Preston Pysh (02:23):

Well, dad was crushing it on the stage.

Morgen Rochard (02:24):

Yeah, he did really well.

Preston Pysh (02:27):

He did really well. Yes. I mean, as always.

Morgen Rochard (02:29):

He always does though, yeah.

Preston Pysh (02:31):

All right. Let’s start here. I’m curious about why did you become a professional at financial valuation and planning and going down this path? What were you attracted to early on that you would choose this?

Morgen Rochard (02:50):

Yeah. That’s a great question. I grew up, actually always wanted to be a doctor, which is exactly why you would imagine I’d be in finance to this day. And so it was literally like, I don’t know, maybe because I grew up like in a Jewish household and that’s just sort of a thing. You’re a doctor or a lawyer or something like that.

Morgen Rochard (03:06):

But I mean, I don’t remember my parents really forcing that down my throat. I remember always just saying I wanted to be a doctor like my dad and my dad’s actually a dentist, so he was hoping that maybe one day I would realize he was a dentist, not a doctor and go down that path. But everything I did all through growing up and then in college was to become a doctor until I interned at this hospital and they had me changing bedsheets and doing a bunch of things, which if you’re like one of these people like me growing up who you think like, oh, I can do a lot more than that, you have me changing bedsheets, and I just found it really disgusting.

Morgen Rochard (03:39):

And then people were coughing. It was just like, this is really not my environment. And I’m thinking to myself like, I don’t like coughing and I don’t like germs and the bedsheets and all these things, maybe this really isn’t the right environment for me. And I started second guessing it and I had other members of my family who are in finance, so I started talking to other members of my family about what that potentially would look like.

Morgen Rochard (03:58):

And I got really lucky getting a job as an intern out of college, on the floor of an equity options trading firm. We worked on the floor of the Amex and I got coffee for people. That was literally what I did. I was like a runner girl and I would get coffee and I would deliver messages. And this was back in 2008 and volatility was through the roof back then. So options traders actually did very, very well. So while everybody else was watching the world burn, options traders were making markets and were generally long volatility and were having a good time. So that’s where I got my feet wet and started learning, so I learned basically to be an equity options trader and I did that for a couple years.

Morgen Rochard (04:34):

And then the trade flipped, right? So the VIX went to 90, but then after that it came back down, but then it started to sort of creep down. And I don’t know if anyone really remembers what went on in 2009, but it was like the VIX went from 60 and then it went to 45. And then from 45, it just sort of slowly creeped down from 45 to about where it is today basically. That’s like the worst case scenario for options traders. It’s like you’re bleeding out money for your options. You’re paying the time decay every single day, the firm started to lose money. And it seemed really obvious to me that I was not really somebody who they were excited to keep on. They were going to keep on their veteran traders.

Morgen Rochard (05:13):

I ended up getting a job in wealth management at Merrill Lynch, because that’s who was hiring in 2010. And that ended up being how my career ended up where I was. I worked for this large private wealth team and I started learning about what private client was about. And I still did a lot of trading because if anyone knows what goes on at these large wirehouse, it’s a lot of trading and not really so much long term investing and hearing about what the research desk wants to do and then calling your client and telling them to do it. And it’s a lot of mumbo jumbo garbage. But from there I was like, well, I really want to be a portfolio manager. So in order to do that, I need to have a CFA. If I don’t have a CFA, then I’m nobody in this field. I started studying for it.

Preston Pysh (05:52):

Which is a big test, multiple test, right?

Morgen Rochard (05:56):

Yeah.

Preston Pysh (05:56):

Because you got all the different phases and for people that might not be familiar with the CFA, I mean that is a major undertaking for somebody to get chartered as a CFA.

Morgen Rochard (06:06):

Yeah. I had a whole thing in my mind. I was like, okay, I’m very type A if you haven’t already noticed. And so in my mind I was like, okay, Martin Luther King Day is when I have to start and I’ll put up my calendars and I’ll do everything. And I’ll mark off every single day. And that’s literally what I did. I went to work at 7:00 in the morning, I would come home at 7:00 at night and I would study and I would check off my boxes and I had this big calendar on my wall. And I did that every single year for three years and I got my CFA.

Morgen Rochard (06:31):

Then I was like, okay, now I’m going to be a portfolio manager, but that’s not what happened. What happened was is that there were a lot of people who got CFAs, especially in New York, which is the market I was in. And nobody really wanted somebody who was doing wealth management. It was really hard to switch from the sell side back over to the buy side as they put it. Then I was like, “Well, I kind of like wealth management. I just don’t really like where I’m doing it.” And I know people are starting firms. Why shouldn’t I just go out and start my own?

Morgen Rochard (06:59):

That at the time in my 28 year old mind, that seemed like a really good idea. But I think now a little bit more risk-averse with kids and marriage and all the other things maybe I wouldn’t have taken that leap at that time. But at that time in my life, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I had always been really good personally with my money. I had saved enough so I actually could make this of the cuff decision to go start a business, so that’s what I did. I got rid of my apartment. I broke my lease early. I moved in with my parents. I did basically everything I could to get like-

Preston Pysh (07:27):

You are [crosstalk 00:07:28], yeah.

Morgen Rochard (07:28):

Yeah, as long of a runway as possible. And yeah, now here we are eight years later, I have my own wealth management firm and it all started really as portfolio managerly type. And then I realized, well, this isn’t really going to work. This isn’t what people want. People want financial planning, they need financial planning. They’re asking me questions that I don’t have answers to that’s not within the confines of the CFA curriculum here. I ended up studying for the CFP at that point.

Morgen Rochard (07:52):

And that’s basically how my firm evolved. And then from there it’s just gotten more and more down the financial planning route to the point where now we offer something called life planning. And I have my registered life planning designation, which is basically where we take clients through a series of three meetings to help them really organize their thoughts on what they want to prioritize and how they can execute it in their financial life.

Preston Pysh (08:12):

That’s amazing. Okay. So tons of context there. Where I want to go back to is this CFA because I’ve gone through … I’ve never taken it. Right. But I’ve gone through some of the manuals. I’ve seen some of the questions that are in there, the breadth of what it is that you got to know, especially just like fixed income. I mean, you have to understand the whole breadth of anything, financial derivatives, you name it. As you look back to what’s in those books from an academic standpoint, and I know what my answer is. I’m not going to tell you my answer.

Morgen Rochard (08:43):

I don’t want to know your answer. No, I’m just kidding.

Preston Pysh (08:44):

What is something that you remember learning that in practicality and how you see the world and the economic landscape is just total trash.

Morgen Rochard (08:58):

Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to pinpoint one specific thing. I want to start high level and then we’ll maybe-

Preston Pysh (09:04):

Yeah, let’s do it.

Morgen Rochard (09:05):

… funnel down here. I find the main problem with the CFA curriculum is that it’s not applicable at all to almost 99% of the population. So for like the 1% of people who want to be in the weeds doing minutiae financial portfolio management, yes, the CFA is great. If you take a bunch of McKinsey consultants and send them with their sharp ratios and all their little check boxes, or I guess it’s not even the McKinsey people, it’s the Cambridge associates folks. And they check all their boxes about alternative assets and all of things, that’s who this is for.

Morgen Rochard (09:37):

It’s not for the average person who is going to evaluate how they want to allocate their assets. And I use that term allocate loosely because that term allocation can go anywhere from index funds to Bitcoin, to individual stocks, to individual bonds. Most people are not going to do all sorts of duration calculations, bond evaluations, derivative swaps, interest rates swaps, all of this stuff is just not relevant to most people’s lives. And for the people who it is relevant for, it takes it to a place that’s just not even-

Preston Pysh (10:11):

It’s even deeper than what’s being asked on the-

Morgen Rochard (10:13):

Yeah, it’s almost like you get so lost in the minutiae that you can’t even see what’s right in front of you. And 2008, I think is a perfect example of that. Because you’ve got plenty of people who have CFAs out there and they literally can’t see what’s right in front of them, which is the macroeconomic backdrop in which that they’re evaluating these mortgage back securities and these CDOs and everything else that went on out there. I think that that’s really the true problem with what the CFA is doing is because they take you so far into the weeds, you can’t take a step back and actually evaluate a total picture.

Preston Pysh (10:42):

Yeah. Speaking of the 2008 and the CDO being right in front of their faces and nobody except for the few that they made movies about that we’re making the call. How do you see our landscape today? Do you see a similar setup as far as like there’s a really big thing brewing right now? And if so, what is it?

Morgen Rochard (11:02):

Yeah, so something that I talked about a long time ago, even before I knew about Bitcoin was the idea that there would come a time when people didn’t want to hold dollars anymore. And I didn’t really know at the time what would really be the catalyst for that or how, but I did know that the more we print money, the more we don’t take into account how much the government is spending and using the money printer as a way, as a means basically to give people quote unquote services that they may or may not need to provide things. Let’s say like aid to Ukraine off the cuff without actually going through normal channels to do so. Spending ridiculous amounts of money on missiles and other things that they do. Just no checks and balances in regards to the budget.

Morgen Rochard (11:44):

In my head, I’m like, okay, this doesn’t really make sense. And while at the time in my kind of stupid trading head, I was like, “Okay, I want to be long tips the inflation bonds. And I want to be short US treasury.” That’s kind of where my head was at. It was like, okay, there will come a day where there’s massive inflation and the 30 year bond will be worthless. And therefore I want to be long the inflation bond and short the 30 year treasury.

Morgen Rochard (12:07):

And now my brain’s like, that’s totally stupid, I don’t know why you want to get involved in that. But I think that there’s sort of a mindset there of like there has been something brewing for a long time. And this actually was I believe something that we could have gotten out of, had we taken a step back let’s say in 2010 or 2011, when things started to settle and reigning things in that we could have actually figured out a way to grow out of our debt the way that everybody had talked about we’re going to muddle through and then we’re going to grow out of our debt.

Morgen Rochard (12:33):

Now we’re at a point though where this is just what we do whenever we come up against some sort of crisis, and everyone could say what they want about the pandemic or whatever they want to call it. But right when it did hit, the first thing that we did was we printed money and we handed out free money. We’ve done everything we can to do that. And I think that that’s not going to stop and whether or not the crisis is brewing now, or if it’s brewing in the next crisis from now, if our only answer is to continually print money, then at some point nobody will want to hold US dollars. And that’s when this, I mean the house of cards comes stumbling down.

Preston Pysh (13:06):

Is it a cultural rot? What do you think is the … Because I agree with you. I think back in 08, 09, shortly after they started doing QE and these big stimulus, it would’ve taken a lot of austerity or something to try to get this thing back on the tracks. But we are so far down that path now that it almost seems like it’s becoming indoctrinated into the culture. I mean, you’re seeing it with the loan forgiveness for college education and things like that. It’s just like, well, yeah, just take my debt away. Why isn’t the government just printing a bunch of money making my debt to go? Is this cultural rot then?

Morgen Rochard (13:44):

In a way, yes. Right. And to bring it back to personal finance, because that’s what I know really well. Imagine you’re a person who you took on a bunch of student loan debt and you also have credit card debt and it doesn’t really mean anything to you. After a while, maybe the first 10K you sort of felt like, oh, this isn’t really the right thing. And then the next thing you know you end up 60 grand in debt and you’re like, “Okay. Well, that’s going to be really hard to get out of.” Doesn’t really matter if I spend another extra hundred dollars that I don’t have and you do that a hundred times.

Morgen Rochard (14:10):

And the next thing you know, you’ve got the 60K plus the hundred thousand dollars and then slow, and then the interest is accumulating and the next thing you know, you don’t know what to do about it. And I think that our government is really there. There hasn’t really been any need to say no, we can’t spend that money. We need to balance our budget. There are a lot of pundits out there like Paul Krugman comes to mind, Stephanie Kelton who are saying, “This is actually the way. This is the way to make sure that everyone in our country has what they need.”

Morgen Rochard (14:40):

And so I think it’s a combination of you start down a slippery slope and it’s hard to pull it back. It’s really hard for somebody who’s a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt to all of a sudden say, “Okay, you know what? I’m not going to go out to dinner as much as I used to. And maybe I will sell some of my stuff and maybe I will not get a dog and a pool and all the other things that I thought I was going to have in my life.” That’s really hard for people to do, especially when you’ve already been doing that and you’re on some sort of hamster wheel cycle about it.

Morgen Rochard (15:06):

And that’s really where our government is for sure. And because our government is there, the people who live there are there as well, right? Because they keep seeing us printing money in order to pay for things. Like of course somebody’s going to say, “Why does this missile matter but my student debt doesn’t matter? Why doesn’t my home matter, but Ukraine matters?” There’s a disconnect within the population as to why the government is spending on what they’re specifically spending on and where it should go. As a taxpayer you think that, okay, I’m owed something as well.

Preston Pysh (15:37):

I like that because I think what you’re really saying in that is you’re saying, it’s hopeless for most participants in the market to ever come out of the hole that they’ve been dug into. Based on the environment and circumstances that exist in the world today, I mean, if you’re making $50,000, but to really kind of have any respectable kind of lifestyle, it costs $75,000. Well, you’re going to go $25,000 in the hole every year and you’re not going to be able to come out of it and it’s somewhat hopeless so you just kind of give up I guess. It’s crazy.

Preston Pysh (16:13):

And going back to a key phrase you said earlier, the MMT part. If you were going to, because I think this ideology and this thinking is also kind of adding to this hopelessness that we find in the population. If you could say something to an MMT or if you want to say something this definitely directly, what would you say to her?

Morgen Rochard (16:36):

I mean, other than the obvious, are you an idiot? Well, I would say to her, “When does it end?” Is this really something that you believe can go on forever? Or do you think that there’s some point in time at which the buck needs to stop? Because I think that she does actually believe that this can go on forever, but if she looks at any period of time in history, literally any period of time, it doesn’t go on forever.

Morgen Rochard (17:03):

And I mean, even going back to ancient times, right? The first coinage that ever came out was the Lydian coin. Nobody knows even who the Lydian empire is now. You barely even learn about it in school. It’s like if you didn’t go to the metropolitan museum of art and happen to stare at the pottery for hours, you wouldn’t even know. It’s one of those things where it’s like, and it’s that over and over and over again, just in a different backdrop with a different catalyst, with a different ending every single time.

Morgen Rochard (17:31):

I mean, I like to think about the quote, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it also didn’t fall in a day. And I really believe that that’s where we are in this point of time. We didn’t get to this point overnight. There were periods in time that first certainly accelerated it. But now we’re probably on some sort of slow decline and there will be a point at which it’s not slow anymore because the end is never slow.

Preston Pysh (17:52):

When you talk to other investment advisors and managers that are Bitcoiners, what are the typical hangups that you kind of run into when you’re talking to clients and you’re talking to people, what are you hearing?

Morgen Rochard (18:07):

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it depends on the client for sure. I’ll just give a backdrop on my client base, which I’m sure can really be a proxy for most people’s client base. There’s going to always be a very small percentage of people who are either extremely interested in technology or extremely interested in Australian economics. When you do a bell curve right, they’re on the far right. And there’s not very many of them.

Morgen Rochard (18:31):

Then there’s the middle of people who are like, “Oh, I’ve heard that. Yeah, let’s talk about it.” And then there’s the people on the far left, who they’re the opposite. Either they’re anti-technology or they can’t wrap their head around it or their MMT type people, or they just, for whatever reason, they can’t seem to grasp that something that was created out of thin air could have value for one reason or another.

Morgen Rochard (18:53):

And so the questions are across the spectrum. For the people who are on the far, they’ve got really hyper-technical questions about their Bitcoin and how they’re going to do things with their Bitcoin and how can I lend against it and why do I need to do that versus selling or whatever. They’ve got really hyper technical financial planning questions.

Morgen Rochard (19:09):

And on the left side of it, you’re answering questions like, won’t quantum computing make this obsolete? Won’t the government ban it? I mean, you name every FUD type thing, they’ve come up with it, they’ve read it in some sort of article. Isn’t it only used for drugs? How can people use it if the internet goes out? That kind of stuff. And then for the people in the middle, it either depends if they’ve got an open or closed mind which I think when people think of Bitcoiners-

Preston Pysh (19:33):

I like that.

Morgen Rochard (19:34):

… they think of us as close-minded because we have shunned other aspects of crypto or cryptocurrencies. But I actually like to think of it as Bitcoiners being open-minded and everybody else being sort of close-minded, they’ve made up their mind about the fact that this specific point is going to change X, Y, Z thing in the world for whatever reason that somebody very interesting to them on a podcast said without really thinking about the implications of why maybe you wouldn’t need a blockchain or why that’s maybe just a software project or why nobody would really even want that anyways.

Morgen Rochard (20:02):

It’s just somebody who looked at Bitcoin and decided that they wanted some random thing to be, as be a part of Bitcoin, so they decided to start a whole new project. There’s a lot of that. And so I think it depends on who you’re speaking to. Some people are going to be open-minded when you have those conversations and they’re going to hear what a Bitcoin financial advisor has to say. And some people will be close-minded. And I believe that your job as a financial advisor is not to open the minds of the close-minded, it’s just to be repetitive enough that they get comfortable having the conversations with you until they can actually open in their mind.

Preston Pysh (20:34):

Yeah. I think at the end of the day, if you force somebody into the position and they have no conviction at all, you’re doing them a disservice big time.

Morgen Rochard (20:41):

Oh, totally.

Preston Pysh (20:42):

Because they’re just going to sell it at the wrong time for sure.

Morgen Rochard (20:43):

It’s a fantastic way of putting it. Yes.

Preston Pysh (20:46):

Yeah. Why do most advisors think that? And I have some friends, and I hear this from them. Why do they think crypto and not Bitcoin? What is going on? What’s the bigger story there that’s being fed in Wall Street and all these throughout the whole finance space advising space.

Morgen Rochard (21:07):

Let’s take that back to a backdrop, since we’ve sort of had a lot of context in general on these questions. The average financial advisor went to some sort of school, they probably majored in economics, history or some sort of something in their sociology, some kind of social science. They’ve heard Keynesian economics their entire life. They probably had parents who were either Republican or Democrat and didn’t really swing either way very far to the left or right. That’s kind of the average person. And their whole life, because they’re probably somewhere in the range of age 25 to 65, they have heard about Keynesian economics and that money printing’s okay. And that inflation is good and that’s how the economy grows and so forth and so forth.

Morgen Rochard (21:56):

I think it’s actually asking a lot of financial advisors to then say, “No, deflation is good.” I think it’s really easy for us as Bitcoiners to be like, “Stop thinking all that nonsense. But what do you do about that? You need to stop thinking about that and start thinking about Austrian economics.” I mean, for starters, Austrian economics is not taught.

Morgen Rochard (22:14):

When I think about my upbringing, I’m actually generally, I think I’m pretty lucky of how I grew up and what I learned. My parents voted for Ross Perot. My dad was a Ron Paul fan. These were household things that were talked about. I don’t think that the average person got to hear about libertarianism and didn’t read Ayn Rand at a really young age and then start reading Murray Rothbard, even though that wasn’t assigned reading in college. I feel like it is asking a lot of financial advisors to immediately flip the switch and go from being Keynesians to Austrians.

Morgen Rochard (22:47):

With all that in mind though, I also think that there’s a disconnect between what money actually is and what advisors think it is. Money, it’s basically something that you receive, you hold for a period of time and then you send out. And there are all sorts of properties associated with money, that help you receive it, hold it for a period of time and send it out.

Morgen Rochard (23:07):

Advisors don’t really see money that way. Money is something that you receive and you send, but you don’t hold it. The whole purpose of our profession is to take money and move it as quickly as possible into investment. There’s no holding. The holding period has to be as short as possible, because all we do is talk about how inflation is eating your money away. The whole reason why you need me is because there’s inflation and I’m going to help you invest that quickly because I know how to invest and you don’t.

Morgen Rochard (23:32):

And so I would say that that’s the financial advising profession, not the financial planning profession, but that’s what the financial advising profession has been about for a very long period of time. I think from that perspective too, it’s not even that these advisors are scamming, it’s literally they don’t know that you can hold money. Then I think if you throw at them a bunch of crypto software projects, where they don’t have a 21 million cap, where the whole purpose of their quote unquote money is not to actually be the best way to receive hold and send.

Morgen Rochard (24:02):

What they’re promoting is, it’s money but it’s also all these other things. That makes sense to advisors because there’s no hold part. It’s like, okay, I’m skipping the hold part and I’m doing the sending and receiving part and I’m also getting all this other stuff out of my money.

Preston Pysh (24:18):

Almost like a tech stock is how I imagine a lot of them are just like, well, some of these are going to be like the next Netflix or the next Amazon or whatever. And there’s no way that this the very first one, I mean, that’s going to be the Myspace. And I hear this from time to time. And I imagine that that’s probably the narrative that a lot of them spew.

Morgen Rochard (24:39):

Yeah. I love that you brought the Myspace one too, because I think it also hones in on a greedy aspect of this profession in general, and that clients have. I think everyone wants to find themselves in a situation where they put like a thousand dollars, let’s say into something that they paid 10 cents for. And it turned into $65,000. And I think everyone thinks when they look at a Bitcoin chart that they would’ve been able to do that, if they had just known that that was the thing that would do that. And it’s really easy to look back and say, “Oh, if I had only known, I would’ve done that.”

Morgen Rochard (25:08):

But on the other hand, it’s very difficult to look at something that’s 10 cents and actually be able to hold it to $65,000. I think that there’s also this misconception that even if you were to find it, that you would be able to hold it that long. But advisors are always looking for that next best thing for their clients, because it’ll pay for the fee. Look how smart I was, I told you to do it. Even if they only 2X or 10X their returns, not thousand upon thousand X return like Bitcoin. They still looked very smart in the moment.

Morgen Rochard (25:35):

And clients want that too. Because there’s that other aspect of personal finance where you actually want to spend everything that you make rather than saving it and doing the hard work to do that. And so isn’t it great if I turn a thousand dollars into quadrillion dollars and then I don’t have to do any of that saving stuff that we talked about.

Preston Pysh (25:52):

I know this sounds crazy, but I see it on Twitter all the time where I think people just look at the sheer price and they’re saying, “Oh, one Bitcoin’s $41,000. For it to go to 80 or a hundred thousand, that’s going to take a whole lot of more people coming into it. That’s going to take forever.” But I can go out there and buy clown money. And it’s 50 cents and it could go to a dollar and I would make the same return as Bitcoin going to a hundred thousand. And so I’m just going to … I can’t even afford Bitcoin, right? You hear these narratives. I’m curious, do you think that even financial advisors kind of get caught up in that narrative? Or do you think that they understand?

Morgen Rochard (26:37):

I think for sure, yeah. I mean, there is a bias against highly priced stocks for instance, like Berkshire Hathaway BRK A. People want to buy BRK B and not BRK A. And I mean, and it’s not even the same thing in Bitcoin, because you can buy one Satoshi worth of Bitcoin. Whereas you actually do have to go out and buy a whole share of BRK A. But there’s just this bias against high price stocks, even though obviously something going from 50 cents to a dollar is the same exact return as something going from 40 to 80K.

Preston Pysh (27:06):

Here’s one that I think is a really important conversation. And it’s just age and how you’re advising people. Because I look at my parents and I look at my grandparents and then you look at folks our age. And I mean, the advice is just so different because the risk profile is so different and the economic backdrop that each one of those generations are accustomed to is just drastically different. So for a person who’s a boomer or older, how in the world do you go about advising them with what it is that you know that you expect to kind of play out here from a macroeconomic lens. And what I would imagine most of them are comfortable doing on what they probably need is a fixed income, very conservative portfolio. How do you manage that?

Morgen Rochard (28:02):

Yeah. I like the question for sure. I want to start with the fact that a boomer is probably in the age range of, let’s say 60 to 76 or so, 77. And most people are living to be at least 80 to 90, let’s say. And most people don’t have a goal in mind of dying with 0.01 in their bank account. Most people have a goal of providing a legacy in some way, giving to their kids, providing to charity. They don’t want to die with nothing. Dying with nothing is actually, I mean, psychologically very difficult to see yourself work for your entire life and literally die penniless.

Morgen Rochard (28:43):

There are other goals that people generally have when they’re in retirement. And that goes from anyone who’s even living paycheck to paycheck, to one of the wealthiest people. You don’t really want to die with nothing if you can help it in any way or another. So that means actually, if you think about it, that people have much longer time horizons than they think they do. Because if you’re a person who’s in your sixties or in your seventies even, and you’re expected to live for at least another 10 to 20 years, and then you tack on a legacy to that, you’re actually adding at least 20 years to your time horizon, in which case you need equity, not bonds.

Morgen Rochard (29:18):

And so this is something that even before Bitcoin is something that we talked about with clients. Even before clients were open and willing to allocate to Bitcoin, it was that their time horizon is way longer than they think it is. And so because of that, we try to push clients as far on their risk tolerance as they can go. With that in mind though, you can’t have a client who can’t sleep at night because their portfolio is bouncing around. There is some portion of that portfolio that you need to manage that risk.

Morgen Rochard (29:46):

There’s another portion of the portfolio though, where you can talk to them about the fact that they’re not going to need this for quite some time. And if anything, actually it’s going to help them outpace inflation and it’ll help them meet their goals later in life. Whether that be to make sure they have a legacy or that they have even a nice assisted living facility to go to. There’s any number of goals that we can put on the end of life there.

Preston Pysh (30:07):

So you got to convince them of the volatility.

Morgen Rochard (30:10):

Yeah. So then it’s talking about the volatility. At that point, that’s when you need to make a decision specifically around Bitcoin, how are you going to hold it? I think for most people, something like GBTC really doesn’t work. You put it in their brokerage account and it fluctuates like crazy and they see their statements and they’re going nuts. They’re like, “Why is my account up 65%? Why is it down 48%? Why am I paying this fee? Why did I get this 10.99 that has all these expenses on it even though I didn’t sell anything?”

Morgen Rochard (30:37):

It’s actually massively confusing as opposed to you go help a client go buy, I don’t know, a couple Bitcoin on Coinbase. You help them move it off into cold storage. You get them set up on a multi-sig. You teach them that, okay, you lose the key, you call on Chain Capital and they’ll help you figure it out or you call [inaudible 00:30:55] and we’ll figure it out. That’s what we’re paying for. You pay $25 and you move on with your life.

Morgen Rochard (30:59):

And in the meantime, we’ve actually also set up your estate plan because you talk about how estate planning works in regards to having multiple keys and how your son can actually hold a key, but he won’t be able to move the money until you die and he gets the second key. There’s a whole number of things about it. And then there’s not that fluctuating statement that every financial advisor wants because they want to be able to show returns, but no clients want because they don’t want to deal with the volatility.

Preston Pysh (31:23):

Yeah. And I’m assuming, I mean the position size is obviously an enormous part of that.

Morgen Rochard (31:29):

Yes, for sure.

Preston Pysh (31:29):

I would think for an older client, they don’t need to have hardly any position size and it would still protect their portfolio against this big systemic risk that’s out there that I think we’re all aware of.

Morgen Rochard (31:42):

Yeah, definitely. So for my clients who are boomers are older, we had somewhere between a 1% and 5% position. That’s totally manageable and something that really does actually hedge. And I think a lot can be said for a larger position obviously, because the more concentrated you get, the more likely something will pan out. But in these specific situations, diversification, and I don’t mean within crypto, I just mean within standard assets, really does help mitigate that volatility.

Morgen Rochard (32:10):

And if you can convince somebody as to why they should hold it in a specific way over another way, it really is the best way to do that. That’s not always an option, so I’m not totally negating the GBTC in somebody’s portfolio. I think if that’s the only way you can do it, then yes, you do it. And you really focus on position size and managing risk and talking to the client whenever they want to talk to you. But if you can get it where they have it off in cold storage, it really is your best bet and it will help them the most over the long period of time.

Preston Pysh (32:40):

Morgen, how many of them are becoming more open to it like percentage wise? Is it getting easier? Is it pretty much the same over the last couple years? What’s the trend there that you’re seeing?

Morgen Rochard (32:54):

Yeah. In 2016 was when I started advising on Bitcoin specifically and I had three of my 30 clients interested in 2016. I had two of them actually take legitimate positions. And I had one who was like, oh, say whatever and I’ll do what I’m going to do. But he did take a position, he just also started trading around some other stuff.

Morgen Rochard (33:17):

After the run up in 2017, I had another couple of clients get interested in it. In 2020 we just decided that no matter who we had talked to and who we were going to help allocate, which we did help other people get allocated. Some people were open, a lot of people were not. In 2020 I just said, “You know what, that’s it.” I did the Bitcoin for advisors event through CoinDesk and I was like, I have my client base, my client base doesn’t even have Bitcoin, whoever we can get on the phone and talk to about getting actual Bitcoin we did. And everybody else just got GBTC.

Morgen Rochard (33:45):

And from there it’s actually been the opposite of what I think people expect when you allocate GBTC. People think you allocate GBTC and that’s it. Then the client just has GBTC and that’s what they do for their whole life. No, what actually happens is that people are like, what is this asset in my point portfolio? Why do I hold it this way and not the other way? You’re always talking about holding it the other way. Can we hold it the other way? How do we hold it the other way?

Preston Pysh (34:08):

Huh, that’s interesting.

Morgen Rochard (34:10):

Yeah. There were some people who were like, “I don’t even want this on my portfolio, I don’t want GBTC, why did you do that?” And we sold it. That was a very small minimum compared to the people who were like, “I want more. How do I this better? How do I get actual Bitcoin?” And now I have people who are starting to become true Bitcoiners who are like, “I want 40% or more of my net worth invested in this.”

Preston Pysh (34:32):

Wow. I like this question. This one came from Twitter. Somebody was wanting to know, what’s your best advice for Bitcoiners to optimize their taxes?

Morgen Rochard (34:40):

Yeah. And I’m really sorry in advance, I answer a lot of questions, it depends because it does. This is a really it depends question.

Preston Pysh (34:49):

Yeah, let’s hear it.

Morgen Rochard (34:50):

I think it kind of depends on where you are on the income spectrum. If you are a high income earning Bitcoiner, the options available to you are going to look very different than a low income Bitcoiner. Let’s start high income and then we’ll go to low income, if that sounds good. High income, I think tax planning is often thought of as one of these things where I can save tons and tons of money and it’s going to be great. And then I don’t have to actually save any money because I’ll just save money by not paying my taxes. And that’s how I’ll do it rather than I need to allocate 20% or more of my pre-tax income towards savings. And then whatever I do with tax planning is a bonus.

Morgen Rochard (35:23):

I would start there actually. If you’re a high income earner, you really need to focus on creating savings. What you do with that savings though, is you can do through tax planning. There are a lot more options available I think to Bitcoiners now than there ever have been before. Typically people like to park money in 401k plans, or if you’re a business owner, you can put money into a self directive 401k or an IRA or a pension plan.

Morgen Rochard (35:46):

And then from there, if you’re actually the business owner, you can actually directly allocate that into Bitcoin. There are a lot of services available to people right now where you take your IRA, open up an LLC, you buy Bitcoin through the LLC, and then you could even hold your own private keys. And there’s a number of ways that you would want to do it so that you’re not actually looking like you took custody of those Bitcoin and therefore paying penalties to the IRS, but that is available to you.

Morgen Rochard (36:07):

You can also own a portfolio of miners if you wanted to. And then that would be a way of being allocated the Bitcoin, you can also own GBTC. There are a number of ways where if you were like, “I am dead set on not owning any standard assets, only owning Bitcoin. I can still save money on my taxes by parking money in these plans and also own Bitcoin. That said, if you’re a Bitcoiner and you’ve got 90% of your net worth in Bitcoin, maybe you use the way where you save money on your taxes by putting money into a 401k planner or these other things as your diversifier, right? That’s another option available to you as well.

Morgen Rochard (36:38):

High income earning, that’s the way, it’s going to be HSA type plans. It’s going to be 401k type plans to find benefit if you can, or a step IRA, even if you’re a business owner. There are a number of reasons why maybe you wouldn’t want to do the step IRA because it would make it difficult for you to do, let’s say do a backdoor Roth. A backdoor Roth would be another thing, it wouldn’t be a tax savings strategy from an income perspective, but it would be a tax saving strategy over a long period of time, so that would be something to consider.

Morgen Rochard (37:04):

And then if you are a business owner, obviously making sure you pick up all your deductions, not that it’s free, but it does help. On the low income side, if let’s say, I don’t know, you’re a Bitcoiner and you’ve done your best to save money in Bitcoin. And you’ve now accumulated a large amount of Bitcoin, but you don’t really have a lot of money coming in. There’s a lot of actually brokerage type tax strategies that are available to you. The best part about Bitcoin is you could just buy it. And if you own it, how you normally would go to Coinbase or anywhere else or you’re mining for it, that’s technically what the IRS would consider a taxable account. And anything you do in that quote unquote taxable account falls under the same rules as any other taxable account.

Morgen Rochard (37:43):

People who are single get the first $40,000 of capital gains for free, tax is 0%. If you’re married, 80 grand. It’s actually really quite nice. If you’re making under these thresholds, you can actually sell some of your Bitcoin and actually pay 0% in capital gain. That’s an option that’s available to you if you’re on the low income side. And I think that brokerage, ways of holding things in brokerage or just outright owning Bitcoin, not in any of these other convoluted accounts, it actually affords you a lot more flexibility.

Morgen Rochard (38:11):

Let’s say, I don’t know, you’ve saved a lot. And you know you have two low income years, and you want to go buy a house. So maybe you split up that game between the end of 2021 and enter 2022. And now you pay less taxes by splitting it up and then you can go buy your house. There are ways to do it where you get to choose when you take that tax liability rather than the government choosing it for you.

Preston Pysh (38:32):

All right. Here’s another fun one.

Morgen Rochard (38:33):

Yeah, sure.

Preston Pysh (38:34):

What’s your advice for couples that have a different risk aversion? For example, let’s say a husband who’s selling his chairs to buy more Bitcoin versus a wife who’s a little bit more conservative and maybe not so willing to sell the chairs for some Bitcoin.

Morgen Rochard (38:50):

Is somebody talking about my household? I’m not sitting on a chair right now, I’m standing. I think it’s actually funny because people are always talking about how, oh, what’s it like Pierre to be married to this conservative financial planner who’s obviously stodgy and probably making you buy stocks? And meanwhile I’m like this weird libertarian that grew up learning about Ross Perot. And who’s just is into Bitcoin as he is. No, but to get back to your question, I think it’s really common actually for spouses to have different risk tolerances.

Morgen Rochard (39:25):

You go on your first date, and you talk about all sorts of things. You talk about what kind of life you want to have and what’s important to you. I don’t think anyone on date one through 30, even after marriage is like, so what’s your investment risk tolerance? Are we aligned there? Do we want to be invested the same way? It just doesn’t come up, right?

Preston Pysh (39:47):

There’s no way.

Morgen Rochard (39:48):

It’s just not a question. This is so far more common than I think people discuss and it goes beyond even investment risk tolerance. It’s like your tolerance for debt, your spending habits, how you grew up and what parts of money matter to you versus what parts of money matter to your spouse? We actually had a whole list of questions that we give to clients before they get married, that they can potentially talk about their spouse or their future spouse with, but by then it’s too late. By the time that they’re having this conversation with us, they’re already committed to getting married. There’s no way if they differ on these things that they’re going to [crosstalk 00:40:19].

Preston Pysh (40:18):

No, like it matter.

Morgen Rochard (40:19):

Yeah. They’re like, “We agree on everything else. We’ll figure out this risk tolerance problem.” It’s actually a really big problem. What happens though is that generally the person who is less risk tolerance wins out because that person is so afraid of what’s going on, that the other spouse can’t tolerate dealing with the spouse who’s afraid. I mean, it really is how it is.

Morgen Rochard (40:41):

There was this Jordan Peterson thing I listened to where he said that when they had people who had, I forget what the fear of elevators is called, he had a word for it. But when people have fear of elevators, what they do is they show them pictures of elevators for a while until they get comfortable with the pictures. And then they take them to go visit an elevator, but they don’t go inside, they wait very far away. And then they get closer and closer until one day they step in that elevator.

Morgen Rochard (41:04):

And then one day they step in the elevator, but they have somebody else with them and then they are able to run out. And then finally they get to a point where they can ride the elevator and they’re like, “Okay, we’re good.” I think that you actually have to do that with your spouse. It’s like you give them a Robinhood account or something and you let them play with $40 or whatever.

Preston Pysh (41:23):

A small amount. Yeah.

Morgen Rochard (41:24):

And then they lose $40 because that’s what going to happen. And then maybe they even take out a margin debit. You just let them kind of go wild with it and see how far you can take it where they’re like, “Okay, I feel a little bit more comfortable.” It’s the same thing with spending or saving. You have to expose your spouse to whatever it is that you need to be doing as a couple. And I think the thing that’s often forgotten is what we need to do as a couple part.

Morgen Rochard (41:49):

Usually the person who’s very risk seeking is like, “This is what we need to be doing. You’ve got it wrong.” And the person who is not risk seeking is like, “No, you’ve got it wrong.” But maybe it’s somewhere in the middle. And maybe if the two spouses came together and actually had a conversation of what they wanted to do with their money and what they wanted to do with their lives, they would figure out exactly how they needed to be invested. And obviously if you can’t come to terms without that, it is time to get a financial planner involved.

Preston Pysh (42:13):

I love that. I think that is a great way to kind of … because at the end of the day, it is a meet in the middle with your spouse to try to stay sane. I mean, if one’s being extreme, obviously it might not be smack in the middle, but yeah. This is an interesting question for you and I’m curious to hear how you answer this. What habit are you most proud of developing or quitting?

Morgen Rochard (42:35):

Oh, okay. This is not going to be financial. I hope that’s okay.

Preston Pysh (42:39):

Oh, I love it. Yeah, let’s hear it.

Morgen Rochard (42:41):

I grew up Jewish and I grew up as a cultural Jew, not a religious Jew. So as I have learned about Judaism more as an adult, I have wanted to incorporate more religion and not only in my life, but in my children’s life. And I would say one of the greatest tenants of Judaism is taking it Sabbath. So that to me is that we have a Shabbat dinner on Friday nights. We have now done this for two years where we’ve had a Shabbat dinner almost every Friday night with the exception of Bitcoin Miami.

Morgen Rochard (43:11):

We’ve had a Shabbat dinner every single Friday night with our kids. It’s a time to disconnect, I put away my phone. I don’t use my phone for 24 hours. And I spend true time with my children and I have taught them prayers. And my son actually now sings a lot of the prayers with me. And it really is just a time for us to be together as a family. We often invite other families over who live locally to come and do it with us, even though they’re not Jewish.

Morgen Rochard (43:36):

And what I’ve found is while it’s a religious practice that we’ve incorporated, it has improved my life on a spiritual level for sure, but also financially. If you are really connecting with your family in a deep way, and you’re not on your phone, you’re not in this material world, you’re not consuming things. You are just being present and you’re … Like for me, it’s what life is about. Everything that I do is so that I can spend more time with my children, so I can be there for my children, so I can be with my family. And so for me, this is one of the greatest ways that I’ve found to be able to do that.

Preston Pysh (44:06):

Oh, I love that.

Morgen Rochard (44:07):

And I hope that we continue.

Preston Pysh (44:07):

I love that. I mean, it’s about being with your family. One of the things that I’ve kind of discovered through this show is we’re studying these people who are really extremists trying to achieve at massive unprecedented levels billionaires and these people that are doing these things. And the one thing that I guess just really sticks out in my head is a quote that Ray Dalio says is you can have anything in this world, but you can’t have everything.

Preston Pysh (44:37):

And it’s almost like this realization that here’s a guy who’s probably one of the best investors on the planet and understands macro. But you have to ask yourself at what cost. And I don’t know, just doing the show through all these years and studying all these people who have gone on to just, I mean, they’ve changed the world in so many different ways and they’ve done these amazing things. But I always look back and the thing that I’ve really truly learned from just studying these people is my family is the most important thing on the planet. No amount of money, especially at that level. I mean, how much do you need?

Morgen Rochard (45:16):

Oh, totally.

Preston Pysh (45:17):

At a certain point, you have to ask yourself, how much is it that I actually need to just live the lifestyle? And I’m a pretty simple person and so is my wife. And you get to this point where you’re just like, man, it’s all about what you just said. It’s all about being with your family.

Morgen Rochard (45:35):

Well, I think also, so generally people’s largest expenses are their home. And they tend to think, I need a lot of space because I’m having kids or a dog or both and my kids need … we need to have a certain amount of space for them. We’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle. And when my husband and I bought our home, one of the things that I thought about, because the first thing was I didn’t want to have more than 3000 square feet because I thought it’d be such a pain in the ass to clean. I was like, “I do not want to clean a house that’s so large. I don’t want to spend my weekends doing that.”

Morgen Rochard (46:05):

And the other side of it was also more than 3000 square feet is actually, it’s quite large and it’s expensive. And so one of the things I had in my head was like, okay, if we were at maybe more like 2,500, what would life be like? And the first thing that came to mind was, would my kids even notice a difference between 130 square foot room and 160 square foot room? Would they even know? And the answer is no. Would my kids notice a difference between a playroom that’s 200 square feet or a playroom that’s 400 square feet? No.

Morgen Rochard (46:38):

Because what do you do with a playroom that’s 400 square feet. You fill it with twice as much toys and then your kids have twice as much trouble figuring out what that is that they want to play with. And then they yell at you to go buy other things to play with. Because you’ve just filled your house with garbage. In my head I was like, okay, the more square footage I have, the more time I have to spend cleaning this place and the more money I’m going to spend filling it with junk that I don’t need. And then the more money I’m going to have to make to support a lifestyle that I don’t want to have.

Morgen Rochard (47:04):

And I think that often it’s really exciting to see the kitchen that you want and beautiful pristine floors, a large house, and a pool in the backyard and really everyone’s dream house, design aside. It’s really exciting to think about that. But you don’t think about the other side of it, of when you’re living in it, the cost to you of actually doing so.

Preston Pysh (47:23):

Amen to that. I’m with you. Just you have to ask yourself why, right? You have to ask yourself, why do I want whatever? And you ask yourself that and you really kind of get at the heart and the root of what your real intention is because boy oh boy, do we lie to ourselves?

Morgen Rochard (47:41):

Oh yeah.

Morgen Rochard (47:43):

And I mean, our brain, literally you could come up with any reason to justify whatever it is that you want to do.

Preston Pysh (47:48):

Oh, it’s crazy.

Morgen Rochard (47:49):

Our brains are so smart. You can think of literally anything and there’s a reason to do everything. And there’s a reason not to do everything.

Preston Pysh (47:55):

Yeah. Oh, it’s crazy. It’s ridiculous. That’s the one thing I really try to guard against and I catch myself all the time like, Preston, you’re lying to yourself. You don’t actually want whatever that is.

Morgen Rochard (48:08):

Yeah. We’re in the process of teaching our son about money. And he does extra tours around the house and then he gets a dollar and I know everyone’s booing now because they’re like, “Why isn’t your son set up on a lightning wallet? Why haven’t you put him on Muun? And the answer is because he’s four. But so he’ll sometimes get really excited about money and doing the tour. And other times he’ll be like, “I just don’t feel like it. I think you should give it to me.” And I find it really funny because I think that my son’s attitude about things is actually how we all actually feel in real life. Sometimes you’re like, “Okay, I’m ready to go get after it.” And other times you’re like, “How did I end up in this situation?” And I don’t want this dollar, I just want to go do something else.

Morgen Rochard (48:53):

And I think it’s amplified obviously in my four year old. But I mean I think that as adults, we have the ability to take a step back to detach from our situations and to think about things a little bit more clearly, if we don’t immediately dive into whatever it is that we think that we’re supposed to do. If we really are able to take a step back pause and think about why it is that we want to do something, how we’re going to implement doing it, whether or not we have money for it, whether or not our spouse agrees about it. Is it going to provide all the elements of my life that I want to have? Just taking even five minutes to do that would actually save a lot of people a lot of heartache in their financial situations.

Preston Pysh (49:30):

Back to the market, when we’re talking about bonds, this has been one of the biggest topics that I’ve talked about throughout the year on the show, the story has just been this negative spread. And when we look at the premium above inflation that we’ve seen for nearly four decades, we’re in an environment and we’re in a situation that pretty much everybody alive that’s investing right now has really never kind of experienced in their lifetime, and if they have, it was for a very short period of time.

Preston Pysh (50:04):

And even if you go back into the 80s and maybe you would have a client there, I mean, they still had a positive premium above inflation for most of that period of time. There was a few instances where it wasn’t, but for most, there was still a positive interest rate above the inflation rate. But now I mean we are nowhere on the reservation, I mean drastically off at a discount to the inflation rate on these government issued bonds at least.

Morgen Rochard (50:30):

Totally.

Preston Pysh (50:31):

I’m curious, your clients, are they coming to you about this or are you kind of preemptively saying, “Hey, there’s some concerns here.” How is that conversation taking place? Are they all flipping out or are they just not really even understanding the magnitude of this?

Morgen Rochard (50:51):

Yeah. I want to preface this with, I don’t like bonds. I haven’t liked bonds for a long time. Every time I look at bonds, I get angry at bonds. I’ve had conversations with other financial planners and we’re like, “We don’t know what to do about this bond thing. Clients need bonds, but we don’t really know where to put them.” And there’s really nowhere to put them. And if you talk to an average CFA folk and Lord help me, if the CFA Institute actually listens to this, because they’ll probably take my CFA away. But they just don’t know what they’re talking about.

Morgen Rochard (51:18):

They’re like, “Oh, well, you just put the 30 year bond in the portfolio with SPY and everything’s going to be fine because you’re rebalanced, when SPY goes down and then really you buy more third year treasury and then you do the opposite, when SPY goes up, you sell.” And you do the whole thing. So yeah, that works fine. That works in small scenarios. When COVID first hit, that was a good trade. If you had rebalanced because your treasuries went up and you had bought SPY because your treasuries went up in value, and then you took those gains and you put them into SPY, you would’ve done pretty well.

Preston Pysh (51:52):

But preceding that, it was a positive spread and it had been positive.

Morgen Rochard (51:55):

Yeah, preceding that it was a positive spread. Also though we were still at all time lows and interest rates. People did not know that COVID was happening. And what were you doing with a 30 year bond in your portfolio if you didn’t really need that thing, right? I mean, and I don’t really know of anyone who actually needs a 30 year bond. Let’s be honest.

Morgen Rochard (52:12):

In my practice, we like to do something called asset liability matching. And what asset liability matching means is we set aside a cash and short term bonds as a means for paying for things over a short period of time, short term goal, starting a business, funding college education that’s very close by, doing your trip around the world that you always wanted to do in two years, buying a house. These are things that come to mind where you would maybe want to have a portion of your portfolio in cash and bonds.

Morgen Rochard (52:37):

Everything else, we are trying to push people to the edges of their risk tolerance to basically invest the rest of it. Because if you don’t need this money in the next three to five years, then you have no business being in any of these other assets. So yeah, it hurt in 2020 when that was a good trade to be in a 30 year bond, but it’s helped for sure right now. And I was very early to this trade for sure. And got a lot of flack from other planners about how much cash I’m keeping around in portfolios.

Morgen Rochard (53:05):

But I just can’t in good conscience have people be in anything longer than a five year bond at this point. And so it’s a rough position though to be in, because I mean, I’m very fortunate in regard that the median age of my practice is 41, of people who are boomers in my practice, we’re probably talking about 10%. I’m hyper focused on this for maybe 10% of my client base. But for the majority of my client base, this isn’t even a thing because we’re pretty close to 100% equity or equity Bitcoin. And I use equity loosely as a term of just including risk type assets.

Morgen Rochard (53:39):

But I think for the average financial advisor who is dealing with this, who has a lot of retirees, I mean, this is a major issue and it’s unprecedented and you need to be having serious conversations with retirees about how you’re going to reallocate their assets. And again, I would be doing the same thing of thinking of how long their time horizon really is. Because somebody who’s 65 doesn’t have this time horizon that requires them to be 75% in bonds, he just doesn’t. The education portion with your client needs to be about why they need to hold other things and how they can hold it over a long period of time and how you can handhold them through doing that.

Preston Pysh (54:14):

All right. Morgen, for the last question, what is something that you feel or you believe that you think you know that you think a lot of people might disagree with you on?

Morgen Rochard (54:25):

Yeah. I think that people tend to be something that I like to call married single. Married single to me is when two people get married, but they live single lives. And the more that our society goes in a material direction where everything is me, me, me, all the time, the more people come together, get married and they live these single lives. And it’s portrayed very deeply in their finances. Married married people combine their finances. They do things together. They make decisions together. They don’t think of the part as my husband made this and my wife made that.

Morgen Rochard (55:01):

And therefore as the person who made 72% of the income, I get to spend 72% on so-and-so. Married married people go out to dinner and one person pays the check because they’re married and it’s not about who put the credit card down or who put the cash down. Married single people split bills, or they go back and forth about who paid the check last, or they split their rent in a weird way. Or they have separate accounts. And they like to say things like, “Oh, I just don’t want my spouse to know what I’m going to buy him for his birthday. Or I didn’t want my wife to know that I spent a little extra on ammo.” Things like that.

Morgen Rochard (55:41):

They say innocuously like, “Oh, that’s the whole reason why our entire financial picture is separate, is because every year I buy Jimmy something for his birthday and I’m afraid he is going to check the statement.” But really what they’re saying is I don’t want somebody telling me what to do. I want to have complete control over my financial situation, whether I’m married or my situation be damned. And I think that people get really bad advice from financial advisors and planners and lawyers and accountants about these things, because there’s the legal liability in the United States where they’re like, “Oh, you should keep things separate because just in case one of you is sued you won’t lose all your money, at least one of you will still have money.”

Morgen Rochard (56:21):

But for like 99.9% of people it’s completely irrelevant. It causes so much strife to protect against the situation that really for most people doesn’t even exist. And instead you live this married single lifestyle. I would say most people probably don’t agree with me there, but combine your finances, for the love of God, just combine them, be married, be married married.

Preston Pysh (56:44):

My parents both told us the exact same thing.

Morgen Rochard (56:48):

Amazing.

Preston Pysh (56:49):

Yeah. Whenever my wife and I got married, exact same thing. And that’s what we do. Love it, and you’re right. I think you would get a lot of pushback on that, even though I agree with you as well, but that’s us. Morgen, this was such a pleasure. I’m so glad we were able to sit down and record a conversation together. And I look forward to hanging out with you and Pierre a whole bunch more here in the future. All right. So the final thing, Morgen, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you, maybe check out your firm or anything else that you want to highlight.

Morgen Rochard (57:24):

Yeah. Thanks. You can find me on Twitter, I’m at Morgen with an E, Rochard. You can also find my firm, it’s called Origin Wealth Advisers, that’s originwa.com. I also wrote a book, it’s called the Personal Finance QuickStart Guide. If you liked what we talked about on this podcast, then you’ll love my book. The biggest complaint about my book is that it’s not a quick start guide because it’s 350 pages. So it’s more like a CFP textbook, but it’s really a lot more fun, I promise you. And my husband and I run a podcast called Bitcoin for Advisors. It was meant for financial advisors to learn about Bitcoin. But what we’ve found is that lots of people really enjoy it, so you don’t have to be an advisor to listen to it. And I also offer financial consulting through money owners.

Preston Pysh (58:04):

Awesome. We’re going to have links to all of that in the show notes. And Morgen, thanks so much for coming on. This was so much fun.

Morgen Rochard (58:11):

Yeah. Thanks, Preston. Let’s do it again.

Preston Pysh (58:13):

If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use, just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (58:46):

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