Preview of what we’ll cover today:

🎆 Market Volatility: Fireworks can be unpredictable

🌭 Emergency Funds: Be ready when life happens

🗽 Financial Freedom: Independence takes discipline

📈 Long-Term Investing: Avoid speculation and gambling

💰 Forced Savings: Consistency creates opportunity

🛫 Pilot Planning: Freedom through preparation

Subscribe On Your Favorite App:

YouTubeApple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusiciHeartRadioTuneIn

More About This Episode:

This year’s Fourth of July carries a little extra weight as we celebrate 250 years of American independence, and that’s worth a moment. But between the hot dogs, the parades, and the fireworks, we started thinking about how many of our favorite holiday traditions have a pretty natural financial parallel. So that’s what Ryan’s doing today… and the comparisons might surprise you.

Independence Day is a reminder that the things worth having usually take some work to get there. Financial independence is no different. If you’re still working toward yours, that’s exactly what we’re here for. Happy 4th.

Go Deeper Into The Episode:

0:00 – Intro

1:08 – 250 Years of Independence

2:12 – Firework Mishaps

3:43 – Market Volatility

5:37 – Emergency Funds

10:04 – The People Who Matter Most / Seasons of Life

12:51 – Financial Independence

16:08 – Resources for Pilots

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.)

Walter Storholt 0:00
Well, this july 4 is a little extra special, of course. We celebrate our 250th year of American independence, and it is worth celebrating that moment, as it is every year, but especially this year. But between the hot dogs and the parades and the fireworks that we’re going to all be celebrating and enjoying over the next couple of days, we started thinking about, you know, how many of our favorite holiday traditions have a pretty natural financial parallel, and so that’s what we’re going to do today. Finding parallels between Independence Day and the comparisons to the financial world, some of them might surprise you, and some of them are going to be pretty helpful. So, I think you’ll enjoy this. We’ll have a little fun celebrating America’s birthday and learning about the financial world, coming up next. All right, Ryan, I don’t have my hot dog prop, and we were, you know, not allowed to shoot off actual fireworks here in the studio, unfortunately, to try and, you know, celebrate the july 4 this year. We’ll have to go outside for that later on, but in any event, happy Fourth of July to you as we tape this right before the holiday, and this is a big one. 250 years of American independence, my friend.

Ryan Fleming 1:11
Well, not only the 250 years of American independence, how great our country is, but the Fourth of July has always been my favorite holiday, and the reason why is like there’s no drama, like it seems like Thanksgiving, Christmas, family gets together, somebody’s in a fight, you know, like people start talking politics, I mean, who knows, it’s always drama, whereas I feel like Fourth of July has just always been grilling out, or you’re at the beach, or there’s no drama, it’s just good old fun, I can smell the grill, I can smell like the hot dogs and brats on the grill right now, maybe drinking some beers, and it just seems awesome, like all of that just sounds awesome to me. So, the Fourth of July is always, always been my favorite holiday.

Walter Storholt 1:54
Yeah, it’s a great one. If you’re not having a good time on the Fourth of July, it’s kind of like, what’s wrong with you? There’s, there’s no reason to not just be having a good time, enjoying time with family, friends, or even grill and shoot off fireworks by yourself, like that’s that’s the beauty of the holiday, American independence, freedom, do what you want.

Ryan Fleming 2:11
I was just thinking about, well, I have my whole, my, my wife’s whole family’s coming to spend the fourth with us, so get ready for that, and I’m sure it’ll be a great time, but I don’t know why I was suddenly just transitioned to thinking about all those firework videos of people blowing their hands off or fireworks shooting off in the wrong direction, just all the dumb things that happen over the fourth as well. So, I guess there is one reason to not have a good time on the fourth of July, and that’s if you have mishaps with fireworks. So, yes, avoid that one part, please. Yeah, are you gonna make a comparison here coming up here in a minute

Walter Storholt 2:45
of injury? I don’t know where you’re going with this podcast, but I’m suddenly thinking about life happening and all the bad things that can happen in that that trip to urgent care or the emergency room on Fourth of July weekend. My, my great grandfather in his mid 90s now, he had a close call with a firework. It kind of went down his, it went down his shirt right after he’d lit it, like fumbled it, and it went in the air and went down his shirt, and the firecracker went off right up against his chest. So he’s got some scars he showed us many years ago on his chest from that firework going off. So it does happen. Be safe, be careful with your fireworks, folks, please.

Ryan Fleming 3:24
Well, if you’ve ever shot off a bottle rocket, or you’re ever a teenage boy, you’ve probably had.. or, or what are those black cats, I guess, or the other ones? I mean, sure,

Walter Storholt 3:34
yeah, yeah,

Ryan Fleming 3:35
we all have stories, we’ll just leave it at that. We all have friends,

Walter Storholt 3:39
boys will be boys in those cases, that’s for sure. Well, since we’re talking about fireworks first, I was gonna bring this one up later, but let’s just start there. Fireworks, I gotta think that the easy comparison here is market volatility. You know, fireworks give us a loud entrance, they light up the sky, you know, there’s a little bit of drama and suspense built in there. It’s exciting, but you brought up the dangerous element of it blowing up, maybe in your hand, or you know, could leave some damage if we’re not careful with them. Sounds a lot like the market, fun to be in, but can be dangerous if we’re not careful.

Ryan Fleming 4:11
Yeah, the market volatility is what gives us return, but we got to make sure we’re doing it in the right way. So, fireworks are, you know, both exciting and dangerous, but we need to be safe lighting them off. We need to be calculated in how we do it, or have a plan. And I think about this with the market as well. We, we can’t control the market, but we can definitely control our exposure to it, and it makes me think about having a system where we’re diversified and have that exposure to the market where that volatility is working for us, but not speculating and gambling by picking the latest great stock and leveraging our wealth, hoping one company might take off, and you know, let’s not have the get rich quick plan, let’s have a system in place that’s diversified that’s going to work over the long term, so don’t speculate and gamble with your money. Mean, don’t, don’t stock pick,

Walter Storholt 5:01
yeah, the Fourth of July isn’t the Fourth of July if you don’t have fireworks, at least it certainly seems that way for many of us. It’s kind of like that with a plan and a portfolio, like you don’t have a plan if you’re not in the market, if you’re not participating, and having some of that volatility is just part of doing it, just like fireworks are part of, you know, the Fourth of July. So, like, that’s a big one.

Ryan Fleming 5:22
Yeah, I hope that transitions. That’s what came up for me. So,

Walter Storholt 5:24
yeah, makes a lot of sense.

Ryan Fleming 5:26
Walter throws all this stuff at me, and then I got to figure out how to relate it to finance. I try to throw you curve

Walter Storholt 5:31
balls every once in a while. Yeah,

Ryan Fleming 5:33
I like hot dogs. Cool.

Walter Storholt 5:35
Well, hot dogs is our next one. So, you must have peeked on the sheet. So, hot dogs and emergency funds is where we see the comparison may be merging here, but feel free to disagree. I think no matter how elaborate your spread gets on july 4, if you’ve got a bunch of people doing a potluck and bringing stuff in, you kind of got to have some hot dogs on the grill when it comes to the fourth of July. You can’t not like a hot dog because they always taste good, and so you don’t get any surprises. It’s kind of how your emergency fund should be, right? Stable, predictable.

Ryan Fleming 6:06
What I’m going to go with it. First of all, I hot dogs are great, but I prefer a brat. I want a nice brat with some mustard on it. Yeah, that sounds good to me. But emergency funds, I ask this all the time, like, you know, people know to save for retirement, they have all this money in their 401 k, but their liquidity, in case life happens, in many cases, is like zero. I’m like, where’s it all at? Where did it go? And I don’t think a lot of people realize that they can have money invested in the market and it still be liquid. So, what I see, mistakes that I see a lot for life, and being prepared for life is having that emergency fund, but still having that emergency fund that’s working for you. If it’s sitting in a savings account or a high-yield savings account, you’re basically going broke safely. You’re not even keeping up with inflation, and of course, we allocate funds for an emergency fund very differently than we would have 401 k, but you definitely have to build that liquidity and that liquid stability, and I don’t think a lot of people realize that, and I don’t care if you’re putting $500 a month in or 5000 but you need to automate that and build it over time too, because life will happen, you know, and how much, how much nicer is it when you have that unexpected car repair, that medical bill, that home expense shows up, and you relate this to all the things that could happen on the fourth of July. You know, the, you know, whatever, whatever happened where life happened, and it created that bill. You can’t stop

Walter Storholt 7:35
thinking about people injuring themselves on the fourth of July.

Ryan Fleming 7:38
You know, life happens, and how much is the

Walter Storholt 7:41
dad, and you speaking, you know, like be careful with those fireworks.

Ryan Fleming 7:44
I have kids at my house now, and all I can think about is the liability of having all these kids at my

Speaker 1 7:49
house. I knew

Walter Storholt 7:49
it was coming from,

Ryan Fleming 7:51
yeah, or like, you know, like a boat. What does that stand for? Break out another 1000, because what’s going to, you know, what’s going to happen to it over a fourth of July weekend? Somebody’s gonna be doing something dumb, or they’re gonna, you know, lose, lose the tube, and that’s gonna cost a bunch of money. I mean, fireworks catch, like, catches the house on fire, or I recently had a client that had to reach out for a bunch of money, and it was because the septic system broke, you know, and I’m like, oh man, like I can think of 1000 different things I would rather spend money on than, you know, fixing this septic in your house, like, you know, but I guess shit happens, right? As

Walter Storholt 8:33
someone who has replaced the septic tank,

Ryan Fleming 8:36
pun intended, there, but yeah, life happens, and it’s much, much less stressful if you’ve already planned for and put money away, so I’m a big proponent of I call it forced discipline, having an individual account or a joint account, putting money in there every single month, so when life happens, you already have it sitting there ready to go.

Walter Storholt 8:58
Attention aviators, when you’ve spent years in the cockpit managing the complexities of flight, isn’t it time you navigated your retirement with the same precision? Introducing Retire pilots.com right at your touchdown zone on our homepage, there’s a beacon flashing ‘Get my free tool kit. Click that, and you’ll be cleared for a direct route to Ryan’s retirement toolkit, tailor-made for pilots like you. Inside, you’ll find two of his important works: The Pilot’s Advisor and Pilots Retire Early. Between these two books, you can decipher the nine critical decisions when retiring before 65 and discover the seven lessons to help pilots land safely in retirement, but that’s not all. This toolkit is packed with altitude high value, including extras to get your retirement plans off the runway and light the afterburners on your 401 k. Vector on over to Retire pilots.com to grab your toolkit and let’s embark on this journey to. Gather, yeah, great points. We can’t talk about the Fourth of July without talking about parades. Now, I’m not much of a parade guy. If I never went to another parade, I’d be just fine in life, but I get them, and I understand why some people love them, and especially the small town parades. I think those are the best, where the community comes together, and you’re seeing the local high school teams, you know, the local firemen coming through, and your neighbors are all lining the street. I get that community aspect of it all, and helps us kind of, I think, the local ones especially help us recalibrate a little bit into thinking about what’s important, connecting locally, trying to get closer to the people that are around you and kind of in your everyday life, so I enjoy the spirit of them, at least.

Ryan Fleming 10:45
Yeah, you know, I’m not a big parade person myself, either. But it makes me think of my childhood, decorating your bike, and then riding in the parade, or, you know, I grew up in a small, small town, small city, where, you know, we all went to the parade for the Fourth of July, and then I’m thinking about the different seasons of life, per se, like from being that kid that decorated to the bicycle to maybe when you’re older you might be the adult that decorated the golf cart, right, and then

Speaker 1 11:15
yeah,

Ryan Fleming 11:15
I’m thinking about like the old VFW or the old old soldiers marching in the parade, and they’re in their 60s, 70s, so there’s

Walter Storholt 11:23
those videos from the villages with all the golf carts all lined up for the parade, yeah,

Ryan Fleming 11:28
yeah, so, so the seasons of life, and then the things that are important to you change, I mean, when you’re a kid, you wanted to have enough money to go buy baseball cards, you know, I remember cutting grass so that I could go buy baseball cards or go buy my next baseball mid, and as you get older, those priorities really change, and you know it goes beyond making sure I’m taken care of. Then you start having kids, and you want to make sure that your family’s taken care of, and then you want to make sure that you’re saving for college for your kids, and then after that, it’s like, hey, I think I’m good to go, or I’ve saved for my wife and I to be secure in retirement, but how can I pass on a legacy? How can I do some legacy planning and make sure that my kids are not only set for life, but can we pass on something to my kids’ kids? You know, that’s we’re generation, can we create generational wealth? All of it, all of it takes planning, and I think when you start thinking about Fourth of July and family and the different generations, it makes me think about all those, yeah, and all those things require a plan, and it’s not hard to have it, it’s just you need time to plan and allocate for it, and the time factor and putting money away for all these different things on a monthly basis, in my, in my opinion, is the key. You’ll thank me later, you’ll thank me.

Walter Storholt 12:50
Love it. Well, all of these have been fun, talking about fireworks, parades, hot dogs, all that traditional stuff, but the most important part that we should never overlook, of course, is the freedom aspect of this, and this year being again 250 years of the freedom that we hold so dear in this country, but it’s a milestone that we should always remember. Took generations of sacrifice effort to establish and to protect them continuously, and I feel like financial independence is basically the same thing, it’s not something that typically happens overnight, you scrape and you claw and you learn and you put all of your energy into trying to become more and more financially independent, and with that great independence comes responsibility, just like we have in the country, and so this one, this one cuts a lot of different ways, and I think is a really important one to end on today.

Ryan Fleming 13:46
Yeah, and and it makes me just want to share my situation. I mean, I grew up very poor, my parents were divorced, we lived paycheck to paycheck, my dad was off working, I was cutting grass, trying to make ends meet, and that’s kind of how I developed a love for finances, is because I didn’t want to live that way anymore, and so my whole, through my education, everything was focused on learning about money and how it works, so I didn’t have to live like that, and I think how you grow up kind of defines a lot about how you view money, and I was very disciplined from a very young age about putting money away and being consistently saving and saving, and I know my wife hated it when we’re young lieutenants in the Air Force, because I sat her down and talked about a budget, and she wanted to live life right then, and and I feel like we’re on the other side of that now, where we were so responsible, why we’re in our 20s and 30s, that now we’re in our 40s, and it feels like we’re ahead of the game, and I feel like she, she thanks me now. We’ve been married for 20 some years, and, and in no different than the airlines, we know what everybody makes, but there’s such a huge, drastic difference in individuals and their and their financial stability, and there’s no magic pillage. Takes discipline, and it takes time, and, and, and sacrifice, no different than how we have this country, lots of sacrifice, lots of things that people did over time, and I wish I could just help everybody to be disciplined to put money away every single month, so that as they get older, they’re not feeling that massive financial stress, because there’s a way to not have that stress, and, and I had a wise man once tell me that, you know, 99.5% in life things that happen, you can fix it with with some money, but that 5% that you can’t fix with money is probably the most important thing that that falls under family and decisions and stuff, so, but it’s pretty powerful advice,

Walter Storholt 15:43
yeah, very much so. Well, we have great freedoms in this country, and one of those is the pursuit of financial freedom, and we want to help as many people as possible achieve that, and so if that’s something that you are interested in, if you’re working toward that financial independence, and you need some help getting there, or making sure that you’re on the right track to eventually get there. That’s what Ryan is basically doing each and every day with his clients, with pilots all across the country, helping them discover that financial independence, more confidence in their financial future, all of those kinds of things. If you’re looking for a great starting point, check the link in the description of today’s show. You can order the retirement toolkit, specifically built for pilots who are interested in learning more about retirement and starting to take action. It’s going to have Ryan’s book, it’s packed with other great resources, guides, and helpful information, and it qualifies you for that free portfolio analysis that we mentioned from time to time here on the show, where you get to meet one on one with Ryan, see where you are right now, and then start setting that game plan for accomplishing those financial goals that you’ve got, so check that out again. It’s in the description of today’s show. Just click on the link, or you can go to Retire pilots.com Ryan, happy Fourth to you, my friend, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Ryan Fleming 16:53
Sounds good, Walter. Enjoy the Fourth of July with your family, let somebody else light off the fireworks, and, like I told you earlier, I need something more than hot dogs. I want some brats on that group.

Walter Storholt 17:03
I hear you on the brats. I’m not going to turn down a hot dog, but if there’s a brat there, I’m with you on that idea. So, absolutely,

Walter Storholt 17:10
we’ll let somebody else handle the fireworks, so you and I can keep our pretty faces, so we can stay on YouTube, and we’ll see everybody next time. Enjoy the fourth, be safe with it, but have a blast and celebrate independence and freedom. We’ll talk to you next time here on The Pilot’s Advisor.

Ryan Fleming 17:26
Happy Fourth of July.

Speaker 2 17:32
This episode is for educational purposes only and is not individualized investment advice. The Pilots Advisor LLC is an SEC registered investment advisor, registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal.