Ep547: Dave Buck – Have a Purpose for Your Investments

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 risks but to win big, you have got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives to reduce risk in your life, go to my worst investment ever.com today and take the risk reduction assessment I created from a lessons I've learned from more than 500 guests, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest, Dave buck, Dave, are you ready to join the mission?

Dave Buck 00:45
Totally, I'm ready.

Andrew Stotz 00:47
We are on a mission. And I'm going to introduce you to the audience. Dave buck is fascinated by the concept of time, and how it is applied in everyday life. It is one of the main reasons he started Kairos management solutions. Kairos is one of the Greek words for time, tied to accomplishing a crucial action or performing in a decisive moment through his company. And Dave offers a variety of services from individual and corporate time management, leadership management, retirement and lifestyle time management, and sales, productivity enhancement, the corporate missions of kairos management solution and Dave is to help people move their time from finite to infinite. Wow, Dave, take a minute and tell us about the value that you bring to this world.

Dave Buck 01:43
Well, first of all, thank you, Andrew, I'm honored to be a part of the podcast really appreciate the invitation. The value that I want to bring to people is to that mission of the idea of making time infinite. Today, we can all look at a block of time, like say an hour. And what we choose to do in that hour, can make time feel short, or make time feel like it went by quickly. Normally, when it goes by quickly, it's because we're doing something that we've enjoyed, we've planned for, we've targeted it, and we've accomplished what we've wanted to do in that hour. So the value I want to bring to people is to make that time flow quickly. Because you have been productive in what you've wanted to accomplish, and you have had a really, really good time. And that's the focus of the basis of everything that we try to do at Kairos management solutions for people is to make their time fun and productive.

Andrew Stotz 02:47
I'm curious out of I know, for the listeners out there, you probably felt that feeling of flow or that feeling of you know, everything's working. And I'm just curious, from your own experience, Dave, that, what would you say is the number one or number two blocks to that? What is it that we do that prevents us from getting that

Dave Buck 03:10
we typically try to do too much in a shorter period of time, we think we can do more, it's like in the United States, you go to a restaurant that has an all you can eat buffet. And it's like going and grabbing and filling your plate up with a bunch of stuff. And then realizing when you're sitting there saying you're halfway through the meal saying I'm full. And that's the same concept a lot of people do with their time is they tried to plug way too much into a short period and then get disappointed, frustrated, get down on themselves, because they didn't get accomplished what they wanted to in that particular timeframe.

Andrew Stotz 03:48
I believe that's called over estimation bias when you overestimate what you think you're going to accomplish. But what one of the next follow up question is, but Dave, why do we do it again and again and again. You know, I can understand I do it. You know, last week, I went into four out of five days thinking I'm gonna get all these things done, and I didn't. And then I just lined it up and did the same exact thing this week. Why do I do that again and again.

Dave Buck 04:16
So I know for me it to fight that guiltiness and the clients that I work with on that challenge. It's because of a lack of a planning and a time management strategy. Many times we're last minute in our time planning, it's either the last thing we do during the day for the next day. Or it's the last thing we do in the week, the Friday afternoon. Before we head into Saturday, we try to plan out what our next week looks like or sometimes we even do it Monday morning as we get started. So the idea is you have to invest time to be an effective time manager and most people fail to do that. They only do it last minute and they're reactive instead of pro active in their time management.

Andrew Stotz 05:02
Okay, that's an excellent, you know, it's so true what you're saying. But now let's, let's imagine when I look at time in a week, I start the week with a lot of energy. I'm very productive on Mondays, I bit, I'm starting to get a little bit behind on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I get more behind, and I've got my deadlines, and I got things I got to finish by the end. And you just the intensity of work rises, as we get into Thursday, you know, particularly Thursday, and then even for Friday, I have a lot of things I've got to get done. It's so hard to stop. And I know that you, you shared with me before that you have a habit that you do. Every Friday morning, I believe. But maybe you can tell us about that. And also, that may be a little much for some people, what other ways would you advise them to kind of get started with them?

Dave Buck 05:53
Sure. So the first element of what I do personally is I look at every I plan my calendar two weeks out, so every Friday morning, so I'm fresh, I'm a morning person. So whether you're a morning or an evening person that does play into where are you best, what's your best productivity zone, after lunch, whatever. But for me Friday morning, I plan out my next two weeks calendar. And I go ahead and do that, in order for me to alleviate any tensions or challenges. Now, that is not something that's hard cement, it's wet cement, I know I'm going to have to change in the course of that it's planned into that. But being able to have that two weeks out, helps alleviate time management pressures to that. Now, again, some people might look at that and say, two weeks, what is he crazy, a thing that you might start with a week. But what I would do is to two rules of thumb and that plan every single hour of your calendar every hour of it. And whether you do that starting with one day, two days a week or two weeks. plan every hour. Now, again, people are going but wait, I know things are going to change. I have a rule where I plan if it's important to me. So for example, our time together on the podcast, anyone who goes to my calendar, because I share my calendar with all my clients, everybody sees my calendar so they can get a hold of me when it's convenient for both of us, this time is blocked off on my calendar, so nobody can bother me in this timeframe. But I plan every hour. But if it's a secondary, if it's a project I'm working on that I know I can be interrupted with I make it a private event on my calendar, I still see it, I still get notified, I need to do it, I block off the time, that's necessary. But if someone needs to come in and meet with me, that's a higher priority they're allowed to, then I know I just need to readjust my calendar. So plan every calendar, but don't block off all the time. Block off the time that's important to you that's important to others that they know they need your time. But plan around that. And then you'll see it alleviates the challenges when someone comes to interrupt you

Andrew Stotz 08:12
great advice. And for those listeners out there that say I need to make more of my time, what's the best way for them to follow you to reach out to absorb what you're doing?

Dave Buck 08:24
Thank you. Easiest thing to do. Social media wise, I am on LinkedIn. So please, you can look at my profile Dave buck. I also have my company up there at Kairos management solutions. So you can go both of those on LinkedIn. If you want to learn more about the processes and the programs and the details. My website is k m s time.com kms, t i m e one word.com. And you can start there and I've got all my contact information there that you'd be happy to reach out to me and we can walk through whatever time management challenges you need for whether it's an individual, a department in a corporation or a corporation itself.

Andrew Stotz 09:05
Fantastic. We'll have all that in the show notes. So for the listeners, if it's time to get a hold of your time. Well check it out. Speaking. Yeah, speaking of time, it now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking and will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story.

Dave Buck 09:28
Thank you. I'm gonna give you some background in it started when I'm six when I was 16 years old. And so no, we're not going to go through hours of my life. But starting when I was 16 years old is I was blessed with two parents who really impressed upon their children the importance of saving for the future. And so I took my first job bagging groceries in a grocery store. And my mom in particular said, What are you going to do to save for the future? And I was like I'm 16 As a mom, I just want some extra money to go hang around with my friends on the weekend. And, and so I actually opted into the company I worked for had a stock Saving Program. So you pulled a little bit out of your paycheck every week. And when you got enough money they gave you, you bought a share of stock. And when I left that company, after college, and I went ahead and cashed out, that was a nice little paycheck, little income that I got off of that. And so that sparked my interest to save. So I have saved for retirement, every single year since then. And that was many, many, many moons ago. And so as I began to accumulate, monetary value of note, it was always focused around the performance of how am I doing? How much rate of return did I get off of that from the previous year. And I did that through my 20s, my 30s, or my 40s, and even into my 50s, where everything was on the rate of return, how's my performance doing? And then about five or six years ago, I started to ask myself questions about, okay, what am I going to do with this? What's the purpose of this? How is this going to benefit me later on in life? And as I worked with my financial advisor to talk about that, I wasn't getting a lot of good answers. And it was always back to pay, but we grew your portfolio 10% better than the market value this year. And thank you very much. I appreciate that. But help me understand, do I have enough to do what I want to do in retirement? Do I have enough to do to have a flexible lifestyle? I was not getting those answers that I wanted to get. And so that facilitated me to change my financial advisor go with another group that was better at helping prepare me and my wife for what we wanted to do with in retirement. And did we have enough funds available to have the flexibility to that, but I was still lacking, it was still not enough for me to understand. And so I really did a deep dive personally, into asking questions like, What is the plan for this for these funds that we have? Will I have enough to live on with what I want to live on? What's going to be my standard of lifestyle? Is it the same as what I have right now? Is it less? What is that expectation? And then, what am I going to do with the time that I have based upon those funds? And so we kept pushing and pushing and pushing? And so what it came down to? For me, the realization was that while my portfolio has performed satisfactory, at least I think so I failed in an investment strategy of including a long time ago, what were my goals? What did I want to do with those funds? And so I feel like right now I am playing catch up, trying to figure out, what is my life going to be like? And what do I want to do? And, quite frankly, retirement for me is probably very different than what it is traditionally, say, in the United States. And in that there's gonna be some element of this there gonna be some element of me wanting to work because I believe that brings purpose. So the worst investment is not planning for what your purpose of life is going to be tied to the funds you've collected.

Andrew Stotz 13:45
It's interesting, because, you know, you kind of did everything right. You know, like, there's a lot of people that say, I didn't save, I didn't start saving until I was 50. Well, you kind of did everything right. But it feels like there was something missing. Correct? When was it that you? Can you remember the day that you felt like there's something missing here and the mission that you are on now started?

Dave Buck 14:15
Yeah, we had met with our financial planner, I want to say it was about six years ago. And, we had a really, really good financial planner. He ended up he was retiring, and we got replaced by somebody else and, and again, came in with all the charts and the graphs, and performance and stress tests and all the metrics that you need to be to be successful. And I stopped in and I said, so what does this mean? And he said, means you're performing, you know, X amount better than the market and what does this mean to my life? Do I have enough to retire if I wanted to retire today? And at that point, I was like, 52 If I want had to retire today. Could I do that? And it was a blank stare. And that hit me, at that point to say we needed to make a change with our, again, nothing wrong, the institution managed my money. Well, there was no, but it was something that said, I need somebody who's going to come alongside me and be able to tell me, yes, you wanting to fly by private jet on the current portfolio that you have is not realistic, you know, I think you're going to have to be taking the car that you have, and take good care of that car, you know. So that hit me during that meeting that I was lacking, and that I had not done enough to really ask those questions of myself earlier. And I probably should have done that. And I recommend people do that in their 40s, you really start seriously asking those questions, feel free to do it in your 20s. If you're planning that right now, it's going to be a lot different. But it gives you the right mindset that says, I'm going to manage this portfolio not to a rate of return, though at that is extremely, extremely important. I'm going to manage my portfolio to the desired lifestyle, I want to have one I need to draw on those funds.

Andrew Stotz 16:16
How would you summarize the lessons that you learned?

Dave Buck 16:20
So the lessons that I learned is, I would still recommend to anybody and everybody, no matter how young you are, start to save for the future. I don't, it doesn't have to be, quote, retirement, save for the future. And in my 20s, and my through 40s, as you mentioned, I felt I did the right things, I had the right approach with my financial advisor, it was about maximizing the benefits of my portfolio to your risk to the willingness of the risk you're going to take. I think that's also an important element. But I was happy with my risk reward ratio that we had through that. It's once I hit my 40s I felt I should have adopted a more broader strategy of what is the purpose of this fund that I'm collecting? And how does that purpose align with my lifestyle purpose, and I should have developed a lifestyle purpose. And then once I hit my 50s, I should have had much broader and deeper discussions with my financial advisor. On these are my personal goals. These are what I want to do. My wife and I, these are things and I think more detail is better and that I should have been more detailed. And then challenged them to say, do these goals, aspirations and lifestyle I live? Meet the financial metrics and trends, you see my portfolio being

Andrew Stotz 17:52
got it? Maybe I'll summarize a few things I took away from it, I wrote down three words, purpose, goals, context, purpose, you know, like, what is the purpose of this? Goals? You know, am I saving just for the sake of saving? am I investing just to beat the market? Or what do I want is my outcome, What's my goal, and then putting it into context, it's one thing to say you did really well in the market. But to put it into context, okay, with this amount of money, you can live this lifestyle. And that I wrote down those three things. I also thought about a couple of things. First of all, I wrote a book called How to start building your wealth investing in the stock market. And it really tries to lay out as simple as possible, what I think everybody should know, I wrote that for, for women. In fact, I wrote it for five women, my five nieces, each of them when they graduated high school, I flew back to America from Thailand, with $3,000 in my pocket, and I gave each of them each time, the success of the graduated $3,000. And I helped him set up an account in this case at Vanguard in America. And then I started them investing in using what I taught in that book. So for all of you out there that are looking for some of those goals and purpose, you can get some foundational stuff out of that just go to Amazon, and it's less than $10, I believe, is what it's there. Now, the last thing that I wrote down was the word talk. And I heard that, you know, you wanted to talk about it, and you needed to talk about it. And when you found out that your advisor wasn't able or wasn't interested in talking about it, you switched advisors and I think that that's really a critical thing. You know, you have a right it's your money, they're managing it they're doing a function with it. You have a right to ask that question. In fact, CFA Institute where I was a CFA charter holder has a list of shareholder of list of investor rights. And one of your rights is to get explanations of the questions that you ask them in a language that you can understand them. So for those listeners out there that aren't getting the answers that they want, keep asking And then keep saying, I don't understand that, can you make that more clear, that really is an ultimate obligation of a financial adviser. But now I want to tell a story. And my story is of a man named Dave. This Dave was born in 1934. This day did everything right, he went to prep school, he went to university, he did his PhD, he went to work at one company all of his life as a salesman. And he had a beautiful wife. And they live together, he had a housewife, and Dave, raise three kids, they didn't know much about finance, and investing. In fact, he wasn't interested in it at all. But the company that he worked for was a huge company that had a lot of pension advice, and all of that, that they did. And so Dave was able to get the pension from that company, and then also invest, he knew enough to know that if a company gives us some sort of matching bonus or something for buying shares of that company, that's free money. And so Dave took that money. And he built up as big a position he could with the salary that he had a family living on one salary. Well, eventually, Dave retired at the age of 58. And Dave and his wife, Kathy, lived 22 years on their retirement savings. And they had a great retirement. And they traveled and did simple things. It wasn't extravagant, but they went to Europe, and they went around the US. And they were able to support themselves through that time. In 2016, Dave passed away. And Kathy, his wife was left. And Kathy is my mother. And Dave is my father. And my mother, Kathy had had a stroke, and my dad had had a hemorrhage and passed away very quickly, I was back in the US with them at the time, and my mother was not in a great condition. And she was in a rehab hospital. We ended up, you know, deciding my sister and my mom and I that we would bring my mother to Thailand. And she asked, you know, would you take care of me in Thailand, which I was said, I'm absolutely happy to do. That was 2016. That was six years ago. And we sold the house they had and got the cash from that and added that to their account. But when mom got to Thailand, I brought her to Thailand. And we sat down and reviewed her account, and I said, Mom, you have enough money to live the rest of your life, and not worry about money. And you've got me as a backstop. And that was a remarkable, remarkable discussion. After 22 years of retirement, living on one salary, and not knowing much about finance. I just want to inspire everybody from Dave's discussion here. And my Dave, my dad, to say you can do it, start young. Get it help along the way. Be frugal, be careful with your money, but cheap focused on doing it. And I think you'll learn just like Dave here, Dave, but you're gonna get a lot of value of going through that journey and ending up at the end of it with enough money to live on. So that's my little story for today. Anything you would add?

Dave Buck 23:24
Wow, thank you for sharing. And it's funny because I'm 58. So it's the Dave's and the 50 eights. And I couldn't I wholeheartedly agree with you on the idea that it doesn't have to be a lot to you, you don't have to. This is where I try to coach and counsel people that you can start small and build from there. You don't have to say oh my gosh, I've got to do particularly if you're young in your 20s if you have to start at 5% of your earnings into it, start somewhere. I always try to challenge people I say I think most of us throw away 10% When you look at your budget at the end of the year, and you see how how you've spent your money, you can find 10% pretty easily and start there and just you know work and be consistent and and then you can have a story. Like your dad and your mom, where and we're blessed to we've taken care of both of our moms. That's been part of our strategy. My wife and I same situation with my mother in law, who recently sold her house and moved into independent living very close to us. And she has enough money based upon that to be fine and comfortable for the rest of her natural life. And that is a feeling that takes away a lot of tension and stress not just from her but from the rest of the family that's trying to support the parent.

Andrew Stotz 24:56
Yeah. And that's part of the reason why I wrote the book because I was guiding my 18 year old nieces at the time to be able to have the last part of their life as comfortable as my mom and dad did. And that's really an objective. So I think, for me, you answered the next question I was going to ask, which is what's one action that you'd recommend? And I feel like the action I just heard from you is get started.

Dave Buck 25:23
Absolutely, yeah. Get Started, be disciplined on it. Keep at it, if you have to, because of financial circumstances, or whatever, I understand that you need to stop because you just don't stop forever. Understanding an interruption may happen. But it's the continuous I, I had a professor in college, who always talked about the time value of money. And so the idea is that your portfolio can grow if you're not contributing to it. So, but get back to contributing for as long as you possibly can.

Andrew Stotz 26:01
Yeah. Fantastic. Now, what is a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Dave Buck 26:08
So a resource that I would say, I've got a couple if you want to come go to my site, Kairos kms, time.com. And I offer what's called the retirement time analysis, and you might somebody in their 20s might be saying, This is ridiculous for me to take it, you are more than welcome to take what it does it you'll get a free summer summary report out of it. But basically, I ask you questions in various, what I call priority categories. What's your current career mindset? What is your current financial mindset? You might think, your financial mindset, or your unpaper? It might say, you're fine. Do you believe that? And so it asks you about your financial mindset, it asks you about your retirement mindset? Well, you've got to have the right mindset, if you're going into retirement, or I would recommend, you don't have to retire work, if you still need to, if you don't have the right mindset, then it looks at your lifestyle and your activities, what are you going to do around that all of that is to craft your purpose. So feel free to go to kms time.com. Take that free assessment, you can take a look at it. And then from there, we can work together. I'm also working with financial institutions on this as a corporate program to help them as help their clients to help the Dave's out there like me, connect better. So if your financial institution and you want to talk more about how we can integrate this into your corporate strategy to bring extra value to your clients, again, chemists time, go there, and then we'll get started.

Andrew Stotz 27:44
Great. And we'll have links in the show notes. So last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months.

Dave Buck 27:51
So my number one goal for the next 12 months is there's a verse in scripture that says the plans of the diligent lead to profit, as surely as haste leads to poverty. So my goal over the next year is, I am part of the great resignation. I am one of those who recently left my job to immerse myself fully into Kairos time management solutions. And so my goal over the next year is to implement my initial business strategy to is such a point that I don't have to draw on my current savings plan, as I have set up. So my goal is to help move time from finite to infinite in the execution of my initial business strategy.

Andrew Stotz 28:39
Fantastic. And that's a really exciting endeavor. And I look forward to learning more as you go through it. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet taken the risk reduction assessment, I challenge you to go to my worst investment ever.com right now and start building wealth the easy way by reducing risk. As we conclude, Dave, I want to thank you again, for joining our mission. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Dave Buck 29:18
Just thank you. First of all, again, Andrew, for this opportunity. I'm excited to be an alumni and my parting words everybody is as you plan projects. Invest your time as you look to how you manage it. Take what you do and add 20% to it. It's always going to take longer than what you anticipate.

Andrew Stotz 29:42
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Thank you for joining our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying I'll see you on the upside.