Retirement Investing #1: The Psychology of Money with Morgan Housel
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Hey everyone, really quick before we start the show. In today's episode, I interview one of the best financial writers of my generation, Morgan Housel. Morgan has a new book that comes out today and I have five copies to give away to our listeners. All you have to do is send me an email at podcast at youstaywealthy.com and I'll send a copy to the first five people that I hear from. Okay, onto the show. ♪♪

Welcome to the Stay Wealthy Podcast. I'm your host, Taylor Schulte, and today's interview kicks off our first ever four-part series on investing in the stock market. And I don't think we could have found a better guest to get us started. Today, I'm joined by the one and only Morgan Housel, partner at the Collaborative Fund and winner of the New York Times Sydney Award. Without question, Morgan is my favorite personal finance writer, and he has a new book that comes out today called The Psychology of Money,

You don't need to read the reviews or add it to your wishlist or anything like that. Just go buy it right now. Trust me, this is the best finance book of 2020 and every single investor will benefit from his wisdom. For all the links and resources mentioned today, including links to three of my favorite articles that Morgan has written, head over to youstaywealthy.com forward slash 81. ♪

So one of the things that I regularly repeat on the show and also with clients is that when it comes to making financial decisions, there's the textbook answer and then there's your answer. So I'd love to kick off this conversation by you sharing your decision to pay off your mortgage, even though you're a young investor. I don't know how old you are, but I think we're of similar age.

You're young. You're in this record low interest rate environment. You're very knowledgeable about personal finance, yet you decided to recently pay off your mortgage. So I'd love for you to just kind of share this story to kick things off. Your decision here really couldn't be further from the textbook answer. Yeah.

What's interesting about this is that when people find out that I've paid off my mortgage and they say, why? You can get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage these days for 2.9%. Why in the world would you pay off your mortgage? And I tell them, I can't justify it on a spreadsheet. I'm not going to try to justify it to you. I'm not going to say, here's why I did it in a way that makes mathematical sense because I can't. It doesn't make sense.

I have a very good sense that the stock market is going to return more than 2.9% per year over the next 20 or 30 or 50 years. So why would I do that? Well, here's the explanations that I give. And the first thing that I would say is that paying off a mortgage has been the single worst financial decision that we've made, but I think it's the best money decision that we've made.

It's the one thing that when we did it, my wife and I looked at each other and high-fived and said, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe we did this." We have this sense of freedom and security and no one can take our house from us or the kids. And even if the world falls apart and we head back into the Great Depression, this house is ours, we own it. That feels amazing.

So that was great. And for me, it's always been the sense of with my personal finances, I'm not trying to maximize for returns. I'm trying to maximize for how well I sleep at night. That's my goal. That's my North Star that I'm shooting for. And look, for some people, that's not the case. For some people, what really matters to them, what is all they're going to think about is, are you beating the market? Are you maximizing for your returns? Are you squeezing every penny of income out of your net worth that you can?

I don't mean that in any sort of passive aggressive way. For a lot of people, that is really what matters to them, but it's not for us. All I want out of our finances is to be able to look at my wife and my kids, put them to sleep at the end of the night and say, you guys are going to be okay. Any marginal gains that I get from my finances above that is pretty slim to me. It's not that it's zero. Of course, I have financial goals. I like money as much as anyone else, but the marginal gain I would get after a

all the family security aspects are checked off are pretty small. If there is any way that I might try to justify this in financial terms, although I can't do it with numbers, but it just kind of logically, it would be something like this. One of my goals on the stock investing side of our assets

is to be able to push the odds as close to zero as I can that we will ever be forced to sell stocks at an inopportune time. Forced because we need the money for emergencies, living expenses, forced out of them because I'm scared because we're going back into Great Depression II as it looked like we were earlier this year. I just want to make sure that the odds of being forced to sell at an inopportune time are zero. And to me, the best way to do that is to make myself as durable as possible

in the short run with our personal finances. And once you pay off your mortgage, our monthly cashflow needs month to month that we actually need to pay bills one night are ridiculously low because we have no housing expense.

So if I can be as durable as I can in the short run, that reduces the odds that I will ever be forced to sell my stocks to pay for bills. And if I can do that, if I can truly leave my stocks alone for the next 20, 30, 50 years, that's when compounding is going to absolutely maximize the returns of those stocks. So I like the idea of...

Saving like a pessimist. And in the short run, I am a pessimist. When I'm saving money for cash and bonds, I'm a pessimist about the world. I'm terrified. I'm paranoid of things breaking, the economy falling apart, pandemics, job losses, medical emergencies. I'm a pessimist.

But I want to invest like an optimist. I'm very optimistic that society and businesses are going to solve problems and create profits that are going to accrue to me as an investor over the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And I want to be able to leave the stocks that I own alone for as long as possible to take advantage of that growth.

I'm curious how long it took you to come to that decision to pay off your mortgage. Did you put pen to paper? Did you and your wife talk about this for weeks and weeks and weeks? And I ask that because clients will come to us with these big questions. Should I pay off my mortgage or should I keep my mortgage? And a lot of times we go through a lot of analysis. We have a lot of meetings, a lot of conversations to help them arrive at that answer. So I'm just curious, was that just an initial gut response? We're paying it off. I'm not even going to think about it. Or did you put more time into it?

It was more the former. It was more just a gut decision. And when I went into this, I didn't want to disclose too many details about our personal finances, but I'm deep enough into this now that I might as well just tell the full story. So we bought our house in

2016. And we put, let's say, 25, maybe 30% down, something along those lines. We had a decent mortgage. And my plan was to basically make double or triple minimum payments every month so that we could pay the thing off in like 10 years, whatever that math works out to, something along those lines. So we did that for like a year, maybe a year and a half. And

So we always had this large emergency fund of savings that we would use in case of a job loss or medical emergency. And my wife kind of questioned one day, why do we have such a large emergency fund? And I said, well, if I were to lose my job, we got this big mortgage to pay off. And she said, well, why don't we use that emergency fund to pay off the mortgage? And it was like, well, that's interesting. I don't think we put any more thought into it than that. I

I think we literally wired the check later that afternoon without doing any analysis, anything whatsoever. It just felt right. And once we did it, like I said, it was this high five of, oh my gosh, we did it. I feel so good about this. And that was three or four years ago. And I don't regret that in the slightest. Still, as I look back,

I still view it as the worst financial decision that we've ever made because, hey, the stock market has gone up very considerably in the last four years. So that opportunity cost on the amount that we put is substantial. I don't regret it in the slightest. It's still one of the financial decisions that I look at and it gives me...

an everlasting sense of joy and happiness and security that I really value. Awesome. I love it. So you've been doing a lot of interviews talking about your new book, The Psychology of Money, but I don't think I've ever heard you explain in your own words what that actually means. We all know what money is and we all know what psychology is, but I'd personally just love to hear you expand on what it means to you when you push those words together and why the psychology of money is such an important topic for investors.

It's really important for me for this reason. There are people out there in the world and a fairly large number of people who have no financial training, no financial education, no experience, no real financial knowledge that do very well with their finances. They invest for the long term.

They're experts with their cash flow, their good savers, et cetera. They can retire when they want to. And on the other hand, there are people out there who have MBAs from Harvard and were partners at Goldman Sachs and worked in the most sophisticated hedge funds. They have the most experience in the world that fail and go bankrupt. Some of them go bankrupt during the biggest bull markets that we've seen. And I just think there are no other industries where that is the case.

There's no other industry where someone with no education, no background can vastly outperform financially someone who has the best education and the best background. It does not happen in any other field. And the reason I think it happens is because what matters with finances, what matters in investing is not necessarily what you know. It's about how you behave. It's not about your intelligence or your

book knowledge or the sophistication of the Excel spreadsheet models that you're using. It's just simple things like, can you control your relationship with greed and fear? Are you able to take a long-term mindset? Who do you trust? Who do you seek information from? How gullible are you? Those are the things that really move the needle in finances. And those are things that cannot be taught in a traditional academic setting where you are learning about data and models and charts and spreadsheets.

It's the soft behavioral side of investing that is, since it's kind of soft and mushy, it can't be summarized in a real analytical way. It tends to get swept under the rug in investing and in finance, even though it is one of the most important aspects of investing. And so I've always thought it's the most important thing because if you don't have the psychological side of money of investing figured out, then that neutralizes all of the analytical side of investing that you might have.

which is just to say you can be the best stock picker in the world. You can be the Warren Buffett, the George Soros. You can know everything about picking the next best stock and be very good at it. But if you lose your head, lose your cool in 2008 or in March of 2020, none of it matters. None of the analytical skill that you have makes any difference whatsoever if you don't have a good grasp on greed and fear.

And so that's why it is so important is because it is so capable and it will always neutralize any sort of academic skill that you have sitting on top of it, which is just to say that if you don't figure out the behavioral side of investing, nothing else matters, which means that it's not just important. It is the most important side of money and investing.

How do you think about the current market environment? We're in a recession, unemployment sky high, yet stocks are screaming upwards. And so we are in this really challenging environment that's putting the psychology of money to test. A lot of people are really afraid, yet the market keeps going up. So

How do you think about this? How do you rationalize what's going on right now and how that kind of relates to our behavior as investors? It's interesting because there's no historic parallel to what we're going through right now. There's never been a time when we have a legitimate depression going on.

30 or 40 million people lost their jobs in a six-week period. A very substantial number of small businesses will go bankrupt, go out of business, already have gone bankrupt. But every month that this drags on, the number of businesses that will be finished for good rises substantially. We've never had a period like that when the stock market is not just holding up, but surging to new all-time highs. There's no historic parallel to that or even close. During the Great Depression from 1929 to 1932, the Dow Jones fell 89%.

So it's just a completely different world to what we're dealing with now. And there's a couple of different explanations for it. One of which is just, it's crazy. It's just a new hype bubble that people are falling for. This is all going to fall apart in the coming weeks, months, years, who knows. That's one possibility. I don't want to discount that. But if you did try to rationalize it in any sort of coherent way, it would be something like this. When we talk about the quote unquote stock market, and we're referring to the S&P 500 or something like that,

A very disproportionate share of the S&P 500 comes from literally five companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, just those companies. And those companies are doing very well in this pandemic world. Some of their businesses have surged in this pandemic world. They're benefiting from it. And since those companies make up a disproportionate share of the market, then it's just the classic saying, the stock market is not the economy. And the disconnect between small businesses and huge mega tech companies is wider than it's

ever been. It's always been wide. If you go back a year ago, it was wide and those companies were earning higher profits, had more stability, deeper coffers than smaller companies. But now this year, it's just been blown wide open and the gap between them and everyone else has just surged. This is especially true if we're not just talking about small cap public companies, but mom and pop businesses, your local restaurant, your local dry cleaner or auto dealership,

are truly in something that looks similar to the Great Depression right now, if not worse. I mean, during the Great Depression in the early 1930s, you had the economy at large fall about 25%. So the average revenue, the average profits, the average income in an industry fell 25%. Whereas now you have industries in 2020 that are down 100%. Restaurants that have been closed since March or airlines. I just saw this morning, United Airlines revenue over the last year is down 89%. That

That is not only comparable, that is worse than anything that took place during the Great Depression. But at the same time, you have Amazon that in the month of July shipped 490 million packages in the United States.

So that disconnect just gets blown wide open. And that's at least one explanation for why the market might be doing what it's doing. The other thing is, of course, you can't look beyond the fact that the Federal Reserve is pumping trillions upon trillions of dollars into the economy with the express goal, the intentional goal of pushing up asset prices.

So when you see stock surging and bond surging, bond funds, individual bonds, just doing extraordinarily well, you have to think, yeah, that's the idea. That's the whole purpose. That's not an unintended side effect of Fed policy. That is the stated goal of what they're doing. So when you have an organization that has literally an unlimited supply of money and their goal is to push up asset prices, we shouldn't be surprised when they do that. So that's kind of what's going on. It's very difficult, as you mentioned, from a psychological perspective, because it's

In March, everyone, including myself, was kind of shell-shocked. You lose 35% of your money in a matter of days, as happened in March. And even if you are a patient long-term investor and you don't make any changes to your portfolio, it's never fun to see that happen. Some people take it with more equanimity than others, but it's always kind of a shock to see that occur. And

And then boom, snap your fingers. We're right back to all time highs. And so what does that do? I think what's difficult is if I went back to March, I would have said that the financial pain dealt to virtually everyone in the economy in March was going to leave a generational scar. It was deep enough and fast enough that it was going to be something that stuck with people forever, like the great depression did. And now I would,

update that view to say, look, there's probably half the economy for whom 2020 is going to leave a generational scar. People who are laid off, small business owners who are struggling, if not have lost their businesses, people who have been or are about to be evicted or foreclosed upon, that's going to leave a permanent scar for them for life. It will change how they think about money and investing for the rest of their lives. But then there's another half of the economy for whom 2020 will go down as a tiny little blip in financial terms.

which is astounding because again, during the Great Depression, everyone suffered. Very, very few people made it out of the Great Depression unscathed, let alone profited from it. Whereas now in 2020, you probably have something like half, maybe 40, 30% of the country that's doing better than ever right now. So I think if there's any fear that I have, it's that that will lead to some sort of social problem, that that leads to a country in which

Half the citizens do not understand the lives of the other half. That's always been the case to some extent. And that has been a growing case over the last 30 years with wealth inequality. But whatever wealth inequality was one year ago, it is an order of magnitude larger today. Maybe not necessarily in financial terms, but in psychological terms and social terms.

I was just reading the news this morning and the two articles that were sitting right next to each other. One is about the growing reliance on food pantries and profiling families that can't feed their four-year-old children. And it's just devastating for me to read. And the next one was NASDAQ surges to an all-time high.

And those articles sit right next to each other. I think when that kind of thing happens, how do you have society that understands what your fellow citizens are going through? And therefore, if you can't understand what other people are going through, how do you vote on similar terms? How do you vote for the same politicians? I think if there's one big fear of what's going on in the United States and the world today, it's that.

The divide between people who understand other people's lives is just blowing apart right now. Really good point. Given that you literally wrote the book on the psychology of money, you also wrote an article. Does the current environment or even...

when we go through episodes like we did in the first quarter of this year where market's down 30%, do those events cause you to panic or want to change your approach or change your investments? And if not, does it have anything to do with your age and kind of the stage of life that you're in? Do you see that changing as you get closer and closer to a traditional retirement age? How does all of this impact you as like, let's just say the expert of the psychology of money? Well, I think

Well, I think what's interesting, so Daniel Kahneman, who is a Princeton psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in economics. He is the godfather of behavioral finance or just let's just call it behavior in general. I mean, he's the world's foremost authority on how people think, I think. And someone asked him years ago, he said, Dr. Kahneman, you are the leader of this field of in terms of understanding biases, understanding psychology. Has all that research, all that expertise made you better at overcoming biases? And he said, no, absolutely not.

And I've interviewed him twice. I've met him a couple of times and this will not surprise anyone. He's kind of a surly guy. He's

He's a little bit gruff in a very endearing way. He's an excellent guy, but it's interesting. If someone like Daniel Kahneman cannot overcome some of the psychological challenges that every one of us deal with in life, then there's no hope for people like me and you. We're all going to be falling for this. So as someone who writes about the psychology of money for a living, writes about investing history, thinks about the prevalence of volatility and how to deal with that appropriately, going through March of 2020 this year was stressful for me.

We were also selling a house at the time. We're about to move my family across the country. So it doesn't change how I manage money. But to think that because I write about this stuff and I'm supposed to know how to think about this, to think that I wouldn't wake up in the middle of March and look at the news and say, oh my gosh, this is really bad. This might have a big impact on us. Who knows? Like, of course, I was sweating bullets as much as anyone else back then. But what's important, it's fine to be emotional.

But emotionalism in terms of using your emotions to make different decisions in your life, to go in and sell your portfolio, to make these big active decisions that are reflective of the emotions that you're feeling, that's where things get very dangerous. It's fine to be worried. It's fine to look at the headlines and shake your head and be really nervous. What gets dangerous that I'm able to control so far, let's say, is not using those emotions to go in and just make a change in my

in my brokerage account, leaving things alone and sticking to the plan, a dollar cost average. I do it through thick and thin. I have this emergency fund and I'm investing for the next 20 or 30 years. I put these into my kids' 529s. Just as long as I can keep on that plan, even during those months where things look vicious and brutal, then it'll be okay over time.

But it gets dangerous when people think that, oh, I'm going to study behavioral finance so that I can watch half my money disappear and be totally fine with it. No, no, no, no, no. No one is like that. It's impossible to not be emotional about your kids and it's impossible to not be emotional about your money. So don't pretend like you can't be. I think it's fine to just embrace the flaws that you have and just kind of situate your finances and your asset allocation that embrace those flaws that we all have rather than pretending that you can fix them.

So switching gears a little bit, this is a retirement podcast. Most of our audiences, let's say over the age of 45, they're thinking about retirement, they're approaching retirement. A lot of our listeners are in retirement. And

You hear a lot of, let's just call them gurus or experts of the media saying that the traditional 60% stock, 40% bond portfolio is dead and the 4% rule is out the window given current stock market valuations and record low interest rates. In another interview that you did, you shared a really strong and interesting argument for why you don't think this is necessarily true. And I think it's really fitting for my audience. So I'd love for you to just kind of expand on that a little bit and share with us.

Sure. I think there's two parts of this. One is that if you look at the history of the 4% withdrawal rule, where that came from, it comes from looking at how the 60-40 portfolio performed going back to, I think, the 1930s and saying like, what was the maximum that you could withdraw and never run out of money? Well, that period includes, of course, the period from about 1950 through 1980, which is a period where interest rates went from roughly 0%, like they are today, to 16% or 17%, where they were in the 1980s.

The history of the 4% withdrawal rule does include a period that looks pretty analogous to today. There are a lot of people that think that these are record low interest rates. And I guess to some extent that might be mathematically true, but not by much. We had a period at the end of World War II where interest rates were 0% to 1%. The Federal Reserve put them there so that we could handle the World War II debt at the end.

We are not necessarily in completely uncharted territory. And then so to say that because interest rates are where they are today, that the 60-40 portfolio and the 4% withdrawal rule is broken, doesn't hold a lot of water to me.

The more important point though, is I think that from 1980 through right now, we've been in a period where bonds, the fixed income side of your portfolio was a driver of returns for your wealth. You actually got income, you got capital gains, you made money on your bonds. I think it's important to realize that that expectation is

is what is historically not common. To expect to earn 7% a year on your bonds through capital gains and interest, that is something that is abnormal. So the point where we're at today, we're almost certainly...

in any diversified smart bond portfolio, you're probably not going to be making any returns, especially after inflation. It's to say like, well, that's okay. The point of the bonds and the cash in your portfolio is not to get rich. The purpose of the cash and the bonds in your portfolio is to ensure that you are not forced to sell the 60% of stocks that you own. That is the purpose of it.

That's the whole purpose of it. And once you change your expectations from that and saying, I'm not owning these bonds to get rich and good thing because I'm definitely not going to. The whole reason that I am owning them is to give me a sense of security and protection against the stocks that I own so that I can make sure that I'm never going to sell them. And if I can never sell them, that is when compounding works the best. If I can own them for, look, if in retirement, five, 10, maybe 20 years, if you can keep it at that and keep them going over time, that is when you're going to maximize the returns from your portfolio.

So I guess from those two points combined, that's where I would say 60-40 is not dead. Look, is it reasonable to adjust your expectations down? And maybe in the past, you could say 60-40 returned 6%, 7% a year, and maybe now you're going to expect 4% or 5%. That seems reasonable to me. But to say that it's dead and you should do something else seems like a stretch too far to me.

Looking at your bond portfolio, is that true safety net and not really a driver of returns? Segues really nicely into my last question here. As you know, this podcast is called Stay Wealthy, and you have a chapter in your new book called Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy. And it's eerily similar. I don't know, Morgan. I feel like I should have made the end notes or something for that one. But

I really did enjoy the chapter. And I think it's only fitting that we dig into it a bit on the show. I'd love for you to briefly share the Jesse Livermore story and the relationship between short-term paranoia and optimism, if you're up for it. So Jesse Livermore is...

is known as one of the greatest investors of all time. He lived in the early 20th century and he made a name for himself as one of the most successful stock traders, which is what he was. He was not a long-term investor. He was, let's call it a day trader basically in the 19-teens and 1920s.

And during the crash of 1929, he came home on the day of the crash. I think it was October 29th, 1929. And his wife looked at him and said, Jesse, we must be ruined. The stock market fell 25% today. His mother-in-law was at the doors in tears because they thought they were all broke. They had lost everything. And Jesse looked at his wife and said, no, I shorted the stock market and we are wealthier than ever.

On that day, they made the equivalent, just for inflation, of about $3 billion in one day. So Jesse Livermore really cemented his status as the world's greatest investor at that point. He made a ridiculous amount of money during the 1920s bull run, and then he just multiplied his fortune during the crash because he was short stocks at the perfect price.

point in time. So Jesse Livermore was very, very good at getting rich in the stock market. No one else in the world was better than him. And even if you adjust for inflation, you could say no one else since him has been better than him at getting rich in the stock market. But what's very interesting about Jesse Livermore is that he really didn't seem to have to know where his limit was.

He didn't know where the boundary was. So if you fast forward into the rest of the 1930s, he kept making bigger and bigger and more leveraged bets with his money. And he eventually went broke. He went broke so much. This is a well-known story that he eventually committed suicide and he died penniless.

And what's so interesting to me about Jesse Livermore and a lot of other people like that is that they're very good at getting rich and they are very, very poor. They have no skill whatsoever at staying rich. And those are two completely different skills. They require different skill sets. But anyone who is interested in finance and doing well over time obviously needs both of those. No one just wants to get rich and then go broke. Everyone wants to get rich and then stay rich. And realizing that those are separate skills is really important. You need to nurture those skills separately.

Getting rich, or let's not use rich, just doing well, let's call it, requires optimism. It requires swinging for the fences. It requires being an optimistic investor, taking some risk, looking at the future and saying, look, I'm optimistic in people. People are going to figure out problems and create profits, and I want those to accrue to me. I'm an optimist.

Staying rich requires the opposite. It requires a certain degree of pessimism, particularly about the short run and saying, oh, there could be disaster right around the corner. I don't want to go into a lot of debt. I need to make sure I have a lot of savings. I don't want to take too big a risk. It's this barbell personality that is really important for everyone. One other way that I've summarized it a little more succinctly is save like a pessimist, but invest like an optimist. That's what I think everyone should do. And you hear stories about people like Jesse Livermore who were investing like optimists,

but they had no control over their ability to know where their limit was and to put the brakes on a little bit. Interestingly, in the business sense, Bill Gates was very similar in terms of in his early days when he was managing Microsoft, he was making one of the biggest, most optimistic bets about the future of technology that anyone had ever taken. And he was so optimistic in himself that he dropped out of Harvard at age 19 to pursue that optimistic vision.

But Bill Gates, the manager of Microsoft, the CEO of Microsoft was paranoid. He vowed from the day that he started Microsoft that he was always going to have enough cash in the bank so that he could pay everyone's salary for 12 months with no revenue because he was just paranoid about everything that all the challenges that might hit him. So Gates is good at getting rich and staying rich, not just that personal level, but for how he managed Microsoft. He was very good at both of those things. So it's very different skills that we all need to keep in mind. We need to be optimistic.

Well, you've given us a lot of really good information to help me and the listeners stay wealthy. And I really appreciate it.

I really appreciate you coming on the show. If people want to learn more about you, we'll link to everything in the show notes. Also be sure to pick up a copy of Morgan's new book, The Psychology of Money. Morgan, is there any place else you'd like for people to find you? The book and the blog, I spend most of my time on Twitter. My handle is Morgan Housel, first name and last name. That's where I spend most of my time online. But the book and the blog is really where everything I write ends up.

Awesome. Well, we'll make sure to link to everything in the show notes. Morgan, I really, really appreciate you carving out time today to come and share all this with the audience. Everyone go check out Morgan's book. Morgan, thanks again. And we'll be in touch. Thanks so much. This has been fun. Thanks for having me. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. This podcast is not engaged in rendering legal, financial, or other professional services.