Better Money Choices with Doug Dahmer (CEO) | E105

Turning financial planning on its head.

Summary:

In this 105th episode of Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira, award-winning financial planner, university lecturer, writer, and host welcomes Doug Dahmer, CEO of Better Money Choices, to talk about democratizing financial planning, having a long-term view of planning, and more. 

Episode Highlights: 

● 00:32: – Better Money Choices is a financial platform that puts the power in the consumer’s hands. 

● 01:25: – Before Better Money Choices, Doug founded Retirement Navigator. 

● 02:22: – Better Money Choices allows consumers to gamify their choices to explore what their financial options are. 

● 04:50: – The biggest obstacle to financial planning is the initial data collection, so the Better Money Choices platform has a wizard that allows for that data collection in 7.5 minutes or less, and to identify the places that need further detail and clarity later. 

● 08:59: – Financial planning is a verb, not a noun. 

● 10:20: – Better Money Choices is owned by the client and can be shared with any other financial advisor if the client wants a second opinion. 

● 13:12: – The platform is based on the idea of adult learning; it isn’t effective to tell an adult what to do, but if you give them the tools to learn, then they’ll come to you for help. 

● 20:24: – Doug is able to duplicate a client’s plan to play around with it and explore options without touching their actual plan, but then can send that new version of the plan back to the client for review. 

● 21:50: – It’s almost never as easy or simple as choosing one option or another. 

● 24:06: – Financial advisor decisions are best guesses at the time of the decision based on the information they have and the factors at play. 

● 26:17: – The majority of Doug’s time is spent reassuring high-income people that they can spend money and won’t run out of money, which sounds strange to the average person who typically overspends. 

● 27:40: – Doug pushes clients to decide if their current life is the best life they can live, if this is their goal, or if they can reallocate their money to get closer to goals. 

● 31:27: – If Doug could change one thing in the industry, it would be to democratize access to financial planning. 

● 32:06: – Doug’s biggest challenge has been the current state of the financial services industry and the lack of new thinking. 

● 35:06: – What excites Doug the most is that the need out there is so huge, and he wants to get out there as fast as he can. 

3 Key Points 

1. Financial planning isn’t a one-time action, but an ongoing process. 

2. Better Money Choices empowers clients to learn the process and help them make 

decisions or propose changes to a financial advisor themselves instead of relying entirely on someone else to tell them what to do. 

3. People should stop looking at financial choices as permanent or definitive when the best anyone can do is to make their best guess based on the information they have at the time. 

Tweetable Quotes: 

● “Close to 30 years of financial planning has taught me that it’s not the latte’s that are killing financial plans. What’s killing financial plans is that people aren’t getting what they want because they don’t know what they want.” –Doug Dahmer 

● “More of one thing usually means less of another. What choice do you want to make? Your life will be defined by those choices, but now for the first time in your life you have a tool that allows you to discover the outcome of those choices before you make them.” –Doug Dahmer 

Resources Mentioned: 

● Facebook – Jason Pereira’s Facebook 

● LinkedIn – Jason Pereira’s LinkedIn 

● FintechImpact.co – Website for Fintech Impact 

● Better Money Choices website – http://web.bettermoneychoices.com/index.html 

● Doug Dahmer Twitter – https://twitter.com/dougdahmer2 

Full Transcript:

Jason Pereira: Hello and welcome to FinTech impact. I'm your host Jason Pereira. Today on the show I have Doug Dahlmer, CEO of Better Money Choices. Better Money Choices is the financial planning software that attempts to flip planning on its head by empowering the client to drive a lot of the financial planning conversation and inputs for that matter. And with that, here's my conversation with Doug. Doug Dahlmer of Better Money Choice. Tell us about Better Money Choices. 

Doug Dahlmer: Well, Better Money Choices is a financial planning platform that really tried to turn financial planning on its head. In essence, my goal was to put the power of financial planning in the consumer's hand. A plan isn't a plan till it's owned by the person who has to live with the choices. And in the process, what we've done is taken planning and made it very scalable to the average adviser. That's happening in a world right now where the industry is pivoting towards planning and the only way that planning is going to succeed is if financial advisors can do a whole bunch more of them. More importantly, nobody's going to accept it as value unless they want to do it. And one of the things that surprised me is most people really don't want a financial plan. 

Jason Pereira: So tell me about the journey to create Better Money Choices. What was the impetus where to come from? 

Doug Dahlmer: Well, my primary business, the business that I started 10 years ago is called Retirement Navigator. And the goal of Retirement Navigator is to really build recipes for how people should draw down upon their assets, where they should start their cash flow in order to fund the lifestyle they want. In order to come up with that prescription, you need to have forward knowledge of how much money people need and exactly when they need it. In other words, what are the things they want to accomplish? What do they want to do? When do they want to do it? How big do they want to do it? And we started the process with some very rudimentary tools and it has evolved over time to the point that I recognized it's not going to be accomplished in a client appointment. These are conversations that have to take place at home. 

Doug Dahlmer: And what happened is people really do not have a tool that allows them to organize their thoughts about this and do it in the context of all the other choices that they have. So what we've really done with Better Money Choices is gamified the process of allowing people to explore what's most important to them. What choices are they making that are furthering them towards the things that are most important and what are the things that are preventing them? And it is that what we learned through the process is that this was much more powerful than what we originally thought it was. And that the clarity and confidence it was bringing to people was probably valued at even a higher level than the guidance we are giving as it related to tax planning. 

Jason Pereira: Okay. So let's talk about how you enabled that. So you're talking about essentially enabling the family decisions that are made on their own outside the financial advisor. Because that happens. You know, we ask him about, and we talked about this before, we ask them what their goals are and either abstract at best or deer in the headlights. I don't know, at worst. And oftentimes these discussions only happen when we're not in the room. So talk about what happens when these discussions happen when we're not in the room. How does your software enable that entire process? 

Doug Dahlmer: Well, part of it is the ease of use. The other part is, is really using momentum. What you want to do is say, listen, some of these, some of these choices are really easy. You've got a habit of when did you buy your last car? How long do you tend to have hold... Chances are you are going to spend the same amount. Okay, let's put all your car purchases in. How long do you plan to stay in your house? You know, if you're going to stay another 20 years then I can pretty much predict there's at least two furnaces and a and a new roof on your house. These ones are really easy. I mean I'm dealing with the average people between 55 and 75. They've already started to build their bucket list of places they want to go, things they want to do, where they want to stay to do it. Let's start listing those out. 

Doug Dahlmer: And what happens is as they start telling their story, they get more and more engaged in it. And then you start to look at the cross roughs that happened between those things and you and you start to ask if these things were to happen in conjunction with one another what other implications with those have? We also get out later in life and say it really realistic that you're going to stay in your house? So it's really getting into a very deep conversation but you don't try and do it all at once. What we do is we have them go through the initial wizard. I mean probably the biggest obstacle to planning... There's two, but the first one is everybody hates the upfront data collection. 

Jason Pereira: I sadly referred to it as a financial enema, like literally we're going to turn the inside out for lack of better term. And unfortunately that is where it stalls for both the client so many times unless they're truly committed to doing it and the advisors who don't do planning, who contemplated implementing it and look at the amount of work that is. Those are the two break points. 

Doug Dahlmer: And so the goal of our wizard is to capture all of that data in seven and a half minutes or less. 

Jason Pereira: How? 

Doug Dahlmer: How. You simply say planning is not an exact science. It's best guesses. We will have plenty of opportunity to discover where we need greater detail and correction and that is quick and easy to do. But in seven and a half minutes we want to establish the structure. The second issue is we want to get rid of the second obstacle to planning and that is most people don't trust financial advisors because they recognize this is a process to basically dig into where they're spending right now so that we figure out where we can extract some money out of their current life. We call it the latte factor. And I actually and quite often quoted in terms of saying, I wish people would drink latte. 

Jason Pereira: I have a different one. It was just like, I don't care if you're going to Starbucks every day of the week as long as the sustainable and if your lifestyle is not sustainable, you tell me where to cut because if that lattes, the one thing that's keeping you sane because it gets you out of the house with three kids and the dog that are screaming at you all the time, then you need to keep it. It's cheaper than therapy. 

Doug Dahlmer: Close to 30 years of financial planning has taught me that it's not the latte’s that are killing financial plans. What's killing financial plans is this whole idea of people don't know... People aren't getting what they want because they don't what they want. And it's... 

Jason Pereira: The old Yogi Berra saying if you don't know where you're going you'll end up somewhere else. 

Doug Dahlmer: And so as a result, we often head down tracks on an emotional basis and discovered two or three years later that this is not aligning with what we want and all of that time, energy and money has been wasted. And if I could just get people to spend the time drinking that latte and exploring some of the choices before they do it, I think I could solve 80% of financial plans. Because most of it is poor life choices, not well thought out life choices in terms of how they collide with one another. So the whole idea behind Better Money Choices was to get people to put as much granularity into what they want to do when they want to do it, how big they want to do it. Do that against the backdrop of what you have and then say it's your plan. You start telling me what choices you want to make. 

Doug Dahlmer: Again, the key is is frequent interaction but short interaction where you ask really good questions on a concentrated basis to get people engaged and thinking about things that perhaps they haven't put into the process. One of the advantages you have as a financial advisor is you live, I mean, I have 500 families that I work with. I've lived each one of those lives vicariously. There's not much I have not seen previously and I can see parallels as I watch people heading down certain paths. 

Doug Dahlmer: It's that wisdom that builds the relationship with the client. Every day my goal is to come closer and closer to that valued mentor relationship. Each of us has a mentor in our life who we look to who says they know us better than anybody else. They always provide me with a good third outside perspective in terms of my life. Well at the end of completing a Better Money Choices plan, I know my clients better than their kids, their doctor, their priest, you name it. And now what happens is every choice that comes along, they're coming back to me to ask my perspective is how this fits into the rest of their life. 

Jason Pereira: Good. And again, it goes back to what we said earlier about the, who am I saying about financial planning is a verb, not a noun. And too often it's sold as a noun and too often it's treated as a noun as when now when it can be typically ignored by most advisors in this industry. But yeah, I agree with you. And it's something I live as well, where basically, yes, this is the document. This is dead on arrival because the future never works out the way you say it does. But it's pointing in the right direction. 

Jason Pereira: And we're going to do this, we're going to do this for next couple of years, and then we're going to update it again. And every time there's a major change, we're going to update it again. And every time there's a [inaudible 00:09:29] complicated you're going to call me. And it's the constant nonstop counseling and it's turning... Financial planning itself is turning the industry on its head. Like this is the thing. Like it's so often it was always about the progression was we sell stuff that it's like if we plan we can sell them more stuff. And then there was a bunch of us saying, "No, no, no, wait a minute. This planning is actually more beneficial than the stuff we sell." That's social evolution. So... 

Doug Dahlmer: I mean, I've earned the reputation of being called ‘metaphor man’. And it's, because I usually have a story for everything. And I mean what I tell people is, listen, there's no pilot in Canada that can leave the runway without filing a detailed flight plan. It takes a great deal of time doing that. And every pilot knows no flight has ever gone according to plan. But as a result of what they've done, they're making better choices in the air in terms of when they encounter those things. That's why Better Money Choices is owned by the client. It's not owned by the advisor. They can share that information with any advisor if they want a second opinion. 

Jason Pereira: Okay, so let's talk about that model. So is this B to C or is this you basically going B2B but then the advisor gives the client the link and then they own that instance. That can then [inaudible 00:10:43]. How is this distribution model going to work? 

Doug Dahlmer: The distribution model does both. As of January we are going directly to B to C. There will be two versions of the software. There will be a freemium model which basically allows people to put their plan in and get a definitive answer of am I going to be okay or am I not okay. There will be a premium model that says how okay am I going to be and how could I improve upon that plan and how can I compare plans to do better and that will be done on a subscription basis. We are also making it available to advisors. And the advisor version is a more substantive version. It has more functionality involved in it because if you want the consumer to do it, you can't overload them with all of the other stuff that advisors are going to look at. 

Jason Pereira: Well, yeah. And not only that, you know, and we'd talked about this soft, fair, the danger in my mind with these things is I'll... I mean, these sort of cynical individuals are going to look at this one way or another who basically say, "Well, hi, when I'm going to need an advisor for? A planner for? I have software, which does it all." And it's like, yeah, "Guess what? It's software. You still don't have any idea of really what's going on in the background and making it a sausage." And the person who does knows about the opportunities that you're never going to look at. And there's certain strategies you could never put into a software like this because frankly the clients would be first of all just dumbfounded or deploy it improperly or whatever it might be. 

Jason Pereira: So there's always going to be a degree of capacity. Like they can understand put X amount of dollars into an RRSP, X amount of dollars into a TFSA based on guidance? Yes. Can they understand a corporate organization and then lifetime capital gains exemptions? No. That line has got to be drawn somewhere. So it's interesting. There's an interesting challenge to see how you walk that line. 

Doug Dahlmer: What I've discovered from... So we've been really running this live since the end of September and have people coming to the website on a regular basis. We haven't actively promoted it, so it's not like... You never want to go live... [Crosstalk 00:12:46]. 

Jason Pereira: Well it's good for that. 

Doug Dahlmer: However, what we have discovered is that people who get involved in the process are coming back to us for help. And the reason they're coming back to us for help is they come with better questions. 

Jason Pereira: They appreciate the complexity now. 

Doug Dahlmer: Yes. Yes. What happens is if you haven't started to plan, how are you going to know that there are potential obstacles. And so it is this self-discovery. I mean the whole process is built upon advanced, accelerated adult learning. Don't try and tell an adult what to do. Let them discover it for themselves and then they will come looking for assistance. So in terms of, is this a threat to the advisory world? No, I will suggest to you that it is going to be a huge advancement. 

Jason Pereira: You know, it's interesting. So much of the impetus for this podcast was to stop advisers thinking that every direct consumer play was a massive threat to their business. Because, I mean, I'm sure you've been to the conferences too, where someone gets up and talks about something and then people start like almost screaming at them because they're feeling threatened about the entire experience. And I think that maybe that speaks a little bit too much to how they conduct business and how replaceable and commoditizable they are. 

Jason Pereira: But the underlying theme amongst so many of these plays that we've talked to on this podcast is that there's a need for the consumer to have control over part of the experience. But at the end of the day, like no one's... Congratulations, you have web MD, but you're, you're not performing surgery on yourself. Like there's no amount of just the do it yourself tools that we're going to give people that are a foundational thing that are really going to replace [hello 00:14:18] professionals who truly understand not just how the basic sausage gets made, but how the basically do the complex things that go beyond that and coach people through it. 

Doug Dahlmer: Along that same line, I mean, I was the first advisor to be on the Wealthsimple platform. 

Jason Pereira: Yes, you were. That's how we first got introduced actually. 

Doug Dahlmer: Yeah, that's right. And am I afraid of Wealthsimple? No bloody way. All they are, is they're my housekeeper. 

Jason Pereira: They're pipes. 

Doug Dahlmer: They're pipes. And the issue is that my value comes from planning. And the more time I can spend planning, the more valued I'd be. And so I'm using technology. 

Jason Pereira: We understand why that's such a threat to so many people. Because they get into this business because of the money, of the investments, of the excitement of the delusion to believe that they're going to basically be beating the market by reading the newspaper and research reports. Like they get into that. That's how they define their personality, their value proposition, and you're telling them all that's useless. 

Jason Pereira: You should outsource that to people who can do a better job of it and focus on actually helping people in this way. And they're like, that's not the reason they got into that. Like I would love nothing more than to see this industry start to attract people for planning, actual planning versus them watching Wall Street and thinking it's really cool. 

Doug Dahlmer: Well, and the new financial planning association and your whole emphasis upon evidence-based fiduciary responsibility. I mean, so much of planning that is done right now has people chasing income numbers or accumulation numbers. And people are not interested in how much they can accumulate. They want to know what they can accomplish and you can't be a fiduciary if you don't understand what they're trying to accomplish. 

Jason Pereira: It's amazing. I think maybe it's because of what they read or expect. You get the clients saying like, Oh, I have this much, how much income can I expect to take from it? That's not the right question. Or how much do I need like on retirement to basically have enough to have this income? That's not the right question. Like life throws any number of curve balls around at us and at the end of the day, whatever it is you have and whatever it is you're saving towards, it better be able to weather the storms of how that life is going to change. With a large degree of safety and certainty. 

Jason Pereira: So it's, humans try to boil it down to one number. And I've literally had clients fire back like "I don't need this plan. I just want to know how much I can take every year." It's like, okay, you tell me what to assume as a return and they look at me dumbfounded. It's like I can tell you right now, if you put it under your mattress you can take this much per year. And you'll run out of this year. But the second we introduce a even a slightest segment of volatility or your health going sideways, out the window. It's not a pension world anymore. 

Jason Pereira: Okay so talk to me... So essentially you have built a financial planning software that again the entire concept is you're turning it on its head and you're basically pushing it to the client first. In a lot of ways you're pushing the relationship to the client, which frankly is also been threatening to advisors as well because they often worry that if they see the man behind the curtain they realize we're just a man behind the curtain. I don't... I love collaboration tools. I think that this is [crosstalk 00:17:15]... 

Doug Dahlmer: I was going to say I have now... I mean the efficiency of my office is unprecedented right now. 95% of my appointments are all now done virtually and those appointments are seldom longer than 20 minutes. They are scheduled on a needed basis. Many times I have no idea who I'm going to be talking to on the day, but I guess what I haven't done is I haven't laid out... As the end advisor, you have a portal that allows you to see who came on last night who was working on their plan. Did they take their plan from successful to unsuccessful? And so you've got a complete pulse on your business in terms of who is active in there, interested and therefore I know where I need to be. There's also a place where they can ask for help and book an appointment immediately and those get scheduled. I have no preparation time because they've prepared for me. 

Jason Pereira: Yeah, let's look at what you've done. You know, this is what you did. That's interesting. Yeah, so I mean versus my action item, which is essentially, "Oh yeah, call me when there's a change." They can actually facilitate that change and push it out and you know what the reality is is that that's the way everything is going quite honestly. It's just the application of experiences. 

Jason Pereira: They shouldn't have to call me to say, "You know what? Instead of buying, say $50,000 on the next car, I really liked that Tesla. What if I spent $75,000." You know, pushing that slider should be enough to tell them the red light. That should be enough. 

Doug Dahlmer: But the most common statement I make is more of one thing usually means less than another. What choice do you want to make? Your life will be defined by those choices. It's just now for the first time in your life, you have a tool that allows you to discover the outcome of those choices before you make them. 

Jason Pereira: Oftentimes, I've gotten people frustrated. It's like, look, this isn't witchcraft. This is... I'm not Harry Potter here. Like I'm not magic. I'm not going to go back and make the numbers more realistically improved for you. It's you who gave me input. It's all I can do. And your choices are there. So being able to enable them to basically be able to take some ownership and some... Not just ownership. I mean ease. I mean like he had this debate the other day about my buddy who never uses Amazon and I'm just like, "What is wrong with you?" Like I am standing with you right now and if I need any supplies, I can hit a button and it'll be there before I get home tonight. Like why would you put yourself through the trouble of going to X, Y, Z or three different places or why even one, when it's that easy? Right? And it's just, it's not about devaluing us. It's about enabling their experience to be as user friendly as possible. 

Doug Dahlmer: And then the other issue is, again, this is going back to technology. I'm using Zoom as my... 

Jason Pereira: There's your endorsement zone. 

Doug Dahlmer: ... For virtual meetings. And one of the beautiful things about Zoom is, is that I can give them control of my computer and I have a rule. It's your plan. If I touch the keyboard, it becomes my plan and I'll tell you what to do. Therefore you have the keyboard. If you don't know how to communicate what it is, I will help you. But in the process, I'm accelerating your learning curve in terms of how to use the software. So I never touch the keyboard with the plant. Now there's two key functions that I do have and that is I have the ability to duplicate their plan and go away and explore with a whole bunch of things without touching their plan. 

Doug Dahlmer: And I can send that plan down to them if they decide they want to accept that thing. But the most important thing, and this comes back to my work in retirement navigator, is we have the ability on a year by year basis to prescribe exactly where the money's coming from. So this is a drawdown schedule. There's a number of other softwares out there who try and alter the drawdown by prioritizing which account will be depleted first. Do I deplete RSPs first [crosstalk 00:21:06]. 

Jason Pereira: And that's not the solution. It's never one. It's a combination. 

Doug Dahlmer: It's a combination. You've got to know where the peaks and the valleys are in spending. I've got to preserve the tax efficient funds for the peaks and... 

Jason Pereira: And the tax rates and the clawback thresholds and yeah, there's so many factors that go into this. 

Doug Dahlmer: And then you've got to worry about loss of income splitting. All of those things... 

Jason Pereira: In this country. You do in other countries you don't, but continue on. And the clawback is our term for phase down stuff. 

Doug Dahlmer: I forgot that we were talking to the world here. 

Jason Pereira: And we talk to the world, you know, some of them have it worse than us. Not many have it worse than us. Except in France. I don't know what you guys are thinking about tax rates. Continue. So yeah, so it's not... Yeah, exactly. I've always been like, when I see them as simple as do the one versus the other, I just say like, "No, no, it really is not that easy." 

Doug Dahlmer: Actually. I look at it in terms of they're doing me a favor because it does tell people that the order makes a difference. But it's prescribed on a year by year basis. At the end of the day really what we're saying is, is that what happens is so many people are so anxious to prescribe the medication before they've done the diagnosis. 

Jason Pereira: I mean, as part of our normal processes that simply, we'll do the most tax efficient thing throughout the year in order to get the money. But then come the end of the year, it's a conversation about, "Okay, let's make a full accounting of all your other forms of income. What were the distributions from your investments? And this is what your tax bracket says, we want you to take X out of your RRSP, wants you to take Y out of that." And it's basically because we know based on a plan that if we spread that tax bill out, that we're going to be able to do that. But at the same time, there are years where there's peaks and troughs. So if maybe we're taking more from the RRSP than we need to this year, but there's a tax opportunity to do so. Slide that into something else. And then when there's a need for the extra cash or doing so we're taking it out on a tax efficient basis. 

Doug Dahlmer: In other words, sometimes it's better to pay a little more tax now than a whole bunch more later. 

Jason Pereira: Sidetrack, I mean, I did an article in conjunction with someone else like two years ago on The Globe on it was not waiting to 71 to [RIF 00:23:17]. And the feedback we got was kind of all over the place. Like the consumers just like, "Oh, tax deferral, blah blah blah". And you know, I had like two or three calls. Like why is no one else writing about stuff like this? I'm like, this is not rocket science. People like this... 

Doug Dahlmer: It's no different... Sorry, it's a Canadian thing. But I mean 92% of Canadians make the worst possible choice of when to start their CPP. And a simple piece of software like we have with Better Money Choice. You put both of them in and you say... 

Jason Pereira: Well again, I don't know if I've made the same claim at the same percentage. I mean it is situationally dependent. But in general, yeah, we're always looking for and actually my article on this, I'm so sick and tired of rules of thumbs on Canada Pension Plan, it just drives me up the bloody wall. It's like 70s more, 60s less. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Like oh, crossover point is here. It's like you didn't factor in taxes and inflation and like... And it's just like, it's never that simple. Like what are the circumstances, what are the factors that come into play here? And you have to make a best guess at the time based on that. 

Jason Pereira: But you're right, no one does that either. Default, earliest, 65 or 70 because those are the three... Or as soon as they know they can take it or... 

Doug Dahlmer: But I mean I've got the actual statistics from Services Canada. I know how bad it is and it's pretty miserable. 

Jason Pereira: So what is it? Let's have this conversation. What's it look like? 

Doug Dahlmer: I believe the last one I looked at was 87% had taken it before age 62. 

Jason Pereira: *0... Okay though. So that, yeah, I mean, like I said, I think it's largely, it's situation dependent on lots of things including other investments you have lifespan. But I would have to say that that number should be a lot more normally distributed than 87% before 62. 

Doug Dahlmer: And the unfortunate part is most of the other people that are taking it are taking it later only because they worked that long. So it would suggest that it's not good knowledge. 

Jason Pereira: You don't have to... That you used to be a rule, you have to stop working. You don't have to anymore. So it's an independent decision now so... We're side tracking [crosstalk 00:25:14]... 

Doug Dahlmer: We're going down a rabbit hole. 

Jason Pereira: Evidence based. Okay. So back to the software. So talk to me about the... First of all the consumer reaction thus far to what you've done. And I'm not talking about the clients in your client base, the ones who found you and have been basically doing it. What's the feedback been thus far?

Doug Dahlmer: The feedback is really a progression of aha's in terms of how they're starting... They're having conversations they've never had before. The other issue is that in most households there is, I will call it the provider and there is the individual who figures out how are we going to spend it. And that creates a great deal of friction. Well, now what happens is we have both of those parties sitting down with a credible source between them so that one can't say that's impossible with, in fact, the program says, "Yes, you can afford that." On the other hand, if it can't be, what choice do you want to give up? 

Doug Dahlmer: The other thing that astounded me, and it could be based upon who are the people who are coming to us first. I have spent more of my time giving people permission to spend, giving them the confidence to spend. I mean I'm dealing with very high net worth people who are terrified that they're going to run out of money. And... 

Jason Pereira: It's amazing how when people hear this, the average person just doesn't understand that because most of the average person is probably spending too much. But you can't go your entire life worried about this and living frugally. And not just within your means, constraining your spending with that mindset and then suddenly hit a certain age and turn that switch off. 

Jason Pereira: I mean, I'll share a personal experience. My own in-laws are very much like that. And one with a pension, one without, but they'd always been very, very responsible with their money. And I'll tell you, people, you know, for years like, "Oh, don't worry about us. Take care of..." You know, the daughter's like, just take care of yourselves, go on more trips, whatever. Finally got them to sit down and do a financial plan. I said, "So here's the deal. Why aren't you spending more?" It was just like, "Well, we were... Can we?" It's like, "Yeah, you can." I basically said, "Here's the best case scenario, like spend below that. You're spending this, you can spend up to that. Anywhere in the middle is acceptable. Why are you waiting? Don't wait to give it to us." 

Doug Dahlmer: And one of my favorite quotes again is they don't put pockets in shrouds, they don't put trailers on hearses. So... 

Jason Pereira: You could put a trailer on a hearse. There's no point. 

Doug Dahlmer: What happens now is we push them to say, is this your goal? And if this is the biggest life you're going to live, wouldn't it be a lot more fun to start distributing this to other family members while you're on this [crosstalk 00:27:52]. 

Jason Pereira: You know, upgrading the cruise ship. Like you name it. 

Doug Dahlmer: Yeah. Or again, we've pushed the envelope. I'll add another 10% and 20% to their spending so this is still how much is left. We've got an estate problem now suddenly we're having a meaningful estate problem as opposed to them worrying about, "I can't deal with estate. I don't think there's going to be one." Because it is their story. It's not my story. 

Jason Pereira: It never ceases. It's quite astonishing to, I mean, we love showing them these projections that are not indexed, but just showing them, "By the way, you're scheduled to die with this many millions of dollars." And they're just like, that's never going to happen. It's like, well, the return number was like 5% in this case. And the reality is that you're making more money per year than you have to live off of and you failed the factor and CPP and OAS to like... You know, it doesn't sound a ton, but it pays for a lot of basic living expenses. And just do that renumber and you're going to get there. And they're just staggered by it. So it's amazing when people get to that stage and then just don't think that they have enough to retire. They never thought about this large amount of wealth that they're leaving behind. 

Doug Dahlmer: And I guess the other thing I've discovered, but this again come back to Retirement Navigator. A good tax plan in terms of drawing down properly... 

Jason Pereira: Such a Delta. 

Doug Dahlmer: If I'm talking about a husband and wife, white collar translate somewhere between 250 and $400,000 in an average plan. And it is so easy to do once they tell you where the peaks and valleys of their spending is and you're able to prescribe what to do. Now my question is, if I am to provide value and the value is $400,000 in tax savings over the balance of your life, do I have a value problem? I don't think so. 

Jason Pereira: I mean I've never... Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Personal experience, you know [inaudible 00:29:42] we took over clients that we have to compel to do the financial plans, some who still have never been engaged in that and just don't want to use us for that for whatever reason, no matter what conversation we have with them. And then we have the ones who come in who sought us out for that. And the relationship is very different across all three. One is I don't value us as much, which is, I understand you're not giving me the opportunity to demonstrate value. The others are just super happy that we've managed to add so much more value to the relationship. And then the third they come in and frankly when they see the value from day one. 

Jason Pereira: Right? And you're right, like if I can have a $400,000 tax deviation even that's going to basically just by drawing down from the right sources and managing this properly. And the rumors of tax rates going up, which let's face it, we know how the election went. We can pretty much bet that that's only going to become even a bigger issue. And they're talking about even more clawback thresholds for things like personal exemptions and whatever. So this is becoming ever more complex and convoluted. And it actually just creates more opportunity for anyone who's taking a really good planning approach to provide substantial value. And that's one of the things that converted me to planning in the first place is I realized, wait a sec, I do all this. Forget about trying to outperform the TSX by one point. Like this has an infinitely bigger impact than that ever would. 

Doug Dahlmer: My comment to each of my clients is, "Now that you're in retirement or the balancer life, I will give you greater return than what your investments will. And you've got a lot of investments." 

Jason Pereira: You nailed it. The return on managing it right over one's lifetime is actually higher than the return differential versus the market. Like that's exactly it. So before we wrap up, there's three questions I ask everybody. You've listened to the podcasts, you've probably heard them, maybe you're ready for them. So the first one is if you had one wish for something you can change in the industry or in your company or in your product, what would it be? 

Doug Dahlmer: I was not prepared for that. 

Jason Pereira: So you're not listening [crosstalk 00:31:35] as much as your claim. 

Doug Dahlmer: Okay. So the thing I want to change and part of this is that we're doing it with the launch of Better Money Choices. We're going to democratize access to planning. We've going to take the complexity out of planning. As you said, it's not brain science. It's just describing a route. And I think in terms of what I want to change, I'm in the process of doing it and I still have further to go down that road to simplify it even further. 

Jason Pereira: Excellent. Okay. Second question is, what's been the biggest challenge in getting to where you are today with Better Money Choices? 

Doug Dahlmer: I would suggest it's the current stage of the financial services industry in Canada. There's an awful lot of people who are trying to last it out, stay in the industry long enough that they can exit. And there's not much in the way of new thinking and there's got to be some new blood coming into this industry. [crosstalk 00:32:32] 

Jason Pereira: We can talk for hours on this subject. But I mean, yeah, I, the utter frustration I have when conversations break out at conferences, questioning, you know, people saying we should look at a fiduciary responsibility and then the people were like five years away from leaving or just like, "No." It's like this isn't about you. You're going to be gone. Goodbye. Like stop. Or banning of DSC. And it's like... Which in the US would be [share B 00:32:56] units, whatever it's called with embedded compensation. It's like, why are we allowing the transition to the majority of people who are leaving the industry to dictate the terms for the next generation of this industry. Now, not all of them are that. Yourself, you're more gray than I am and you're definitely forward thinking in this regard. But just the rent seeking behavior that they're just going to hold on and eke it out, doing as little as possible and not, and we should not be even allowing an audience to that conversation. 

Doug Dahlmer: And that's between Canadian banks and the statesmen statements in this industry, is it any wonder we move at get glacial speed. 

Jason Pereira: And everybody talks about... And I love the entire like average age succession crisis, like where are these young advisors coming from? It's because we've done such an absolutely abject, terrible job of A, attracting people to an industry because we tell them go to help people then tell them to go sell insurance to survive for the rest... To all their friends and family to survive. So strike one. So people discover that, you know, they got lied to. That conversation happens all the time with young advisors reaching out to me. And it's like, okay, so the average age is in the mid 60s. How many of the these advisors at conferences, when you ask them, put up a hand to have a succession plan? Almost not a single hand goes up. Have you ever thought about working with a junior or pairing up with a junior or parking your ego so you're not the only person with a word and no. 

Jason Pereira: There's no mentorship, there's no career development path. There's no guidance. I mean you look at medicine, you know you're not allowed to be a doctor until you've worked under a doctor. You now have to be a lawyer until you've articled as a lawyer. Like this model exists anyway. This is why an association got started recently. Anyway, let's move on beyond that. And I will say, I'll plug the US again. I'm seeing this behavior start to happen down there. People graduating programs and financial planning are going to work as paraplanners while we're taking the CFP, learning their chops and then hanging their shingle after the fact. 

Doug Dahlmer: But a lot of that also comes from the entrepreneurial side of the IRA structure. 

Jason Pereira: Closer here than you think. 

Doug Dahlmer: I can [crosstalk 00:34:58]. 

Jason Pereira: We can have this conversation later. Yes. I have a big smile on my face right now. There's been a lot going on. Okay, so last question for you is what excites you the most about what you're working on and what gets you out of bed to keep basically going at this? 

Doug Dahlmer: The need out there is so huge. And my biggest frustration is how do I get there as fast as I possibly can and I have so many ideas of how to do that, that there's many nights that I spend staring at the ceiling trying to figure out which one to pursue next. 

Jason Pereira: Yep, We have that in common. So Doug, thank you very much for coming and taking the time to come on. I encourage everyone to check out Better Money Choices when they have time, but once again, thank you. 

Doug Dahlmer: That's bettermoneychoices.com. 

Jason Pereira: Take care. So I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Doug Dahlmer of Better Money Choices. I always loved talking to Doug. We have very like minds as you can hear. And as always, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever as you get your podcasts. Until next time, take care. 

Speaker 4: This podcast was brought to you by Woodgate Financial, an award winning financial planning firm catering to high net worth individuals and their families. To learn more, go to woodgate.com. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play, or find more episodes at FinTechimpact.com.