Season 4, Episode 15 Buying Happiness: Using Money as a Tool to Maximize Your Lifestyle

[00:00:00] Eric Brotman: Welcome to Don’t Retire… Graduate!: The podcast that teaches you how to advance into retirement rather than retreating. I’m your host and valedictorian Eric Brotman. And we have a tremendous guest today. Andrew Hallam, who is a best-selling author. He’s now written his third book. And I normally don’t read a full bio, but Andrew, I’m going to do it today because your bio is priceless.

And this is the bio: when Andrew Hallam isn’t fighting off mosquitoes in tropical jungles, cycling up a mountain with his wife during a downpour, or trying to drive to Argentina in a van, he’s speaking and writing about happiness and personal finance. The former high school teacher wrote the international best-selling books, Millionaire Teacher and Millionaire Ex-Pat, and most recently Balanced: how to invest in spend for happiness, health and wealth. Profiled on such media as CNBC and the wall street journal, he’s one of the world’s most prolific financial wellness speakers having spoken in more than 30 countries. He’s also written columns for the globe and mail Canadian business. MoneySense Swiss quote and asset builder. And amazingly, this is true. He’s the first person ever to have a number one selling finance book on Amazon USA, Amazon Canada, Amazon UAE, and Amazon Singapore simultaneously.

So if that doesn’t do justice to our guest I don’t know what does. Andrew, welcome to Don’t Retire… Graduate!

[00:01:17] Andrew Hallam: Yeah, thanks very much, Eric. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:20] Eric Brotman: Your bio is priceless and, and actually it, it, your personality comes out in that just as it does in the book from the very first sentence, quite frankly. I loved it.

I loved everything about it. I didn’t agree with all of it and we can certainly debate some finer points and that’s part of the fun. But the premise of the book I think is, is determining the confluence of happiness, health, and wealth which is a whole lot more than just how to get rich. Tell us a little bit about you and tell us where the impetus was for this book.

[00:01:50] Andrew Hallam: Well, you know, I’ve been writing about personal finance for years, the concept of investing and, and what I found really interesting was that people would ask me certain questions about what I was doing, perhaps with my money. And Andrew, do you have a condo? Do you have any real estate? And I do happen to have a condo in Victoria, British Columbia, and I leave it vacant and I don’t rent it.

And people would question me and say, well, that, that doesn’t make any sense. You’re supposed to be this guy who was smart with money, but you have this condo and you’ll leave it like vacant. Th that doesn’t make any sense at all. But maximizing your lifestyle is, I think, the key when it comes to why we will do anything that we do really, why will we, why we will invest or why we choose to, to travel or why we choose to raise our kids a certain way.

What we really want to do is we want somehow to live the best life that we can, and that that’s, what’s the rationale behind it. So money is just a tool for that, and that’s all it is. And the, the idea that we should try to look at the science behind, I think, spending it. How can we spend it to enhance our life satisfaction now? How do we spend it in ways that we think will enhance our life satisfaction, but are actually counterproductive. So counterproductive to our wealth. If we’re spending money that we’re not investing, for example, or for spending money on something that doesn’t enhance life satisfaction. But we think it does, to me, these are fascinating things, you know, getting into that whole concept of the human psychology.

Now, Daniel Conaman talks about this really well when he says, you know, we actually don’t know what makes us happy. We think we do. But we don’t, and he breaks happiness down into a couple of categories. One is, you know, reflective happiness, which really is more of like what we really think or justify or believe.

And then there’s the experiential happiness, which is actually more real it’s actually what we’re feeling. So I wanted to write “Balance” to look at a holistic sense in terms of our relationships with money and look at how we can best use it to enhance our life satisfaction overall.

[00:04:00] Eric Brotman: So you, you take a little shot at the Ivy league education in your book. Not that you say it’s not a good thing or not valuable, but that it may be, it’s not, it shouldn’t be everyone’s goal. Which certainly makes sense. You, you also, you end every chapter with a few tips for living well, which I think is great because if someone were to just pick up the book and, and, and spend 15 minutes with it and just go through there, you’d wind up with the cliff notes in a, in a beautiful way.

Tell me what the thought was behind sort of that, that Ivy league premise, the, why do we do what we do and why do we feel that’s important?

[00:04:34] Andrew Hallam: You know, it’s something that, as I explained in the book, I was working at an elite private school. So I was I was teaching English and personal finance and I was doing a project based assignment with the students on opportunity cost.

And so, you know, a few, you have decision a or decision B. If you have decision a financially speaking, what would potentially be the opportunity cost long-term of that over decision B if one thing was cheaper and if it was cheaper than. An amount of money could be invested on the person’s behalf or making lower cost decision.

So I said, let’s do Ivy league schools. And, and honestly, Eric, I really didn’t know the answer to this. I was just saying, let’s see if this works out based on an opportunity cost assessment, because these kids, they all want it to go to Harvard and Yale and Stanford and such. So I said, well, let’s look up what the actual salaries are for people starting out, you know, and then looking at mid-career salaries for people who have graduated from Harvard, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, et cetera. And then look at what salaries were for some lower priced schools. And so kids look these things up and they saw that yeah, somebody that were, you know, graduates from Yale, they typically end up starting out with a higher salary than someone who graduates from a lower price school, less prestigious school.

Likewise, with the mid-career levels. It was much the same, but then I said, well, that’s cool. Let’s look at what potentially the difference would be if you had invested the difference in tuition over time. And so my students did an opportunity cost assessment and found that wow, if that money were actually invested and that student went to that lower price school, financially speaking, their Ivy league counterpart really couldn’t keep up in most cases because that money would compound over time.

That in itself was really interesting. And then I was looking at different variables, like one being, well, what would happen if the students who could get into Ivy leagues chose not to because any assessment we were looking at, the college itself wasn’t the isolated variable because the kid that gets into Harvard, Yale, Stanford is also going to have some pretty strong intellectual firepower.

And so they can also going to be really, really driven. So to what extent is the college itself the isolated variable that allowed them to earn more money, more income in the first place. And so I found some fascinating research on students that had been accepted into Ivy colleges, but chose not to go that route.

And as it turns out, those students actually ended up with the relatively the same amount of income salary wise mid career and the same amount of net worth as our Ivy league contemporaries. So it wasn’t really a judgment thing, but it was more of showing the students and allowing us really to discover it because they discovered it.

That’s the cool part about educator. I know you have an educational background as well.

[00:07:55] Eric Brotman: Yeah. And in fact I studied English and psychology in undergrad and have, and have done a bunch of teaching at the, at the college level, adjunct and so forth. And I teach English and personal finance. So you and I aren’t going to get along great.

[00:08:07] Andrew Hallam: Oh, that’s cool.

[00:08:08] Eric Brotman: But I mean, I think they go real well together and a lot of people used to use to ask me why, you know, why, what are you going to do with an English major? And I said, well, anything I want. That was kind of a, that was a good thing, but I also, I also have an Ivy league degree, which quite frankly, I, I fervently believe doesn’t matter at all.

Particularly now that I’m 50. It really doesn’t matter at all, but it was interesting the way that you’ve the way that you frame this, that I guess the idea was that someone with that type of academic background and talent was going to have some success, no matter where they matriculated, as opposed to looking at it some other way.

Like somehow that piece of paper was the magic ticket to something else.

[00:08:50] Andrew Hallam: Right. It’s interesting. Malcolm Gladwell referenced some interesting studies in his book, David and Goliath, which came to much the same conclusion. And and he was actually looking at the fact that if somebody could go Ivy and chose not to, for whatever reason, in some ways they also feel like they’ve got something to prove.

I mean, some of their friends would have gone Ivy. It’s like, oh, you know, I’m going to do this and I’m going to achieve. And he actually found that they were able to achieve more, which was interesting. And probably, you know, might really have been as a result of feeling like they had something to prove perhaps, but yeah, it’s fascinating.

The research that I did, or at least that my students did, me just giving them this opportunity cost assessment or assignment. It was it’s, it’s very powerful when somebody can come to a conclusion on their own. So, you know, you could stand up in front of a classroom of people, and you could lay this out, like, let’s assume that I’d figured all this out and I put it on a whiteboard.

That’s one thing. It’s not gonna have the same kind of impact as allowing someone to figure it out. And honestly, I can’t say that I knew this stuff before Eric, like, I didn’t know. That was the fun part. It was me just giving the students the question and finding the tools for which they could find the answer.

[00:10:01] Eric Brotman: There’s a lot of wisdom in this book. There’s also a lot of humor, which is what made it such a fun read, but the, the wisdom some of the wisdom is sort of flies in the face of financial advisors. So let’s have a little fun because some of your tips for living well one of them is don’t trust anyone offering financial advice, always research and verify.

I completely agree. And the second is not all advisors are evil, most just don’t know what they don’t know. So let’s have some fun with this because like any, like any industry, like any profession there’s going to be some, some great ones. There’s going to be some lousy ones. And then there’s going to be some crooks.

Do you think that’s more true for financial advisors than other fields because it, that it deals with money? Or do you think it’s just like any other group of people where you’ve got this bell curve from rockstar to thief?

[00:10:53] Andrew Hallam: It’s probably, yeah, that’s a, that’s a really good question. I imagine that, you know, there’s a, there’s the wide is a wide spectrum of abilities or competencies, probably an any, any job, any profession. And I think though the best ones are those that continue to ask questions. So, you know, when you come out, for example, me being a school teacher and trained to be a teacher, I, you know, I did my training and the training was good. But am I a master teacher in the very beginning of year one? No way.

There’s no way I’m even going to be close. Likewise, with a financial advisor, you know, you just come out of the gate, you’ve got your CFP certification or whatever it is that you have. Are you going to be amazing? No, no, you’re not because there’s so many different elements with respect to dealing with people as well and dealing with human emotions and then that curiosity and that ability, or at least that tendency to want to continue to learn.

I think the best advisors are those that come out with curiosity, great communication skills a level of humility whereby they’re not going to do all of the talking. They’re going to make sure that they do a lot of listening because in doing that, they can also grow and become amazing. So it’s a, it’s an interesting thing because I think to be a great financial advisor you’ve got to be a great psychologist.

I mean, truly, and I’m not talking about that from purely a sales perspective because it’s not a sales perspective, like good financial advisors aren’t the types that say I’m going to sell. You know, they’re the people that work really, really well with their clients. Listen to them, learn from them and, and try to abate their fears.

Because of course there’s a human tendencies to, to chase whatever’s hot and avoid whatever’s not. And you would know this better than me in dealing with people, that’s probably a huge part of your job is taking people away from that th that edge that you know, that they’re probably looking like they’re going to jump off, you know, like they may not know it, but they’re, they’re ready to make some kind of mistake.

They might ask you about some crazy hot tech stock businesses that don’t actually have corporate earnings. And they may want you to stuff that into your account or their account. You’ve got to work with them and talk to them about overall diversification. Things like reversion of mean give them a little bit of history.

You’ve got to be a teacher and a communicator.

[00:13:23] Eric Brotman: It’s true. And unfortunately, in our industry and, and I I’ll take a shot at our industry too. For many, many years, people called themselves financial advisors because they said they were. And I think some of that still exists, where you get a job and you’re suddenly working for an insurance company or a bank or a trust company or a wirehouse, and your job is to sell.

And unfortunately the goals of the organization are not necessarily aligned with the clients being served.. So while I do think there’s an incredible need for talented, capable, ethical financial advisors. There’s still a lot of dribble out there because unfortunately, if you’re going to be a doctor, you either have your MD or you don’t. You’ve passed the boards.

If you’re going to be a lawyer, you have your JD or you don’t, you’ve passed the bar. Even if you’re going to do taxes, if you’re going to be a tax accountant, you, you can get the the CPA. And then now you’ve at least got credentialed. The financial advisory business has dozens of different credentials that most of which mean nothing and a lot of which mean nothing to the consuming public. I mean, honestly,

[00:14:31] Andrew Hallam: you’re bang on.

[00:14:34] Eric Brotman: It. It is the wild west. And so consumer beware has never been more applicable than it is in this space. And so I, I love what you said. I don’t think all advisors are evil, actually. Of course, I know some phenomenal financial advisors who I would say, you know, if something happened to me, I would tell my widow, you know, these are people you could talk to who I would trust from beyond, right? But there’s a lot of junk out there. And unfortunately this is an intangible. It’s not like something you can demonstrate. It’s not like somebody, it’s not like a car salesman where you can say, well, either it drives well or it doesn’t. And most of the time you don’t know if you’ve made a mistake until it’s too late.

[00:15:14] Andrew Hallam: Yeah, I guess the tough part too, I think with this, Eric, is that you can take advice from someone that the advice is harebrained. It could be completely insane. However, it can look like it works for two or three years. So let’s assume that they just, they put everything that you have into a group of tech stocks whereby the co, because there aren’t any corporate profits and we know what’s happened.

I mean, we’ve had, you know, especially over the last couple of years, it looks a little bit like the late, late 1990s where we had certain stocks are absolutely flying so we can get a sense of, you know, incorrectly that this harebrained idea where this person, you know, speculated and decided to put us into something non diversified it’s working.

So it must be a good advisor and that’s how people often measure it. But, but that’s catastrophic, isn’t it? Long-term we know that that’s probably going to really, really hit and hurt that person.

[00:16:09] Eric Brotman: You’re absolutely right. And, and you, you are a fan of indexing. And a fan of passive which, which I actually think are, are not the same thing.

And so let’s break this down a little bit because I, I’m not generally a fan of active management. I do think cost matters. But I also worry about indexing because of the late nineties. When, if you own the S and P 500, you thought you were diversified and really you had a half, a dozen stocks that overweight overwhelmingly were the were large pieces of that.

And the same thing is true today again. So I worry that having an index with mandated purchases and sales, anytime something joins or leaves the index, it takes away some of the ability to buy and hold certain types of quality and still be passive. So I agree with you that trying to time anything is, is foolish. And I agree with you that that, that having paying a whole lot of extra money for active management is to me, fool’s errand, but I, I, I’m not a huge fan of pure indexing simply because I think it eliminates the ability to it eliminates the ability to think. It, it forces you into whichever box it is. H have you, have you spent any time looking at the difference between a true index fund and just a passive investment portfolio?

[00:17:27] Andrew Hallam: Well, let’s define it for the listeners. So perhaps you could define that for me. And then we’ll, then we’ll look at what we are looking at. Yeah,

[00:17:35] Eric Brotman: sure. So so an index fund, if you’re buying an index fund and let’s use the S and P 500, because it’s something people know. The standard and Poor’s 500 is a, is an index that holds 500 us stocks. But it’s weighted in such a way that the largest stocks based on, on market value and their enterprise value are larger percentages of the, of the index. So it’s not that you own 500 stocks and you own them all equally. You own them very unequally. And in fact, at the high end, there are some trillion dollar companies that make up a giant portion now of that index.

So that even though you think you’re incredibly diversified, you’re still overweighting some of these companies that we don’t want to chase. You know, the counter opportunity there is to be in a passive investment, meaning you’re not timing, you’re not tactical. You’re not actively managing. You’re passive, you’re buying and holding, but you’re buying and holding without being required to hold a certain amount of any individual company, just because it’s become a trillion dollar enterprise.

And so I tend to be academically speaking, I tend to be interested in this because I do think passive is better than active long-term for most asset classes. But I don’t like index funds. And the reason I don’t like them is because they are not as diverse as people think they are. They might hold 500 positions, but 400 of those are footnotes and a hundred of them are running the ship.

[00:19:00] Andrew Hallam: Yeah. That’s a, that’s a really good point. And of course, there’s that. There is that argument to ha to ensure that we also have, let’s say, and it’s really out of favor right now, but if you are going to go with indexes to also have value oriented indexes as well. And then the emerging markets, the developed market international, and so many people have shied away from what hasn’t done well, like we are performance chasers.

So if you look at the S and P 500, the popularity of investing in that has exploded. And you have so many people who are also shunning international diversification because it hasn’t done as well. So, you know, there’s an argument to ensure that you have an emerging market component and emerging markets are actually cheap right now.

They haven’t performed very well lately. The international developed world market much the same thing. So these elements do end up helping to reduce risk, especially I think if you build the portfolio based on something closer to global market capitalization, which people are very, very afraid to do at times when one sector or one market such as the U S market has done really, really well.

But it is interesting. I’d be curious about your, your thought on the, say a value index. So you have, you know, like, I guess you have a firm like dimensional fund advisors and they build their portfolios partly, you know, it’s small, a small cap tilt, and obviously they have loads of different sector funds now, but their premise is really built on, you know, Eugene Fama.

His research, Kenneth French and Eugene Fama’s research on the value component. So having that value stock component or a value stock index does help to mitigate that risk that you’re talking about.

[00:20:45] Eric Brotman: I agree, actually, I’m a big fan of DFA and I’m familiar with the three factor model and Fama French. And just for our listeners, that is the, the three factors in the simplest terms are that over time small small companies will outperform large companies. Over time value companies, meaning companies where you’re getting a good purchase price on the way in because you’re buying them at a good price will outperform growth positions. And then also that equities will outperform bonds and other asset classes over time and I’m oversimplifying. But the, the premise I think is sound and of course, value has been out of favor for a while because the S and P and, and is largely growth bias now. So a value index to me is a passive play without being a true index that’s tied to a mandated purchase. So I like them a whole lot better than something that holds the entire index.

[00:21:40] Andrew Hallam: In my book, the idea for me was, you know, if somebody is going to use a financial advisor, what can be a fairly simple litmus test? Because it’s, it’s pretty tough. I mean, you have a whole variety of different financial advisors.

So I looked at the credentials and I said, you know, you don’t want people who are going to be trying to time the market, who are going to be speculating. One thing you could do is, you know, you could look to advisors that deal with say deal with the DFA deal with dimensional funds. And you typically know that you’ve got people that have already drunk the Kool-Aid there.

So those are people that are going to be diversified. They’re going to build a portfolio based on Fama French’s three factor or five factor model. And it’s tough to go too far wrong there because you’re not generally going to end up with a crazy overweighted portfolio let’s say in tech stocks, it’s going to be relatively low cost.

And it won’t involve speculation and you’ll have broad diversification. So it was sort of, sort of one of those things where if I had to nail it, you know, narrow it down to something really simple. Obviously there are great financial advisors that don’t use DFA, but for me to actually guide people in the book, “balance,” like, okay, well, how do you find those people?

I found that maybe you’re perhaps fine finding someone that deals with DFA might be an easy way to, to cut off a lot of the eliminate a lot of the crappy financial advisors. It was just a, a simple process. And again, as I said in the book, “balance,” it wasn’t something that, you know, it was, it’s not going to make or break your portfolio, whether they use DFA funds or not, but they just have a very solid premise typically.

[00:23:14] Eric Brotman: It’s interesting because we’ve been, we’ve been measuring for the last 15, 20 minutes. We’ve measuring somewhat the quality of a financial advisor and tying it almost entirely to portfolio. We started on behavior and psychology very briefly, but then we’ve gone to portfolio. I tend to be a believer and I’d love your opinion on this.

I tend to believe that the investment piece of the, of the planning is one of the least important components of financial advising, not because it, it doesn’t matter. Of course it does, but because setting it and forgetting it and spending a whole lot less time thinking about it, you can spend time thinking about the decisions that are potentially more impactful for you, for your family, for your career, for your, for, for the things that matter to you. And I do think that financial advisors, the best ones are the great communicators who help they help soothe family conflict and they help create communication between generations and they help create legacies and, and leaving behind something that’s more valuable than money and all the qualitative things that get lost when we start talking alpha beta and standard deviation.

[00:24:18] Andrew Hallam: Yeah.

[00:24:19] Eric Brotman: Do you get that sense as well?

[00:24:21] Andrew Hallam: You’re a hundred percent correct. I exactly, yeah. It’s a, it’s a human profession dealing with people and you’re dealing with their goals and you’re dealing with their emotions. And it’s funny because I’m glad you brought that up because the investment part of it, that’s the part we think about. That so, so much. And I wonder when we were trying to define what the role is of a financial advisor and I like to look at it much more holistically, which is really one of those reasons I came back to writing this book, which was a lot different to just, Hey, here’s how to best invest your money for the highest odds of statistics, statistical success.

Although I do talk about that, I talk about that role of money, much more so than anything else in the book.

[00:25:06] Eric Brotman: I, I hope people will pick up this book. I do. I hope our listeners will, will go to Amazon and get a copy because I think it’s excellent. I want to shift because we’re, we’re running low on time and I want to shift to the concept of conventional retirement, because it is not only one of the driving themes of what we do and what our show’s about and the book that I wrote most recently is about, but also you covered beautifully in your book, which is that early or conventional retirement is over. And finding balance between work and play is the key to success. You also said that research suggests you might enjoy a longer, happier, healthier life if you work part-time during your golden years. And how much money you need to retire is as individual as your fingerprint. You have to consider location, passive income and lifestyle. All of this is great. I mean, literally one jam after the other. I think retirement is not only overrated. I think it’s unhealthy.

[00:26:01] Andrew Hallam: Yeah, it’s interesting that we, we strive for it so much culturally. And retirement itself is, is a fairly new concept. Isn’t it? I mean, the idea that at some stage you can, you can go off into the sunset and do nothing. Whereas historically we’ve always contributed to our communities in whatever capacity we could.

And that’s healthy. And, and research suggests that we continue to do that in some way. Can you know, you don’t have to work at a job that you hate forever, but dial things back, perhaps quit that job and find something that you enjoy that may or may not bring in a little bit of money. It might be voluntary.

But the fact that it, it gives us some kind of purpose. It’s interesting looking Eric at research and the journal of epidemiology on life expectancy for people that retire early. And you’ve got the whole concept of a fire community to where these people are so keen on you know, scrimping to such a crazy degree, so that at some point in the future, they can have this wonderful lifestyle going forward, where they don’t have to work.

And the research behind that in terms of the longevity research and the life satisfaction research, just as you’re alluding to actually points to that, not being the best option at all.

[00:27:13] Eric Brotman: Yeah. I believe retirement is the absence of needing to work. I think financial independence is a fabulous goal, whether you’re 28 or 88. But the idea of, of daytime TV and shuffleboard is it’s a fate worse than death. It really is. I can’t imagine having no reason to get out of bed every morning, I’d stop doing it. And that’s what people do. So I think we’re, I think we are very, very strongly aligned, Andrew and I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I want to shift to the conclusion of your book and actually it’s, it’s both in the preface and the conclusion.

So you did go full circle so as an English teacher, I approve of that. What you say here is that there are four quadrants of success. And do you want to talk a little bit about that? Do you want me to read them off? I think it’s really, really great. And if there’s one takeaway today, that’s the one. You want to talk about your four quadrants?

[00:28:04] Andrew Hallam: Yeah. One is, you know, I look at success as a, four legged table. And, you know, one of the legs is the money leg and we do need enough money for, you know, for shelter, for food to be able to purchase experiences, which will allow us to enhance our life satisfaction far more than just buying material things now and allowing us to save for our retirement.

Th th the second leg and not in any particular kind of order of importance is the relationship. Like when we look at. The study I have is an eight plus decade long study the Harvard study of adult development, where they try to isolate what factors lead to a good life? What is it that that makes people actually happy or gives them life satisfaction?

And it’s, it’s our relationships. And when we have regrets in life, their regrets, aren’t about, you know, something we didn’t invest in or something we didn’t buy. Our regrets are typically not spending time as much time, perhaps with people that we love, you know, not keeping in touch with with old friends, perhaps as much as we should have.

The third leg is your health, where you have one. And we can’t abuse it. You know, we can’t focus on other things to its detriment. I mean, we need to do our best to get sleep. We need to do our best to get exercise. We can’t control genetically. What’s going to happen to our body. Anything can happen to anyone, but to do the best that we can.

And then the fourth sense, which, or the fourth leg of the table, which contributes to success is that sense of purpose. And back to your point, Eric, about. With a sense of purpose, we do end up happier and living longer. And so one thing about working part time when we’re of retirement age is that it gives us that sense of purpose that keeps our minds working.

It allows us also to engage hopefully with people of different age demographics, so that we continue to learn. I mean, your brain is like a muscle. You either use. Or you lose it. And so, you know, looking at interesting studies in the journal of journal of epidemiology on dementia and Alzheimer’s, these are things that we can’t control.

These are things that, to an extent we can’t, if it’s genetic, however those who end up continuing to work and continuing to learn and having that sense of purpose in their later years and up with far lower cases overall of dementia. And Alzheimer’s essentially because they’re using their mind.

[00:30:30] Eric Brotman: Well, this, this is this is a fabulous way for us to close. I mean, the, the four quadrants you have money, you have relationships, you have your health of all different types and you have purpose. Andrew, this has been great. It’s time for our extra credit assignment. What is the one takeaway or the one thing you would recommend other than, of course I’ve already recommended folks check out your book, but w what is the one extra credit assignment today for our listeners?

[00:30:54] Andrew Hallam: I would say for today, let’s do something today. Call an old friend, call somebody you haven’t spoken to in a long time who you were really connected with and connect with them because success more than anything else really is about our relationships. And so don’t get too busy for that. Make that a goal today. Make that a goal today. Everyone listening to this, pick up the phone and call an old friend you haven’t spoken to in awhile.

[00:31:19] Eric Brotman: I love it. Sage advice, Andrew, where can people get your book and learn more about you?

[00:31:24] Andrew Hallam: Well, any retailer Amazon or any typically larger book brick and mortar stores like Barnes and Nobles on my website at andrewhallam.com, there are links to a variety of retailers that have the book “balance.”

And so, yeah, I would love it if readers would be interested in checking that out. Thank you very much for asking me that.

[00:31:44] Eric Brotman: Absolutely. It’s been, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for being a guest on don’t retire, graduate, keep, keep keep sharing this, this your message is very, very important and I, I want it to get out to as many people as possible. So thanks for doing what you’re doing.

[00:31:57] Andrew Hallam: Oh, thank you, Eric. And, and same to you and I’ve listening to your podcast and you’ve got some super cool stuff here, and I think you’re really making a big difference in people’s lives. Yeah. Thank you.

[00:32:06] Eric Brotman: Well, thanks. I appreciate that. I’d like to thank all of you for listening today.

If you like what you hear, please subscribe and rate our podcast on Spotify or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Please also check out our books, workbooks and online financial literacy resources at brotmanmedia.com. We’ll be back next week with another installment of office hours and in two weeks with another engaging guest. For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman, reminding you: don’t retire. Graduate!

[00:32:32] Narrator: From this day forward, let us begin changing the way we view retirement. Today. I implore you: don’t retire. Graduate! Visit our website at brotmanmedia.com to subscribe and please like us and post comments on social media.

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