, and eat from a meal plan.
Do you think joint or separate checking accounts are appropriate in marriage?
I love this question because it’s so controversial, and I don’t think it should be. The true question (I think) is this: do you think your spouse would lie to you about their money. I can’t imagine any other reason that people would worry about one or two checkbooks except for that question.
Well, liars are liars. They’ll lie about money or they’ll lie about something else. If you think your spouse is lying to you, there are far bigger problems than one checkbook or two in your relationship.
For the record, we use two checkbooks in our household. We review both checkbooks during our weekly meetings. I don’t believe in hiding things from my spouse and best friend.
Have you ever lost a large amount of money in investments?
Before I answer, I’ll tell you this from my financial planning days: everybody talks about their big winners. Few people talk about the losers...but almost every investor has them. There are some people who present themselves as awesome investors who have taken embarrassingly huge hits to their net worth because they made a really bad call.
I’ll share my stupidity. I fell in love with XM Radio in the early days. The idea of better radio seemed like an easy winner, even though analysts and my friends said to stay away. I bought the stock at just over $4 per share and sold half of it to diversify when it reached $32 per share. I was laughing all the way to the bank.
Here’s what I did with my profits: I placed the money I’d taken out to “capture the gains and diversify” in Sirius Satellite Radio. Yeah.... The two companies merged and today the combined stock is trading at $2.21. I hold onto it mostly to remind myself that I preach doing your homework...and here I clearly didn’t follow my own advice.
If you suddenly won, inherited, or received $1,000,000 as a gift and you were already debt free, what would you do with it?
I would donate a quarter of it to the Arthritis Foundation, a charity I work with frequently, and with the remainder I’d build a machine to make more money. I tell people to do what they know best, so to follow my own advice, I’d build businesses. Having sold a business for a large sum (to me) has made me a believer of the build-to-sell business model. Good business processes fascinate me. I’m not sure what the business would do. Maybe we’d create the Free Financial Advisor empire! Ha!
Thanks for interviewing me, Sicorra. Feel free to wake up people when they reach the bottom of the post. ;-)
I would really like to thank Average Joe for finding the time to do this interview during a time when he was very focused on family issues. At the time I wished he had postponed his interview, but it may have helped to take his mind off of things for a moment. I wish him the very best!
Source: http://tacklingourdebt.com/2012/05/09/lets-talk-money-series-average-joe-free-financial-advisor/
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