Nora Ali: Welcome everyone to Public Live. I'm your host Nora Ali. And today, we are talking about goal setting and, more specifically, how the types of goals you have might shape your investing strategy. With us today to discuss all of that is Taylor Sohns, a Co-founder of LifeGoal Investments. life goal is an ETF issuer focused on helping everyday Americans reach their financial goals with funds like the H O M ETF, which is focused on showing investors what dollars they have allocated for a downpayment on a future home purchase. Taylor, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Nora. I am super excited to be here. Awesome. Great. We love the enthusiasm. So Taylor, let's start with two common types of goals that might ladder into different investment strategies, and that is retirement and non-retirement. First of all, how and why are these strategies and risk tolerance? Is tolerance is different for these types of goals?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah, it's a great question. And I am going to start off by saying that I am young. I am a 34-year-old millennial, just to give context to listeners, I'm probably in the same seat that a lot of them are in. So, Nora, great question. Right out of the gates, there are two vastly different buckets that need to be separated mentally and physically, if you will, between the retirement bucket and the non-retirement bucket. And so it's funny, I spend some time on social media as a millennial. And the echo chamber that you hear is the following quote by Warren Buffett. So Buffett says, quote, unquote, "the best thing to do is buy 90% in an S&P 500 Index Fund," period. And then that goes away. And what they don't say what they fail to mention is that later in the conversation, Buffett also states "if you're not willing to own a stock for 10 years, don't even think about owning it for 10 minutes." And so that is the investing quote in its entirety. And people look at just the front end of this. And so Warren Buffett would never ever, ever tell someone with short or intermediate-term assets that are not in retirement plans to go out and roll the dice than the s&p 500. That is absolutely laughable and something that he would never do. So at the end of the day, what we always talk to people about is literally setting up two different strategies. One is your retirement account. And that's likely set aside with your employer, whether it's a 401K, a 403B, 457, whatever it may be, and then you have your brokerage assets on the other side. And what we talk about, people is literally write down, I don't mean that mentally writing down, I mean physically writing down your plan for both of these two different buckets. So I'll give an example of what I have written down literally right in front of me about my brokerage account. And then I'll tell you differently what I have written down as my plan for my retirement bucket. So my brokerage account is in this is written, and I go back to this often. So this says, my brokerage account dollars are there to outpace inflation; anything additional is a bonus, and I will remain diversified and actively tweak the allocation to take advantage of market opportunities, with the emphasis always being on preserving my money. This account is for singles and maybe an occasional double, but never a strikeout. And that's very, very important. Because in a brokerage account, that are assets that will be used in your everyday life, whether it be two or three years out, you're buying a car, a home, your kids going to school braces, whatever it may be, you can't afford to take on all the risks that you can in your retirement bucket. So conversely, this is what I have written down for the thesis on my retirement account. I'm invested for the long term; I'm willing to take on more risk. Because my time horizon is longer. I will remain diversified but tend to be more aggressive without trying to hit home runs. No strikeouts here, either. And so that's how I think about things. Again, you have two totally different time horizons. And when you're investing, time horizon is the absolute emphasis on what determines how you allocate those assets. Shorter term means more conservative, and less aggressive, longer term means you're able to be more aggressive, but only if you're able to stomach the ups and downs in the market, which is a very important point as well.
Nora Ali: That's great. I like the idea of writing down your goals because then it just reminds you of the purpose of each of, your buckets. You mentioned time horizons. Can you give us a little bit more detail as to how you go about figuring out what your time horizons are for your different buckets and your approach to that?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah, that's super important. Obviously, you need to know what your money is set aside for. And so, just like writing down a mission statement for the actual investments, before that, you need to sit down and write down what your goals are, again, your retirement assets are set aside; you're not touching those till you're 65 years old. And that's why your shorter-term investments are really important to understand what it is that you're investing for. So at the end of the day, you may have an emergency bucket, and you should have an emergency bucket. And that's called xix, nine months set aside in cash or cash, like security stuff, that's not going to bounce around in case you lose your job, in case you decide to step away from your role and start a new company like I did, whatever it may be, but after that, then you need to think, Okay, I have access income, and therefore I have money to put in a brokerage account. What are the intentions of those assets? What's happening in my life that may dictate where those dollars go? And the advice on our end is always to err on the side of caution. Right. I didn't necessarily think that five years ago that I was going to launch LifeGoal Investments. But I had a very good job that made a very good income. I worked at Wall Street. And at one point, I said, "Okay, enough is enough of this. I want to go out and try to build a company to help the masses as opposed to the mass affluent that I was working with in the past." And my paycheck went to zero. That wasn't anticipated. And I'm very, very glad that I erred on the side of caution, focused more on the short term, focused more on, hey, I don't necessarily know what's to come in my future. And with that, I'm going to remain more conservative, as opposed to remaining more aggressive. And in 2022, obviously, this has come home to roost in spades. It doesn't matter what you've been invested in. Now granted, the more aggressive the worship, then but even the modest bond exposure that people have that think about, you know, sleepy, old, boring old bonds have sold off some as well. So if you're investing, you need to know what your goal is, what you're going to do with that money, or what the unknown for that money might also be. And then, you go about writing your mission statement as to how you're investing that money.
Nora Ali: We hear that term diversification a lot when it comes to investing. So from your perspective, Taylor, what are the core tenets of diversification that investors should be wary of specifically when they're thinking about goal setting?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah, diversification can be a laughable topic. Because people look at diversification, they say, Hey, I own three different ETFs, I'm diversified, and that the two most popular on social media that I see talked about all the time, and nothing against these, but I'll tell you why you don't want to own them in the way people own them. So Vanguard is vastly popular on social media. So you look at Vanguard's S&P 500 V O., and then people say I'm diversified, I own VO, and I own VTI--Vanguard's total stock market index. What's funny about those two things is when you look at the correlation between them, and I'll discuss that in a second, they correlate at 99%, meaning they do the exact same thing at all times in the market. So the markets going up, they go up in unison. When it comes down. Unfortunately, they come down. And in essence, that is the antithesis. That is the opposite of what diversification really means. To understand diversification, you have to look at how things correlate together; how things correlate is a statistical analysis. And this isn't something you have to do on your own. Thankfully, we could all be, you know, in a terrible spot if we did. There are websites online where you can look at the correlation between different holdings. But essentially, what you want to do is you want to put together different assets, whether it be stocks, bonds, commodities like corn and oil, gold, and real estate, a combination of those things that have low correlations to each other. So let's look at stocks and bonds. Over time, stocks and bonds have a very low correlation. Call it somewhere between zero mean, they don't do anything the same 2.3%. And what that does, is in a strong market, where the economy is churning, and results in an really strong economic backdrop, your stocks are going to really do well. And your bonds might not do as well--they certainly aren't going to keep pace. That's not what they're meant to do inside of your portfolio. But in a year where we hit a recession, stocks are likely to sell off. And the low correlation with bonds proves to be essential. Bonds have a historical performance of doing very well during a recession. For context here, I'll give you some real numbers. Right, the last real recession we had, I'm not calling 2020 to the 45 or 2020 to 45 minutes session we had there as a recession. But look back in 2008 and 2008, it was a disastrous year for the market. We didn't even know if our economy was going to be able to hold up our banking system was gonna hold up. And with that the S&P 500 sold off 37%, down 37%. And at one point, it was down 49% throughout the year, that year, bonds returned 5.4%, which is above their long-term average. So obviously, that's when you want to have that yin and yang of stocks and bonds in your portfolio at the same time. Now, let's fast forward to this year. 2022 has been a really tough year. Inflation has driven almost all assets downward. So what do you do in that scenario? Well, a different leg of that stool has held up pretty darn well this year. So you've had stocks sell off at one point, they were down 25%, the S&P 500. The NASDAQ was down 35%, almost bonds have sold off as well. This is the worst year bonds have ever had. Bonds right now for the year are down about 12%. The worst year they've had in history going back to 1976, when the bond aggregate was put together, was down 3%. So this is almost a five time multiple of how bad bonds have ever been. But stocks and bonds haven't worked. What has worked is commodities. Commodities have worked in an inflationary environment, look at oil this year, it's been a very, very good asset to be in to hold up when stocks and bonds have sold off. So again, the basis and the crux of diversification comes down to how assets correlate with each other. And what you want to do is put together different assets inside your portfolio that have low correlation to each other going out and buying VTI. And VO is not diversification going out and buying Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon--is not diversification. They all go up and down on days together. And that is not what you want to do. When you look at an overall diversified portfolio. You want to put together the pieces on the outside that have that low correlating asset to them to have something holding up inside of your portfolio at all times. How do you go about phasing out the allocation of these different asset classes? It totally makes sense and diversifying across bonds, equities, and commodities, but how do you determine the right balance? Or, I guess, how do you start figuring that out? So so that's where it gets tough. Right? So that's where it goes back to the original conversation, what are we investing for? Is this the retirement assets that we're investing for, and therefore, you're going to be disproportioned? If you're young, you're going to be disproportionately weighted towards stocks, which are the higher risk, higher rewarding asset over time, or are these your short and intermediate term assets, in which case bonds should be the bulk of the portfolio because they're more stable, again, the worst year they've had prior to this year, and their history over the last 50 years is down 3%. the predictability of bonds is what you're looking for over time. So at the end of the day, what you need to do is have your goals, understand what the money is built for, then understand the mission that you've written down and what your intention with the investment is, and then allocate accordingly. And if you're not able to allocate accordingly, because maybe you don't have the expertise, or the time or the interest, which is, you know, there's a lot of smart people out there that are way smarter than me that just don't have the interest in finance, then you need to go out and find another solution. And so when you think about other solutions, what does that look like, doesn't look like rolling the dice on, again, a couple individual ETFs, that you don't know how they correlate together, because they've all gotten smoked this year. But, you know, selfish plug here, you look at what we do at LifeGoal Investments, my background, and the company's background was working at Wall Street. So we would go around and work with ultra-high net worth people that have sometimes $50 million to invest and put together a portfolio for them. What we did when we decided to get away from that and start life goal investments was sent to ourselves, what does the person that makes $50,000 a year, whatever the number is, that has $5,000 to invest, and want to invest it for a three 510 year timeframe. What do they do, that don't have the interest in going out and plugging together all these pieces for them? And this came from the catalyst for all this. The genesis was people coming to us, our friends, and saying, Hey, I have seven grand to invest, what should I do? And we're like, Well, what do you want to do with it? I might use overthe next five years. Okay, question mark, then what do you do? And so what we did was takeall of that sophisticated portfolio composition that we did for the ultra-rich, and we justpackaged it inside of one ETF. It's called a multi-asset ETF. Each of our ETFs have stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate embedded within them, instead of one single ticker symbol. You can buy it for $10 a share on any platform like Public.com. And so that's what we've done. And we've said, hey, we understand people don't have the interest the time or the education potentially to do this. Let's give it to them inside of one package that they can access easily.
Nora Ali: Let's talk about losing. You know, because we've all done that this year, right?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah, exactly.
Nora Ali: Can you walk us through some of the math that goes into breaking even after you've experienced a setback?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah. So let's start mid-extreme right. So 2008, the market had pulled back the S&P 500 year had pulled back 49% at the depth of the drawdown. And not coincidentally, by any stretch of the imagination, when it pulled back 49%, you also had the highest level of selling that the s&p 500 has ever experienced. And so that's human nature, right? So human nature is Darwinian, whatever you want to call it, is fight or flight; we can't fight the stock market. So it's flight. So when people get scared, they say, I'm out. Right? And actually, when you look at consumer confidence, and I'm getting away from your question, I will get back to in a second, when you, when you look at consumer confidence, which right now is that the depth, which has a ton of pessimism, consumer confidence is actually an inverse indicator, when consumer confidence is really high, the subsequent 12 month period average, is a 4% return, when consumer confidence is really low, which is right now, the next 12 months average is a 25% return. So there have been eight points since consumer confidence has been tracked that have been as low as we're at right now; the average next 12-month return is 25%. With the worst performance over that 12-month period, being 14% return, I think any one of us raise our hand, say I'll take 40%. But again, going back to the original part of the conversation, you don't want to lose money. So when you look at 2008, the stock market pulled back 49%. We'll call it 50%. To round to get back to even when you lose 50%. It's not 50%. So let's do the math allowed here; you have $10 a start, it draws down to $5, a 50% loss, you need to double that 100% return to get back to $10. So the key to growing wealth over time is not hitting home runs because home runs come around with strikeouts as well. And that's losing money. The key to making money over time is consistently hitting singles and doubles. You can't afford that big drawdown. Because even if you are willing to sit in the seat through that big drawdown, and be down 50% and say, hey, I'll stick with it, you got to get 100% back to get you back to that breakeven mark. Whereas let's look at a different number. If you draw down 10% Well, that's not good either. But a 10% return, you need an 11% Return to get back to breakeven. So again, the bigger the drawdown, the bigger multiplier effect it is to get you back to even so again; at the end of the day, when it comes to investing, you win by not losing over time. And when you win by not losing, that comes back to that portfolio composition. You can't have all your eggs in one basket; you need to be diversified. So your overall portfolio isn't selling off at the same time, like an allocation sided with VTI.
Nora Ali: Very helpful context to close us out, Taylor. Can you walk us through some other goals-based investing strategies for our audience and examples you can share that have helped investors stay focused versus saying, oh, I just want to have X number of dollars in the future?
Taylor Sohns: Yeah, it's really tough. If you asked most people, you know, XYZ, Mr. Mrs. Smith, that are together that are 30 years old. You just got married, and you put your money together in an account; how much money do you have set aside for your impending house purchase? Whatever it is, and they look at their account, and they go, Well, I see I have $25,000 in cash in our bank account. But we also need a car, and we're going to get a dog, and whatever it is, you don't have that money earmarked. Right. And that's something that's really important for you to do. So there are a couple of different ways that you can do this. You can set money aside in different bank accounts, which is a hassle, but that's also what some people do to say, hey, this money is specifically in this account because this is my car payment. And this money is in this account because this is my, you know, impending home down payment dollars. And that's exactly what we did. We launched our life go home downpayment product. We said, Hey, we know that people put their money not only in a checking account but also into a brokerage account like publix.com, and they have holdings there, and again if it's just four different ETFs that have different ticker symbols VTI, I keep picking on them for whatever reason, or is any of that money earmarked for something specific? No. So one of the reasons that we named our one ETF the home downpayment with a ticker $HOM is the psychological component to it. Someone looks at it and immediately goes, hmm, okay, I have $16,000 there. That's exactly how much money I have set aside for that home downpayment that is coming up when we find that right house over time, and along the way, that's invested conservatively to help you attempt to grind out returns to allow that 16,000 to come 16,005 on earn 17,000. And that's the intention of the product over time is to be that conservative, slow-mo, type portfolio that gets you to your goal over time. But again, to your point, the fact is that it's very hard if your money is just piled together to dictate what is meant for this purpose in this person, this purpose, and this one and that's a lot of the naming convention that went along with our home downpayment product, to begin with.
Nora Ali: Awesome, a lot of great insight today. I hope our listeners were taking notes—I sure was. Taylor, we will leave things there. Taylor Sohns is the Co-founder of LifeGoal Investments. Thanks again Taylor, for the time, we appreciate it.
Taylor Sohns: Thank you so much, Nora it was a pleasure.
Nora Ali: Awesome, and thank you to our listeners. We will catch you next time!