Preview:

Imagine you could read your financial advisor’s mind before you even walked through the door for the first time. What would they want you to know? In this episode, we bring you the game-changing insights financial pros wish every saver and investor understood.

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More About This Episode:

Discover the four crucial insights that can transform your retirement planning and investment strategy. From understanding real risk potential and the motivations behind financial information to the value of long-term planning and the comprehensive nature of financial planning beyond just investments, this episode can benefit pilots at any stage of their career.

Here’s what we cover in this episode:

0:00 – Intro

1:17 – Real risk potential

3:20 – Understanding the motivation of information

5:56 – The value of long-term planning

7:05 – More than just investments

Resources:

Retire Pilots – https://retirepilots.com

Get your FREE Retirement Toolkit – https://bit.ly/3ZmZsaX

Pilot Tax – https://pilot-tax.com/

The Pilot’s Advisor Podcast is also on video. Watch & Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3EIEBW2

Connect with Pilot-Tax: https://pilot-tax.com/

Episode Transcription:

(Note, this is an automated transcription. Please forgive any errors.)

Ryan Fleming: On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what your financial advisor wished that you knew beforehand. Imagine if you could read your financial advisor’s mind before you even walked in the door so that you had all this knowledge that you could take forward in retirement and not make the same mistakes that most pilots make. Let’s hear about it on today’s episode. Let’s go.

Walter Storholt: Hey. It’s another episode of the Pilot’s Advisor. Welcome back. Walter Straholz here alongside Ryan Fleming, a, uh, financial advisor that helps pilots get to and through retirement with success. And looking forward to another episode with you today, Ryan, as we break down this interesting concept of kind of what advisors wish every pilot knew, what every pilot wanting to invest knew. And we’ve got four key things that we wish everybody knew. That, boy, it would just make life easier on you, make life easier on the pilot before they come through the front door if they had a good embrace of these things, right?

Ryan Fleming: Well, absolutely. And I think, you know, investing in my mindset’s not difficult. It’s not that hard. It’s not that complicated. A lot of what happens is based off emotion. We know that our emotional decision making causes us to do the exact wrong thing in retirement planning.

Walter Storholt: Yeah. Well, let’s see if we can get that under control as we walk through our key points today.

Ryan: We wish pilots knew what their real risk potential was in their portfolios

So first on the list, Ryan, is going to be that, uh, we wish that everybody knew what their real risk potential was inside of their portfolio instead of just choosing to focus on upside potential. Can you break that down for pilots?

Ryan Fleming: I’ll do my best. I talk about it all the time, that pilots want all of the upside and none of the downside, which, of course, is totally unrealistic. Pilots understand risk, and they understand managing risk because they do it every day flying airplanes. But when you look at what they do in their portfolio, totally different story. Okay. In investing, we talk about a standard deviation. And of course, a standard deviation is going to be a level of the risk that we have in our, uh, in our portfolio. And this comes down to good, consistent returns over a long period of time with less volatility or owning one to four very, very speculative stocks and having massive volatility and blowing up our whole financial plan. So what I really wish is that clients had a clue how risky some of the portfolios are that they build. One of the recent conversations we had at a financial advisor conference is the s and P500. There’s not one advisor that I know out there that would ever, ever tell a investor uh, to put all their money in The S&P 500, all you have to do is go look at the lost decade where over a 10 year period US large cap stocks made exactly nothing or another thing to look at is even right now the S and uh, P is doing historically better than it has recently and it’s still only held up by the magnificent seven. So seven stocks are doing well and 490 some aren’t at all. You need to be more diversified and I wish that pilots knew how risky that was, whether they’re stock picking or they have all their money in US large cap because that’s what we see on, on TV every day, how truly risky that is.

Ryan: I think people underestimate bias in some of the information out there

Walter Storholt: Well, let’s talk about information, Ryan. You know you talk about where people get their information from. You’re dropping some great knowledge there, a little bit about the level of research and intention that you have when you put together portfolios and plans for clients. And unfortun one of our we wish items here is that we wish everybody knew the motivations behind the information that they might hear on TV, watch on YouTube, listen on podcasts, read in a magazine or find just during a simple Google search. Because I don’t think people realize just how much maybe bias or other elements are baked into some of the information they’re consuming in this financial landscape.

Ryan Fleming: Well, if you wanted to be a very good investor, what you’d have to do is actually study investing from an academic perspective. Sadly when you get on the Googler or you uh, watch Fox Business or you buy some of those magazines out there, Kiplingers or whatever it might be, or, or I mean I can go on and on of all the different things that they have online now, teaching you how to invest your money. Well, what we’re really doing is trying to tap into your emotions, trying to tap into uh, getting more clicks, getting more ratings, selling more magazines, which really has nothing to do with, with long term planning to be successful and get to retirement in a safe manner. I think there’s a lot of stuff out there now that is about speculating and gambling with your money. Pick these five tech stocks and retire early. Um, you know, I’m just trying to think of all those headlines that, that they get to you to pick up that magazine or click on that link. And the funny part is when I look at pilot clients and ones that weren’t a client before and I look at the ones that were unemotional, didn’t look at it that much, they tend to be in a much better position than Those that are constantly looking at their portfolio, spending hours and hours online, reading, watching, uh, tv and then they make these, these highly leveraged changes or positions in your portfolio. And it’s funny to see how much farther

00:05:00

Ryan Fleming: behind they are because they’ve speculated and gambled, they’ve made short term emotional decisions that tend to not work out so well for them.

Walter Storholt: Yeah, we’ll talk about that again in just a few moments, uh, and expand on that a little bit.

Ryan has created a toolkit to help pilots better prepare for retirement

But it’s a great time for me to remind folks, Ryan, that they want to find out a little bit more about what true planning looks like for pilots. They can certainly get in touch with you and download the toolkit. That’s a great place to start. This is a specific toolkit about retirement and finances, uh, that will help pilots better prepare for their financial future. We’ve got links in the description of today’s show where you can go and uh, order that toolkit right now. No cost or obligation by getting that toolkit. Just a great starting point for a lot of people to begin their retirement planning journey. Uh, so again just click the link that’s in the description of today’s show and you can access all of that great information that Ryan packs into that toolkit and helps you learn a little bit more about what you need to know for financial success in the future.

Ryan: We wish everybody knew the value of long term planning versus short term gains

Speaking about needing to know things, Ryan, the next uh, one on our list is we wish everybody knew that true value of long term planning versus the allure of those short term gains.

Ryan Fleming: Well, of course long term planning, long term, disciplined, unemotional planning is going to get you where you need to go. Picking short term emotional stock picks, Nvidia, Microstrategy, uh, Bitcoin, uh, whatever the hottest name is out there that’s only going to get you in trouble. And most of the time when it’s coming to be prevalent that hey, I need this stock, I need this position. First off, number one, you already have exposure to that, you’re just not don’t have leveraged exposure to it. Secondly, if you didn’t already have a position in that stock by the time you’re really figuring it out and everybody in the cockpit’s talking about it, guess what? Now you’re chasing market returns. You’re probably a little late to the game. So we don’t want to do these things with our financial future, our retirement planning. We want to be long term, we want to be diversified, we want to be unemotional.

Walter Storholt: Great comments on the emotions involved in investing and saving and planning there, Ryan.

Financial planning is about more than just investments, Ryan says

It takes us to our last. We wish you knew and we wish that pilots knew that financial planning is about more than just investments. So what’s the rest, Ryan?

Ryan Fleming: Well, I think, uh, it’s about being unemotional and disciplined. I mean, I look at it where I’ll make sure that the investment side of it’s taken care of. But when I talk about financial planning, it, uh, I don’t think it’s that difficult because a lot of it’s about being diversified. And what I mean by that is owning a bunch of different positions. So any one position or one in it, any asset class blows up. It’s not going to ruin your portfolio. So so much more of it is about just being long term, saving every single year, maxing out your 401k every single year, not looking at your account all the time because the account’s going to go up and down. And if you get emotional about it, you’re going to make some short term dumb emotional decision and just keep going forward. Like I tell my clients all the time, I don’t know if the next 20% in the market’s up or down. I have no clue. But I know the next 100% is going to be up because it always is. So let’s plan our portfolio that way. Let’s know how many years we have to retirement and know that we don’t have to make any emotional decisions until we start looking at an income plan where we’re inside that timeframe of hey, I’m going to start needing this money to live off of and the reality that’s within about two years or less. So stay focused, stay disciplined, stay long term and absolutely unemotional. If you’re doing anything outside of that, you’re probably about to hurt yourself. So I get asked all the time, hey, Ryan, I heard about you from so and so in the cockpit. I heard about the pilot’s advisor. How do I get started? The best first step is to go to retirepilots.com and order my retirement toolkit. Why do I want you to do that? I don’t want you to just jump in and say, hey, let’s go. I want you to learn a little bit about what we do and what we stand for in that toolkit. You’re going to get a couple books I’ve written, you’re going to get some tax stuff, you’re going to get some other investment stuff and what, what the value is of working with an advisor and how much that’s going to help you out as soon as you get that toolkit, you’ve earned yourself a free portfolio analysis. Anytime you’re ready, upload your statement securely secure. Pilots advisor.com I’ll analyze them and we can set up a zoom call. During that zoom call, we’re going to answer all your questions, and it’ll be obvious to you whether it’s a good fit or not. Moving forward, Fly safe. I’m here to help. Information is for illustrative purposes only and does not constitute tax, investment, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified investment, legal or tax professional before taking any action.