Ep433: Shinobu Hindert – Speak Up When You Believe Something Strongly

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community we know that to win in investing you must take risk but to win big you've got to reduce it. To join our community go to my worst investment ever.com and receive five free benefits first, you get the risk reduction checklist I've created from the lessons I've learned from all of my guests and ladies and gentlemen, that's gold right there but you also get my weekly email to help you increase your investment return. Third, you get a 25% discount on all a starts Academy courses for you get access to our Facebook community to get to know guests and fellow listeners. And finally, you get my curated list of my favorite top 10 podcast episodes. Fellow risk takers This is your worst podcast hosts Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests Shinobu hindered Shinobu Are you ready to rock? I am ready. Let's do it. Now I'm gonna introduce you to the audience. Shinobu hinder is a certified financial planner, professional, money expert, and creator of empowered planning, LLC. She spent the first half of her career working for some of the largest financial institutions in the United States, including Smith, Barney, and Fidelity Investments. As an financial advisor, she created personalized financial plans for high net worth individuals overseeing more than $350 million in client assets. Now, Shinobu has taken all her knowledge and created a simple, proven method for teaching personal finance. She's delivered over 500 live workshops covering a wide range of topics, from budgeting, to estate planning. Our goal is to simplify the complex world of investing and empower women everywhere to reach financial freedom. Shinobu take a moment in filling for the tidbits about your life.

Shinobu Hindert 02:06
Yeah, I am living in sunny San Diego, I have two children and really started in power planning as I transitioned into motherhood, or just a little bit more flexibility in a life conducive to kind of trying to do all these different things. So thank you so much for having me on here. It is my goal to really inspire other women to get more involved asking them questions. And I think this is such a great platform and a great way to introduce that to people.

Andrew Stotz 02:36
And besides the obvious answer to this question, why women because you're a woman, but I'm curious, why women besides the fact?

Shinobu Hindert 02:46
Well, if we look at economic data, women are going to there's going to be this transfer of wealth that's happening with the baby boomer generation where women are going to be handling a lot of this wealth. And as I saw professionally, with clients who their husbands would either pass away, or they would get divorced. Later on in life, they were having these aha moments of like, wait a minute, I don't actually know what I'm doing. And how did I get to this point. And then when I would open up conversations with friends that were very career driven. Women, I was finding, well, wait a minute, no one's giving them this information, either. So we have a generation a little bit older, that doesn't have these resources, then I'm turning around and my peer group doesn't have these resources. And it was really this lightbulb to go, I need to get more involved and speak louder, and just share share this message.

Andrew Stotz 03:40
Exciting I'm in. I'm just one of the things I'll share with you is that many years ago, I wrote a book, and I wrote it about how to start investing in the stock market. Now a financial planner does different stuff than a financial analyst. So I'm a Chartered Financial Analyst CFA. And basically what I know about is investing in the stock market. You know, I don't know a lot about the topics like budgeting, estate planning, tax planning. There's so many things that a certified financial planner knows about that someone like myself, it's not my area of expertise. But sure, I wrote that book, which I later turned a new online course for five women. Cool. Those five women are my five nieces. And when each of them graduated high school, I gave them $3,000, I flew back to their high school graduation from Thailand, brought $3,000 in my pocket to help them set up an account. In that case, they set it up in Vanguard, and I just told them by the vt fund that owns every stock in the world and just keep buying and never sell and no matter what happens. No, don't ask me any questions just keep buying every single month. And what I later learned is that they didn't, they actually had a lot of confusion and questions along the way and they didn't buy every single month and therefore they didn't accumulate as much I thought I was being pretty good uncle, getting them started. But I realized that I kind of missed that part of continually contributing. And that's why in my course Now, like I have a Facebook group and all that, where I try to nudge people much more aggressively to Hey, make those contributions. I just thought I'd share that because the other thing about women is that my mother lives with me here in Bangkok, Thailand, when my father passed away five years ago, we agreed that it would be best for my mom to live with me, I thought, that's great to be with mom. But what was interesting is when my father was a single earner family, my father worked for DuPont, all of his life, you know, nothing fancy, just a good sales executive job. And, but when my mom arrived, I was able to sit down and go through her account that was being managed by my parents, but also the financial advisor we had in the US. And I basically said, Congratulations, you've done it, you have enough money, to never worry about money for the rest of your life. And that is where I want my nieces to be. And I want every woman to be at that point, because chances are, you are potentially going to probability tells you you're gonna outlive your husband. And so you need to have some knowledge of that. So I've got important women at the young age that are starting and a very important woman at the end of her life that has the comfort that, you know, is there. So anyways, that's my story. And I'm excited to actually hear your story. So let me ask you this question. Now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one ever goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to an Intel is your story.

Shinobu Hindert 06:44
Sure, I, this story is kind of me adjacent. So when I was working as a financial advisor back in 2007, you know, we're hitting the summer of 2007. And everything's good. You could literally throw a dart at the board, and everybody was making money. So like working in that field at that time. Everybody loves you, right, as I get best friends are getting these good phone calls, everything's working out nicely. And then 2008 starts approaching. And we're kind of getting hints that the markets not looking so hot, but as advisors, we're looking long term, right? We don't want short term headlines to dictate what we're telling our clients, we don't want to have knee jerk reactions. So you know, you kind of hear rumblings that banks are backing out of loans that they issued for residential properties. And you're like, well, that's that's kind of funny, you know, it kind of has the seedling of doubt. But these rating agencies, even for bonds that were out there, everything still looked good on paper, there was just this kind of like eerie feeling that you have. But you get that all the time, when you're investing, you always are second guessing what you're doing. So I remember, I was going to lunch, I had appointments in the morning, I was typically meeting with four to five clients a day, and I went to lunch on my lunch break, I come back, and the market had dropped so quickly, so significantly, that they had halted trading. And I'm going, what the heck is going on, I just went out to go to lunch. And now I'm coming back. And this is happening. And it just started to plummet from there. So Lehman Brothers had gone under, and there was just mayhem broke out, I worked for a very large financial company, we serviced a lot of the area, I was in northern New Jersey at the time, just a stone's throw away from Manhattan, and a lot of our clients worked for Lehman Brothers. So the next, you know, gosh, I want to say three months or so we just had so many people coming in lines out the door, because there was also this credit issue that people were thinking, hey, am I not going to have access to my money out of financial institution. So there was this fear that was running around everywhere. So people were coming in, not necessarily to withdraw money, but they wanted to look at somebody in the face, they didn't want to call somebody on the phone, and they wanted to say you're, you're alive, you're here, this is a building my money exists and just look at you. So you had the kind of rush of everybody else coming in. But I had direct clients that worked for Lehman Brothers for 25 years, for 30 years. And everything that they invested in is a more traditional way of investing but by what you know, invest what you know, invest you're familiar with and a lot and Lehman offered great. company plans, stock options, all of these their bonds were highly rated. So when I was as a financial advisor previous to this 2008 crisis, having conversations with a client saying hey, you should really diversify. They're looking at me like girl You don't know anything. You're young. I've been out this for 2530 years. I made tons of money. This company has been great to me. And these are emotional stories because it's not just a stock to them. This is like I was able to send my kids to private school because of what Lehman Brothers did for me, I was able, I was the first person in my family to hit this kind of mark, I sent my kids to college, I'm going to retire in two years, I'm not going to take advice from this young person who's telling me to sell my stocks, and especially at that time to if it's capital gains, you know, people are like, Well, I'm not gonna pay taxes just to spread out my right, what are you talking about? So having these conversations every single day with people sitting across from I'm probably 25 years old and sitting across from you know, someone 5560 years old? And they're asking me, well, well, what is the balance? What do I have? And it was just devastating if you looked at what they had a month ago versus what they had. And then these were no longer financial planning conversations of diversify your risk it was, do you have family? Who could you live with how much longer and then everybody was laid off, there was a chance that they were going to get purchased by another baby. So there was this kind of influx in between. But when all the dust settled, when you were talking to people as a financial adviser who lost everything it was, it was really intense. And I think that, really, it shook me at my very core.

Andrew Stotz 11:24
Gosh, I remember that time very well. So let me ask you, what lessons did you learn

Shinobu Hindert 11:31
to push harder as a financial adviser that if I really believe in diversification, if I believe, and there's a philosophy, to push that on to people and not feel badly or to feel, you know, I enjoy financial planning, because it's educating people, and you're helping people, but there's a sales component of it. And so sometimes I would shy away to be like, well, I don't want to really sell this product if this person isn't into it. And then I really, at that time, realizing it's actually my responsibility to make sure that they're aware of definitely the upside, but also the impact if they don't listen, what could that look like?

Andrew Stotz 12:10
It's such a, you know, a real lesson because I know, as a financial analyst, my job is to advise institutional clients around the world. And, yeah, I mean, sometimes you don't want to push too hard. But other times when you when you really have, you know, when you really have a strong feeling or something, you know, and I think the client needs that. And you never want to be the person who have clients as he should have told me. Right? Right. You know, that's something you really want to make sure you don't know, maybe I'll share a few things that I took away from it. I wrote down three things as you were talking. The first one, I want to tell a story about my father, my father went to work for DuPont, when he graduated with his PhD in chemistry, it was that time that plastics were really coming on. And that's what he was into all of his life. When he moved to North Carolina, in started to work on retirement, he had a lot of DuPont stock, huge amount of DuPont stock. And the financial advisors said, you got to reduce this. And he really did not want to do that. I mean, he was really emotionally wedded to that. But that financial advisors slowly and steadily pushed on him until they started diversifying away. And as my mom tells the story, she says that the financial advisor says, you know, imagine the DuPont stocks at 100, the financial advisors say what would you do if that stock went to 10. And it just couldn't, he couldn't imagine my father couldn't imagine it. And but my mother said, it happened. There was like this point where that stock collapsed massively. But the point is, is that the financial advisors stuck to his guns, and he got my dad to part with that and diversify away from that. So when that crashing the price at that time happened, it didn't impact them. And it's part of what made you know, my mom and dad able to have a really healthy and happy retirement. So I really think this is an important lesson. And that's just a story of that in my own life. Also, the second thing I wrote down was like, what worked for you in the past may not always work for you in the future. And I've been really studying the 400 episodes, to try to find commonalities. And one of the things that very clear, is that we get stuck in our ways. And we naturally rely on what works in the past. Like you don't know what you're talking about. I've been through this before. And it's it's just,

Shinobu Hindert 14:35
I mean, there's there's all of these studies with behavioral finance, and it gets a little technical. So sometimes, you know, as a customer, you can tune it out, like I don't need all this data, but as a professional when you look at it, and you're living in it, and you're working with it, and you're teaching it, it's real, it's it's real, and I tried to communicate that if it's not a repeatable process, it's probably not a repeatable So you don't just don't really help people understand that. Maybe you just got lucky, you know, and that's okay. You take take the win. But if you can't repeat it and teach someone to do what you did and how you did it, then let's just kind of count counted as luck, take our earnings and keep

Andrew Stotz 15:17
going. Yeah, well, that's another thing that many people don't realize is the underlying function of randomness and luck in the stock market in investing. But the last thing I would just say is that I have like a strategy that I manage, and people follow that strategy. And it's a global strategy. And one part of that strategy was to invest in a particular fund in Thailand, that invest in global bond, particularly us but globally, corporate and government bonds. And basically, when the about a year ago, when everything really started shaking up with COVID, that that bond started acting very strange. And it became clear that that ETF, let's say, that was actually a fund in Thailand, buying that ETF that ETF started behaving very strangely, and yields started rising, and basically, the price started falling, and we started worrying. But that, you know, there's going to be bankruptcies and all that. Now, what we didn't see was that, you know, of course, the US government, the Fed basically found a way to channel money to BlackRock and have BlackRock go and buy the ETF or whatever, you know, broad base bond funds. But what happened was that the local, we were just worried enough about it that we decided, let's switch out of that, in one day, when we saw that movement, we should switch out of that, and we're just gonna put it in a Thai bond, government bond fund, just bring it back out from the US and put it there. And so we made that move the next day, that bond fund in Thailand, got suspended by the fund management company, because they weren't able to really handle the volatility that was happening in the ETF. And it took a while, eventually, they reinstated trading, and people didn't lose it all thanks to the Fed buying out, you know, that, that the ETFs. But the end result was that we were able to save some something just before. And that's the point of, you know, the reason why I raised it is that you, as a financial planner, have been through this experience. You know, number one, as you've said, be stronger with what you believe in what you want to communicate. But also, there's times that you have to act fast. And that was an example, anything you would add to those lessons that I learned from your story.

Shinobu Hindert 17:37
The only other thing that I would add is to find a trusted partner, if that's just a family member, or a financial professional, but not to internalize these ideas because it can I love your show, because it humanizes our mistakes. And we don't have to live in shame, and we can talk about it. And on my end, there's something about being a financial professional, where people gravitate towards you to tell you all of their wins. They just come like, well, I bought this and they're talking about all these lofty amounts of money that they've made, but then they don't circle back, you know, so if you're in touch, and you're like, Alright, okay, last week, Bob told me he bought, you know, XYZ and I know it kind of plummeted. And then you don't see that they don't come, they don't come around and tell you that story. And it's okay to make a mistake. And I think it's it's part of learning, and just to talk to somebody about it. So that way, you know, you're not internalizing it or trusting your gut gut on these decisions.

Andrew Stotz 18:35
Yeah. And that made me write down my next learning, which is to remind myself and the listeners, people love to talk about their winners. And they do not talk about their losers. And therefore, not only does it make it a confusing situation for people who are talking other people, because they're thinking cheese, everybody's winning. But the second thing is it's hard for people to honestly evaluate what's going on. Now, before I ask you the next question I want to, I want to highlight a quote, I may even add it into my scripts that I use it every time because your story is one of observing at a young age, other people's loss and then taking a lesson in that reminds me of the Otto von Bismarck, quote, Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others. So based upon what you learn from this story, and what you continue to what what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Shinobu Hindert 19:40
You'll be really clear on the purpose of the money they're investing. What is the goal of that money, get clear on it, and then you can feel comfortable with your investment strategy. But if someone were to come to me and say, I need this money in five years from now, I have 100% of it in this one company stock. Is that a good idea? I was like, No, it's not Oh, you probably have a lot of other things that you want to do. So just get really, really clear what is the purpose? And then you can back into the investment strategy.

Andrew Stotz 20:08
Great advice. Last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Shinobu Hindert 20:14
number one goal, I have an academy out there. It's called empowered Academy to grow my reach for that I had so much fun with it. So my goal is to spread it to a larger audience. So that would be well, what

Andrew Stotz 20:26
about our listeners? Where should they go? To get access to that and learn more about it?

Shinobu Hindert 20:32
Yeah, you can check out my website. It's www dot empowered, planning, calm and the academy we are enrolling for September.

Andrew Stotz 20:41
So check it out. Fantastic. And I'll put all that in the show notes, ladies and gentlemen, in case you're driving. So listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. My number one goal for the next 12 months is to help you my listener reduce risk and increase return in your life. To do this, I've created our community and my worst investment ever.com and I look forward to seeing you there. Shinobu I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy I hereby award you alumni status for too many your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Shinobu Hindert 21:22
parting words if you are about to make an investment and don't understand it, just ask ask ask ask until it makes sense.

Andrew Stotz 21:30
Fantastic. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.