Featuring Julia Chung, Markus Muhs, Cam Smith, Connor Hewson and Mark Gochnour
This is the second half of our week at Future Proof in Huntington Beach: five more short conversations, recorded off the cuff with no agenda beyond a handful of questions. Part 1 is here, but you don't need it to follow this one.
Four of the five work with clients; the fifth works at a fund company. We asked them the advice they'd happily never hear again, what they'd do with a hundred thousand dollars, and the mistake they keep seeing inside a professional corporation. Almost every answer came back to the same unexciting place. That turned out to be the point.
Chris sat down with Julia Chung, who leads Spring Planning in Vancouver and chairs the Financial Planning Association of Canada.
The advice she'd retire is the hot-stock tip, and the idea underneath it: that a good money decision is one that shows everyone you're doing better than them. In her words, your grandchildren are never going to say, hey, look at grandpa's tax return. A good decision isn't the one that made the most money last quarter. It's the one that fits the life you're building.
Julia works with a lot of affluent families, and she says more money doesn't change the person. It changes the decisions. Take away the ceiling a smaller income puts on your choices and you're left with what you actually want, which is a harder question. It can be lonely, too, when none of your friends are dealing with it. Plenty of practice owners whose income has outgrown their circle of people to ask will recognize that.
Chris asked whether anyone earns enough to skip a cash flow plan. One word: no. Taxes, what you leave your kids, how you plan for the future: in her words, everything is cash flow.
Her investing is the same at a hundred thousand as at ten million, and deadly boring on purpose. "If you're getting your sexy from your investment portfolio, you need to really look internally about what is going on in your life."
Markus Muhs is with Canaccord Genuity in Edmonton, where he runs Muse Wealth Partners. He started in the business in 2008, so when he explains risk, he leads with what can go wrong. For a lot of investors, a hard fall and a long recovery are either something they've never lived through or far back in the rear-view mirror, so he talks it through up front.
His pick for overrated advice is the 4 percent rule. As he put it, it's not a rule. It's a rough guideline, and he'd rather see a real plan than a rule of thumb.
Then the corporation. Markus works with a lot of incorporated professionals, doctors included, and the mistake he sees most is about who makes the call. How much you pay yourself, and how much you leave in the company, shouldn't be decided by your accountant alone on this year's numbers. It should be decided with a planner who is looking at the long term.
Scott's version of the same point: we want clients to reach retirement with more than one lever to pull, with money in more than one place, so that one change in the rules can't reach all of it.
Cam Smith runs Clarify Wealth in Mississauga, and he's drawn to the behavioural side of money. On risk, he starts with a questionnaire grounded in psychology rather than a generic form, then asks how much risk you actually need to take. If your tolerance is higher than your plan requires, why take more? His test is whether you sleep when your head hits the pillow.
Asked how to keep people invested when markets get rough, he pushed back on the idea that it's been quiet. There's always something: a war, tariffs, a headline calling for the next drop. In his words, the markets are voodoo, and nobody has a crystal ball.
He pointed to Charles D. Ellis's book Winning the Loser's Game. In amateur tennis, more points are lost than won, so keep the ball in play and let the other side make the mistake. Investing works the same way: stick with your plan and, as Cam put it, don't do crazy stuff.
His definition of a real plan: the calculator output is the appendix, the proof that the numbers work. The plan itself is basically written in Microsoft Word, a roadmap that turns deciding into doing. His corner of the market is business owners from thirty-five to fifty, often with young kids, which is a lot of this show's audience. And the plan is written in pencil, not pen, because the life it's for will change.
Connor Hewson is with PWL Capital in Saskatchewan. His pick for overrated advice is the idea that you need some secret ingredient in your portfolio to succeed. You don't. Simple, straightforward strategies get most people to their goals without a lot of risk and without anything fancy.
Asked what he'd do with a hundred thousand dollars over twenty-five years, he described his own setup, with "not investment advice" said out loud first. He's early in his career, invested for the long run, and prepared to see his portfolio drop hard along the way. Would anything change at a million, or five million? Nothing. Same portfolio, rebalancing on its own, and he keeps living his life. He called that liberating.
For incorporated business owners, the mistake he sees is a communication gap. Your accountant and your planner need to be talking every year about how the corporation, the investments and your pay fit together. Get everyone on the same page and you can get back to your life.
Mark Gochnour works at Dimensional Fund Advisors and doesn't take clients. As Scott said at the top of the episode, Dimensional is the fund company we use to design our clients' portfolios.
Scott asked him what most investors get wrong about how markets work. His answer: they assume the prices are wrong. You don't stand in the grocery store wondering whether the banana is overvalued. You accept that's roughly what it costs to get it there, and he sees a stock or a bond the same way.
On staying in your seat, he was honest: it's hard, and most of the noise is designed to make you anxious. What helps is a plan, and knowing what the money is for. There's always something to worry about. The worries just change.
Then he told a story about his dad, an orthodontist, who always wished finance classes had been mandatory in dental school. You open a practice, the income arrives, there's a "Dr." in front of your name, and everyone starts calling to sell you something. His parents were frugal, diligent savers. Then his dad went into a real estate partnership with someone who turned out to be corrupt, and lost a million dollars in the early 1980s. They nearly lost the home they had built.
One bad decision, Mark said. That's where the value of advice comes in. He has seen up close what that kind of stress does to a family, particularly in the medical professions.
Different firms, different questions, and the same answer underneath: keep the investments dull and put the energy into the plan. Julia's deadly boring portfolio. Cam's don't do crazy stuff. Connor's nothing changes at five million. Mark's banana.
Markus and Connor, separately, landed on the same practical point for incorporated professionals: the long-term decisions shouldn't sit with your accountant alone, and your accountant and your planner should be talking. If yours have never been in the same conversation, that's the thing to fix this year.
The one thing: Keep the portfolio boring. Put your attention on the plan around it.
Listen to episode 052 of The Chiro Money Show →
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