– Welcome everybody to today’s Building My Legacy podcast. I have with me today, Jonathan DeYoe. Jonathan is an accomplished financial advisor. He has 24 plus years of financial advising experience. He managed investments at a variety of Wall Street companies before he began his own financial investment company. He teaches simple steps to financial success in ways to mindfully overcome emotional and cognitive biases related to money. I think that’s so important right now because when you think about building legacy, having that financial base is critical to that and those who are planning, thinking, wanting to be there knowing what’s important with planning for that is huge. So, Jonathan, I wanna just turn this over to you and let you begin by sharing with the audience why mindful financial investing and responsibility and priority setting, what brought you to this?

– Great, it’s a good start, thanks for, first of all, thanks for having me on Lois or Dr. Sonstegard.

– Either one.

– Okay.

– I respond to either one.

– Good, good, good.

– Lois is simplest.

– Lois is quick, my aunt was Lois, so that’s easy for me too, so I appreciate it. So just a little bit about the journey, you know, in my high school times, like I loved investing, I had so much fun studying economics. You know, my high school had an economic scholarship, I loved studying it and I won the economic scholarship and I was very excited to study finance in undergrad and when I got to undergrad, it bored me to tears.

– Ooh!

– And so that began two side-by-side developments in my life. And the first side was, you know, I loved studying about money and I loved investing and I loved the concept of real estate and businesses and stocks and bond, I just, I loved all that stuff and I started studying about philosophy and comparative religion and psychology and sort of the stuff that brings life meaning. And so you fast forward, seven years, I go through my undergrad, I go through grad school and in grad school, I went on to study Buddhist phenomenology and comparative religion and I ended up dropping out of grad school because for two reasons, one, my wife at the time, my first wife said, “Jonathan, it’s my turn.” I had to go earn money so that she could go to grad school, which seemed fair, she’d been supporting me in grad school for awhile. And the second thing was I had pursued Buddhist studies and the academic side of religious thought for six or seven years and I really thought that what I needed to do was I needed to meditate more. I needed to be more in practice. So I started both my heavy practice career in terms of meditation practice and my finance career ’cause this is right when I got hired at Dean Witter at the exact same time. And so for the first six years of my career, I worked at it’s so, it’s bizarre, this is only five years, all this in five years. So I started at Dean Witter that became Morgan Stanley, I moved to Paine Webber that became UBS, I moved to Smith Barney, and then I moved to Prudential and that became Wachovia. So seven firms in five years and then I finally said, okay, it’s no specific firm, it’s the idea of working for two masters, having the firm and having the client didn’t work for me. So I had to have my own firm where it’s just the client was the boss. And so I switched then I switched and started doing that in 2001, I started my own company, but it wasn’t until the world fell apart in 2007, 2008, you know, the Great Recession that I really saw that what was necessary wasn’t a more intelligent way to manage money. There’s lots of good ways to manage money, there’s lots of ways to the top of that mountain. The thing that’s problematic is our physiological and our psychological and our cultural response to money. And so that this brought, this was the moment I started writing that book, “Mindful Money,” to bring the two elements into one and to start thinking about the best value that an advisor, someone like myself can offer a client is to say, let’s do some, let’s be goal-focused, let’s understand what’s important to you, let’s understand your values, let’s understand where you think money will provide the most value in your life. Let’s build a plan to make that happen and let’s forget about the noise. No one can predict or control markets. So let’s use evidence to build a portfolio that can survive regardless of what the media throws at us or what our brain tells us is important or what your parents say is impor– let’s build something that works regardless of what the environment does and that actually culminates a couple of years ago, I had a client say, “Jonathan, I finally get it. “You don’t manage investments, you manage people.”

– That’s interesting.

– And that’s absolutely true, we manage people.

– So you’ve mentioned media.

– Yeah.

– You talk about how media impacts financial decisions and people achieving their financial outcomes that they set for it so talk a little bit about that.

– Sure, I think there’s two pieces that go into that and I think there are two really important pieces. The first is the more benign, media gets ahead or media participants get ahead the louder their headlines are, the more clickworthy their headlines are. So there’s an ingrained competition for catastrophist headlines

– Yeah.

– and catastrophist conversations and so that’s the baseline and that’s, that is, that’s just benign, that’s just reality, you know, they say bad news is good copy. And that’s what we see. But there’s another part that’s actually even worse than this and that is the folks that are advertising on media, whether that’s people getting into spend stuff, cars, alcohol, what are all the ads? What are the ads teaching you to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy. So those take us off our real value-driven spending things. And then in that financial world, you know, the more you’re trading, the more you’re changing things, not sticking to your plan, the more you can be scared away from what you have going on, bless you. The more you get scared away from things, the more the financial firms make. They make money when you transact, they make money when they attract your money away from somebody else, they make more money, the more movements you make. You actually do better the less you do, the more stable your environment, the more consistent your plan, the more consistent your practices. So there’s a disconnect and this is the cultural disconnect. The media says, you know, Great Recession, worst thing in the world, time to flee, time to do something else. The reality is within two years after the Great Recession, most things were back to normal. COVID, February, we just went through this, we just went through this in terms of markets between February and March, we had the 20, we had a 34 worst days as in fastest peak to trough, 34% decline in history followed immediately by the 50 best days ever in market history. So you can’t time that, the idea that you can time that is just somebody feeding you lies, no one can time that, no one knew that was coming, no one knew that would resolve that quickly. Best thing you can do is sit on your hands, take a deep breath, make sure it’s designed correctly to begin with, make sure you’re broadly diversified, make sure your asset allocated, make sure you’ve, are ready to rebalance those kinds of things, but picking and choosing what you should own and timing the markets and trying to select better investments, no one can do that consistently, stop trying, that’s the best thing you can do. And so the media actually throws this stuff in your way constantly.

– Isn’t that interesting, where media is now getting blamed for so many things and they kind of create that for themselves, but it does create stresses that especially in this last, I think with COVID, the stress level that they added was really very sad to watch. Can we talk a little bit about what you’re saying though, relative to that and that is you talk about financial and money mindset, being mindful. So, there’s a part of what you’re talking about in terms of the planning that seems to me is a, is being very mindful, but there’s more than just being mindful in what you’re saying. There’s a purposefulness, but explain what you really mean by that.

– By the mindfulness

– Yes.

– or the purposefulness? By the mindfulness.

– Well start with the mindfulness.

– Okay. So mindfulness, you know, simply understood, defined, the definition of mindfulness is a nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment as perceived through your senses and through your mental activity, that could be your thoughts and your, you know, dreams. So mindfulness in all aspects of our lives creates a pause between something that the world does to us and how we react to it. It creates a bit of space so that you can actually have a better reaction and that can, that’s true in athletics, in relationships, raising kids and in finance as well. Mindfulness in personal finance specifically provides a doorway to reason, right? When reason is so out of reach, when the world seems upside down and we use this term flippantly nowadays, we use the term unprecedented. I hear it every other day, every three days, this is unprecedented, that’s unprecedented, everything’s unprecedented. It might be that the thing we’re going through, COVID-19, coronavirus is an unprecedented thing. However, our human response to things that are unprecedented is anything but unprecedented, it’s very normal what businesses are going through and what they do to survive and to thrive afterwards, it’s very normal what individuals do with our finances to survive and to thrive afterwards. The question is, can you see that difference? Can you see that the disease, the risk is an unprecedented thing and believe that we’re gonna, this too shall pass. Like we are going to deal with this and on the other side of it, we are going to grow again. I will buy another pair of shoes at some point, I will buy a new pair of jeans, I will put solar panels on my house. Eventually I’m gonna buy another new car, my kids are gonna go to school, they’re gonna grow up, they’re gonna get jobs, it’s the normal longterm life structure hasn’t changed because COVID. It created one, maybe two year incredible difficulty that lands a lot on some people, not a lot on people like me. So we can actually do a lot to say help some other people and the federal government should be doing, I, in my opinion, lots more than it is, but it will pass and remembering that it will pass and believing that you can survive it and believing that you can get through it is something that the media almost doesn’t let you do it. It doesn’t let you, you know, separate, oh my God, from this too shall pass, which you have to, you have to separate those two.

– So you talk about almost everybody has some stress around money irrespective of where they are in life. Talk a little bit about that because I think it goes hand in hand with what you just spoke about.

– So I think that you actually spoke about something a little earlier about purposefulness. And I think that the people who survive, who have the least amount of stress around money have the most purposefulness. They understand where they’re going, they understand and embrace the trade-offs that they’re making. They know that they don’t buy a new car every three years because they know they’re trying to put their kids through college and then that’s more important to them than buying the new car. They know that they’re, so this purposefulness, this values-based beginning actually enables a much better, much more fulfilled, much happier life around well everything, but including finances and mindfulness actually brings us back to that purposefulness.

– So Jonathan as you work with people, what gives you the most excitement and joy?

– So, you know, I get invited to like weddings and retirement parties and any time that I can take part in a celebration of some longterm planned for thing, I just think that’s actually, I mean, that’s actually the fun part, but,

– Okay.

– the thing that really gives me juice, and this is why I actually wanted to be on your podcast, the thing that really gives me juice is this whole idea of legacy. And I think that if you have the right values and you work really hard your entire life, that you have two kinds of legacy, you have the legacy of your values, which I think is critical, but you also have this financial legacy, the difference between what a doctor does and what I do like a doctor has to have a lot more training, it’s gotta be, they gotta be really smart and really scientific and really on top of all kinds of things and it’s really important, I’m not dismissing what a doctor does, but at the end of the day, the human body has a lifespan. That is not true of money or of personal finance. So no matter what a doctor does, they can be the best doctor in the world, ultimately the patient perishes, naturally, that’s part of the deal. However, with legacy, with money, if you think about this, you can actually leave things for your kids after you’re gone, you can leave things for your kids’ kids after you’re gone, you can leave values, you can leave financial resources. I’ve got clients who think about, you know, I wanna make sure my great, great grandkids have access to healthcare, housing, and education. Beyond that, I want them to live their lives, but I wanna make sure that they have access to healthcare, housing, and education and if you think about it, if people have those three things, they can pretty much write their ticket, they can figure out the rest, but sometimes people don’t have those three things and it actually destroys the entire thing so for me, the thing that really excites me about what I do is this idea of being able to support families in creating that legacy that lasts multiple generations. That is incredible to me, it’s such an opportunity.

– So tell me, is it ever too late to begin planning?

– No, no, absolutely not, it’s never too late to begin planning. Is it too late to leave a legacy that last that last four or five generations? Yeah, you have to get started pretty early to do that and you have to have a serious net worth in order to and to, in order to do that. However, you can always leave values and this is the thing, when you think about immigrant families in the United States, they, I mean, so I live in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area and I know that folks who can’t afford a home here sometimes live two and three families to a home, okay. So there’s a level of value inculcation in doing that meaning we sacrifice our living space, personal, private living space for a communal benefit and that communal benefit can then support the next generation to live on their own in a private personal space or the next generation, like immigrants come in and they they’re thinking ahead, I’m gonna make sure that my kids have a fantastic education and it’s, and they sacrifice for that, they give up everything, parents that moved to this country 50 years ago, they gave up everything so that their kids could have great educations and now those kids are doctors and lawyers and investment bankers and doing, and their kids are gonna grow up and be very successful because, you know, they enabled that generational thing and they didn’t have much, but they sacrificed in order to create and leave something behind so you can absolutely leave those values and those values become the next generation’s financial success.

– So what’s interesting about that in a sense that communal living is a financial investment. I mean, it’s, I’m sacrificing, I’m giving up, right? So that there can be a greater pool for the next generation of what they’re trying to do. Talk a little bit about our, what I see so much right now is there’s also a sense of entitlement, please take care of me, please, I deserve. It is not just a low income people, you see it in all walks of life, but that then detours from that responsible, mindful planning for your finances. Is that also your experience or what is your sense of attitudes right now towards money and investing?

– So I think that question, I think you opened up a huge can of worms with a question about this. So there’s, you know, there’s levels of entitlement.

– Right.

– And there are, I think, there’s an ongoing longterm argument about what should be the baseline series of benefits that an American has when they’re born, you know, is healthcare, is that a, should that be a guaranteed benefit for everyone? And I don’t think we’re gonna answer the question of the specifics about what should be, you know, guaranteed benefits, you know, what are we entitled to? My fear kind of goes along with what you said, that the more the argument is that we are entitled, the less, we believe in our own ability to get those things without the entitlement. And the reality is many, many, many, many people have those things, not because they were given to them, but because they worked really hard and made it happen. There’s also another reality beside that and they’re and we’re living through this right now in our culture. I am incredibly lucky, I am, I come from a very privileged position. Not that I had money growing up, we didn’t, but that, you know, I’m a six foot five white man, that gives me a lot of the advantages, that gives me, you know, the doorway to capital, like banks generally will trust me more than they’ll trust either a woman starting a business or a person of color starting a business, that’s a privilege. Some people, women and people of color were raised with more money than I had, they had more money in their families than I did, but they didn’t have the privilege of my whiteness or my maleness. So I do think that there is, you know, we’re all starting at different points relative to the starting line and relate to the finish line. I don’t think, you know, human nature, you know, in its natural state, it’s, I don’t remember who said it, but it’s brutish and short. It’s a very difficult thing without culture and without community, without and because of that, the idea of entitlement is a hard one for me to struggle with because I don’t think we’re entitled to basically anything, generally, but I do think that there, we have the opportunity to create more fairness, to create more equity and to really lift up the folks that need the help, need the support being lifted up. I might, you know, I was born with working legs and working arms, some people aren’t and they suffer for that their entire lives. And it would be ridiculous for me to say that I didn’t have an advantage over them, right, but then, we have this other sociological, psychological advantage, whiteness, maleness, that’s really there and poverty versus wealth and so the question is, is all privilege bad? No, no, no, no, but I think maybe there’s an, there’s a born with privilege that we should at least be very, very aware of.

– Let me take a step back from what you’re saying, because I think when you, take for people who build legacies for example, generally are very mindful of what it is that they want to do. Maybe they haven’t set up the not-for-profit, maybe they, but they know that they’re going to get there and they have somewhere in their mind, a vision of what that will be, that is and so they start to create action steps to get there. So along with what you’re saying, mindful money, happiness, there’s part of that, that being able to manage that money and to plan for that future, that brings you a sense of self satisfaction and happiness, right? But if you feel entitled, if you feel that somehow you deserve something it’s harder for I think to take those action steps to get you where you really want to go. So it’s a juxtaposition, but I think in our, in the noise of our discussions right now, especially in the media, as you mentioned, I think it’s hard for us to separate those discussions out, somehow it feels not right to separate them.

– Yeah.

– Thoughts on that?

– And it’s disempower, it’s, if it’s entitlement, it’s almost disempowering if you don’t have it. Right if I should have it, if it should be something that’s granted me and I don’t have it, then I can’t do anything about it, right. But if I believe in my own ability to create something out of nothing, to create a better scenario, that I can be an Uber driver, make a little bit of money, you know, save a little bit of money, you know, grow a little bit of wealth and I don’t need the entitled, if I believe in my own ability, if I believe in anyone’s ability to become, then I think I put more work towards becoming, like the minute and this is my, one of my big struggles is, do I de, I question, do I deserve what I have quote, unquote created, is that mine? And some part of me says, absolutely like I sacrificed, I created, I built, I worked hard, I, you know, absolutely, and I don’t think anyone’s taking, I don’t think anyone’s tryna take it away from me, but what is it that enabled me to do it? Well, it’s probably, equal parts, you know, luck, hard work, privilege, it’s, you know, there’s probably a lot that goes into it and not all of it was just me working hard and so someone else who works really hard, doesn’t have the luck and the privilege line up with that hard work ends up in a completely different place. You know, I think we have to forgive luck, you know, luck is luck, like it hit, sometimes it hits us, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I think we just have to re– we have to recognize that privilege and recognize the danger in assuming that there’s an entitlement, there’s a danger to an entitlement. And I taking it out of the, you know, socioeconomics, I have a 12 year old and a 15 year old. Entitlement is something that we battle against all the time. Like my son thinks, you know what, I really am entitled to Instagram. I’m like, no, you’re not like, that’s not part of the deal, you have one thing you chose this along time ago, that’s what you get, there’s no entitlement around this, you’re not entitled to a phone, you’re not entitled to a phone of, you know, you’re not entitled to any of this stuff, this is, you work, you earn, then maybe you can get it yourself, but you still have to go through a parent, like it, right. So, I think entitlement in general is de-motivating, right? And that’s the challenge so how do you motivate? How do you support and how do you make it so that we’re all working and pulling in the same direction together? And right now, you know, together, it seems to be a hard thing to figure out.

– It’s a difficult discussion, isn’t it?

– Yeah.

– So part of what I’m hearing you say is there’s some planning that you need to begin, right? There’s a, you’re doing that planning with your children right now in terms of prioritization, you know, what is most important, right?

– Right.

– And, but somebody taught you that.

– Yep.

– And that is perhaps where some of the greatest disparity happens, because there are people who are taught and then guided along that path and then there are others who have to really struggle to find it themselves. And sometimes they discover it and sometimes not discover it at all. So, as you look at that, you have a process, what’s the process you take people to, through so that they can really begin to look at, where do I wanna end up? And so I can have the legacy that I want to have?

– So, I mean, with, I’m grateful for this, but most people, we go through a process, but we’re not creating that desire. We’re just uncovering the desire that exists, right? So I’m not,

– Okay.

– bit, whereas with my kids, I’m trying to stimulate their thoughtfulness for this longterm, what they might life to look like, what’s important to them. With someone that becomes a client I’m just trying to say, okay, what’s, you know, what’s important to you? And we do have a process and we do some word association, some general selections off of lists, or, hey, what’s important to you and we come up with six words that are important to you and you know, one of my words is achievement, so it makes sense that I would run my own practice or run my own business eventually, because that’s something that’s really important to me creating something, building something is really important to me, not everyone has that same thing. So, by asking them a bunch of questions and by developing what those, what their six most, those value statements are, we build, we go from there to creating a mission statement, personal mission statement, until we build on that and we create this compelling vision of life and the compelling vision of life is a one-page document that talks about what is my home life like? What is my work life like? What is my work? What am I doing? What are the activities? Where are the effects on the community in the world that I, that I’m having? And that, and that’s how you sort of get a feedback loop to this is the good I’m doing in the world because, you know, recognizing the good we’re doing in the world is actually huge towards our own happiness. What is our meaning? Well, this is the good work that I do. I love doing this good work, that’s a lot of meaning there, there’s a lot of oomph that comes out of that. So, you know, we’re just, we’re basically peeling back the onion and asking questions and trying to get people to understand that they already have these things. They just don’t, you know, the world happens to us and we cover over all these things because the immediacy of COVID, the Great Recession, or, you know, your parents getting sick, or, you know, there’s so many fires in Northern California, there’s just so many things that happen all the time that we don’t take the time to think about, or remember what our values were and what our plan around those values might be. So once we go through the process with somebody, our job really becomes, hey, remember that first time we met where you said, these are the values, these are the trade-offs you were gonna embrace, these are the things you’re gonna do, because this is what’s important to you, remember that? And we just become the mirror, we become somebody that reminds folks of what they wanted in a moment of clarity. And then we ask questions, you know, we say, “Hey, do you still want this?” “Yes, that’s, that still provides a lot of meaning for me.” “Okay, well then, then I think that there’s this “and this and this and this behavior “that we should employ now” If you know, if you don’t want that, or if the last three years, all of your behaviors have been away from that, then we should probably take that as evidence that you don’t really want that and figure out what it is you really want. What is it you really want? Maybe we have to make a change in career. Maybe we have to make a change in location. Maybe we have to change your geography, maybe it’s, you know, if it’s a student that, you know, we work with clients’ kids, that we have to study something differently. Maybe the fact that your parents wanted you to be a lawyer, maybe that wasn’t the right thing for you, maybe you should be an English teacher, you know, we don’t know that, where are you gonna get happy? And so really pulling that back and figuring it out helps people commit to something, helps them live happier, more fulfilling lives.

– So I think well the key word really is knowing your purpose and committing, right? And commitment is for all of us the hardest.

– It is, yeah.

– So when do you think people should begin planning? What part of their life, their career, when do you begin this process with people?

– So, I don’t think everyone has to follow this path, but when I was nine years old, literally nine years old, my dad pulled me aside and he said to me, “Jonathan, this is kind of how life unfolds, “you know, you’re gonna, you’re nine, right? “So you’re gonna go to middle school, “you’re gonna go to high school, “you’re gonna go to college. “Maybe after college you’ll go to grad school, “you may get a job, you may get married. “Maybe, you know, you’ll get a job first and then go back “to grad school later. “Maybe you’ll become three, “maybe you’ll get divorced, you’ll go on, “maybe around 30, 32,” and this is, I was born when my dad who was 30. He said, “Maybe, around 29, 30, 31 you’ll probably “have a kid. “Maybe three, four year, you’ll probably have another kid,” so I’m nine, he’s telling me when I’m gonna have kids, right? So I’ve always had this life timeline in front of me.

– Interesting.

– Right and so it’s, for me, it’s been such a natural thing to think about because that’s what I, I don’t know why, I don’t know anyone else whose parents pulled them aside and said, “By the way, this is kind of “how life unfolds,” I don’t know anyone that’s had that experience and in fact, if anyone hears this, of your 2,000 regular listeners and they call in and say, “You know, actually that happened to me,” I wanna know who, I wanna know them ’cause I’ve never met anyone so that’s really interesting, but I think there’s never a bad time to start planning because it really starts with understanding what’s important to you and I think that we will all be happier, be more tolerant, get along better if we start with what’s important to us and focus on what matters, what’s really important, what will make us happy and not get distracted by all this other stuff that’s going on all the time.

– So it’s interesting to me as you start with, what is your purpose rather than what’s the amount of money you wanna make. And I think many times when people get stuck or get caught in the money machine is when they begin with their focus on the money, rather than what’s their purpose in life, I–

– Yeah, you can’t financialize happiness, you can’t financialize happiness. Everything else in life is financialized. Your happiness, you, there’s not amount of money, I mean, there’s a ton of research on this. Like if you make 75, $100,000, you’re pretty much there. I mean, you can afford a life that will give you most of the luxuries, most of the things you want. Beyond that, you know, more might, find a little bit more defense against the negative things, a little bit more opportunity, but then you really wanna focus on why are you here? What do you wanna get up for in the morning? What’s what brings your life meaning? So important.

– Jonathan, I hate to tell you this, and I hate to tell our audience that our time is up, but before we close, anything that we haven’t talked about, that you really would like to talk about or mention.

– So it’s, , it’s great, we’ve had this great conversation. We’ve never once talked about, there’s a book, so we, what we do with folks is we actually help people like, get an understanding of their values and use that as a foundation for their financial lives. Like we start with, we have educational courses, I wrote a book, we have financial planning, investment management, we have all this important stuff and so I’d say go to our, go to mindful.money and check us out.

– A really important point. So for those of you who are listening, this information will be in our show notes and how to contact Jonathan DeYoe will also be in the show notes so that you can go ahead and be connected with him because leaving your legacy does require planning and thinking through where you are at and your relationship with money. Yeah, so Jonathan, thank you so much for your time, and thank you all for listening to the Building My Legacy podcast today.

– Thanks Lois.