The Best Of Our 199 Episodes

Shawn: Do you know the difference between popular financial advice and essential Bible-based financial wisdom? On this 200th episode celebration, we’re revealing the top seven most crucial financial topics from our first 199 episodes. Let’s get some perspective. Welcome to our 200th episode of Christian Financial Perspectives. I cannot believe we have now done 200 episodes as of this recording. I haven’t been here for all of them, I guess about half. And I want to start us out with a scripture. Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Bob: And that was my goal here when I started this, Shawn, four years ago, was to bring knowledge to people and we started it with two main objectives for Christian Financial Perspectives. Our first objective was to bring an ongoing educational timeless resource for our clients first and friends of Christian financial advisors. Shawn: Right. Timeless meaning we’re not covering too many current events or this particular tax code just changed right now, but try to keep it more applicable for now and 10 years from now. Bob: And its Biblical principles are timeless. Okay. And then our second objective was to think beyond just Texas and New Braunfels, our community here in the Austin, San Antonio area. And that was to educate our brothers and sisters nationwide across the country about how to handle their finances from a Christian perspective in a Biblical worldview. And Shawn, I never wanted to measure the success of Christian Financial Perspectives by appealing to the masses. I wasn’t about, this wasn’t about being this big popular program and I wasn’t about providing get rich quick schemes or making gamblers and day traders for people. I just wanted to bring them good Biblical knowledge, and I was going to measure that success one person at a time. That’s the kind of person I am. And that’s the way I wanted to do it. Never being swept into telling our audience what they wanted to hear, but I wanted to tell them what they needed to hear for long-term financial success based on time proven Biblical principles. Shawn: That’s right. And really this all comes back to, for Christian financial advisors with our mission and purpose, the purpose really is to expand God’s kingdom through the area of finance. Bob: That’s correct. Shawn: And so this program fits right along with that. Obviously some people might find us on here and think, Hey, I might want to work with them as a firm. That was never going to be how we measure this as successful. Again, like you said, one person at a time. We’re trying to expand God’s kingdom. Bob: Shawn, I love to teach, it’s just my mom was a teacher, her dad was a teacher and a superintendent of schools. We have teaching also, a lot of teachers own my dad’s side of the family. So I just think it’s in my genetics to teach. I love teaching people and you know that from sitting across the desk and hearing how I love to educate people on what they’re doing financially. Shawn: Which I think fits right along with this program. So today, with this being our 200th episode for Christian Financial Perspectives, we decided to look at the top seven most essential financial topics that have been covered over the last four years, not necessarily the most popular. So we’re not going off of YouTube views or audio listens from the different podcast directories. This is again, what we feel are the most important topics. So here they are in order of importance, starting with number seven. Bob: So we’re going to get to the first, the most important one at the end. Shawn: Yes. So in order of importance, starting with number seven and ending with what we know is the number one most crucial financial topic that we’ve covered over the last four years. So number seven, episode 48, “Sudden Wealth Syndrome”, sometimes called SWS. Bob: That’s correct. And this happens when someone gets a large inheritance, maybe a lump sum payout. I’ve seen this as well from… Shawn: Insurance. Bob: Well, that could be. Or even a major corporation you’ve been working for and all of a sudden you get a lump sum payout when you retire, an oil and gas discovery, or even winning a lottery. We’ve not had any lottery winners, but that would be a definite sudden wealth. And sudden wealth is known, unfortunately, Shawn, for making people arrogant. When I looked arrogant up: an unpleasantly proud person that behaves like they’re more important than anyone else and they know more than anyone else because now they have all this new found wealth. And you got to be very careful of that. Shawn: It is a danger, it’s a kind of a natural human tendency that if you have a lot of money, especially if it comes very quickly, that you get that arrogance that comes along with it where, well, I have all this money, therefore I’m more important and know more than everybody. And it’s different when you have someone that has built wealth over time through a lot of hard work, that they actually tend to be less arrogant, typically, because they know that where they got here was with hard work. It wasn’t that they were somehow special. Bob: Exactly. Being humble is such a good virtue, which was in our Lord and Savior of Jesus Christ. He was humble. When sudden will syndrome comes about, that’s the most important time when you need a fee-based fiduciary, Christian financial advisor more than ever. Shawn: That’s right, to help you navigate that. So number six, episode 192, “Are Rental Homes The Worst Way to Invest in Real Estate”. Bob: And we’ve made some on real estate, and I think this last one was really one that went well and there just seems to be in real estate, a big misunderstanding of the net return and the real yields after all the expenses associated with owning residential real estate. Shawn: And our rental home worksheet is a must to get, if considering buying a rental home, which we did go over that a little bit in the episode.One rental home and just one geographical location is never wise because it lacks diversification for the amount of money it takes. Bob: Yeah, it does. You think about that, you’re putting maybe three, I mean here in New Braunfels, you can’t buy anything for less than $350,000 or $400,000 or you’re going to go borrow that much money. Shawn: And rates are horrible right now. Bob: Really knocks the yield down. You just don’t have a yield. So in this episode 192, “Are Rental Homes the Worst Way to Invest in Real Estate”, we discussed alternative ways to easily buy real estate using a portfolio of publicly traded real estate investment trust. Not private. Yeah, not private ones. And this is across many real estate sectors such as apartment complexes, commercial real estate, retail stores, storage units, hospitals, medical facilities, cell phone towers, and even cloud-based computing storage facilities. So when we came up with this alternative type of portfolio that we’re offering now to people, you don’t have to go to any title company. It’s completely liquid and there’s no sales commissions involved in it. And many times these REITs, they give better yields than one single rental home. More diversification, total liquidity, like I say, no sales charges or title company fees. Shawn: And as I know you like to talk about, no worrying about broken water heaters or leaky roof or broken AC unit, dysfunctional renters, you don’t have to deal with any of that. Bob: When you think anybody that’s thinking about real estate, HDTV is on every day, have them go listen to that episode. Shawn: Yeah. So number five, episode 186, “7 Things to do Before Buying Your Next Car”. We thought this one was a good topic because it’s the largest expenditure typically next to or right behind buying a home for most people. So of all the things you’re going to buy, probably the second most expensive/ largest, but it also happens on average every three to four years with absolutely guaranteed negative returns and losses. Bob: Yeah. Would you want to buy an investment that had a guaranteed negative return and significant losses every single time? Well, that’s when you buy a vehicle, that’s what you’re doing. Shawn: It is a necessary expense, but don’t ever look at it as an investment because it is guaranteed to go down in value no matter what you do. Bob: In this episode, it talks about how most people overpay 90% of the time when they buy a car. So we give you seven great ideas to literally save thousands of dollars when buying that next car. So I would invite you to go back and listen to that one if you didn’t hear that one. Shawn: Alright, and number four, we have episode 122, “Gold Fever. Is it Worth it?” Bob: Oh, another big one, right? Shawn: Yep. We get this kind of questions all the time. Bob: I’ve had two calls in the last week about buying gold again. Shawn: We cover the fact that there’s no regulation, there’s absolutely no regulation. It’s the wild, wild west when it comes to buying physical gold, manipulative sales tactics are very common within the industry. You really have no idea if you’re getting the real value that you’re purchasing because again, there’s no standards, regulatory requirements. So you might think you’re getting a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold, but in reality, because of the change in the markups and what they’re wanting to get paid in the commission, you got $50,000 to $75,000. Bob: And like you say, there’s no regulation that governs this. And something else about gold that a lot of Christians have not thought about is just not Biblically responsible at all. It’s environmentally toxic to God’s creation. And human slavery is used many places around the globe and many foreign countries to get the gold. Shawn: Yeah, the most common, you’ll have some sort of international company that’s partnered with something local. Well, the locals are many times employing human slavery to actually get the minerals and then they just sell it to the corporation. So the corporation, well, they’re not using human slavery, they’re just buying it from people that are using human slavery. Well, okay, that’s not really a good argument. Bob: And gold also, it has no yield and nothing productive from it. Shawn: That’s right. It’s just something you hold and hope the intrinsic value associated with it goes up over time. But there’s nothing to create yield from it. It’s not like owning stocks in a company where if that company continues to produce good products and has better cashflow and more profits that the value of the share can go up over time. Bob: And dividends. Shawn: And dividends. Exactly. Bob: That’s what I like. So now we’re getting into our top 3. Top three, remember, of 199 episodes. Shawn: That’s right. Okay, so number three is episode 127, “Annuities 101, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. Bob: Why do you think I picked this one here? I’ve gotten a couple more invitations with the big steak dinners on them this week. Shawn: Exactly. Bob: Literally I’ve gotten two in the last week. Shawn: We thought the annuities should definitely be in the top three because, similar to the house purchase and the car purchase, the annuity is not something people purchase all the time, but it’s more closer to say a house. Because if you have a decent sized investment portfolio and you get someone trying to take you to the steak dinner and you move all your money into the annuity and then you’re stuck for 10 years. If you take it out earlier than 10 years, then you’re going to have a penalty, usually, is the time period for that. Bob: Very manipulative sales tactics are used to sell annuities also kind of like gold. And there’s a considerable misunderstanding of returns by comparing them to the guaranteed withdrawals of your own money. So I’ve seen this many times where you say, well, you’re guaranteed a 5% withdrawal, and that’s nice. I’m guaranteed to take 5% of my own money every year. Well, you’ll get back 100% of your money in 20 years. Yeah, you will. You take 5% a year times 20 years, you’re going to get back 100% of your money. Boy, that’s a big return, isn’t it? And high commissions in annuities really result in conflicts of interest for those that sell them. Shawn: Yep. Because they’re not acting as a fiduciary. They do not have your best interests at heart. They have their highest commission to pad their own pocket is the primary goal. Bob: And most people don’t realize that these annuity companies, they’ll offer incentives to, if you sell enough, to the salesperson. If you sell enough of this annuity, we’re going to give you a free cruise or you’re going to get a golf vacation or something like that. They never say that. And I remember seeing this way back in my earlier years, how you get these monthly contests going and I’m like, it’s kind of like on the last day of the month when you want to buy a car, you got to sell that certain amount of car. Shawn: Yeah. There’s a lot of push, a lot of incentive. Alright, definitely go check that one out. We cover the types of annuities. We cover there are some situations where certain kinds of annuities might play a part and might be a good fit, but it’s just things to be aware of. So definitely check it out. Number two. Bob: Top two now. Shawn: Episode 162, “Using Emotions as an Investment Strategy”. Bob: And I’ve always said this, emotions and finance, they mix together like oil and water. They should not go together. Shawn: That’s right. Which we understand and recognize that as human beings made in God’s image that we have emotions. So it can be difficult to set your emotions aside, but that’s why when we’re looking at making decisions on behalf of clients, if we’re meeting with clients, we always try to get as much as possible, get back to the math, get back to the principles, the objective things that we can look at to try to help us at the very least more better, more better control our emotions. Bob: We teach how to use your emotions in a positive way, not a negative way. This is done by actually going the opposite way the crowds are heading when the markets are getting overbought or oversold, and we do that here. And when everybody’s getting frantic and you’ve seen that market go up for two or three years in a row and it’s at all time highs, it’s probably time to go the other direction. Shawn: Not at all any kind of solicitation or advice. But just as a somewhat recent example, during 2020, towards the end of 2020, I believe the technology sector was up like 70, 80 something percent and then energy was down 50%. And so that was a good example at that time where you could possibly look at, all right, well I’m not going to buy technology because it’s already up so much and everybody thinks it’s going to go to the moon. But then energy, well, is anyone expecting energy to go away? Bob: I think we’re going to continue to use gasoline. And if you remember, that’s one of the things that we did. That was a strategy we did here. Shawn: So again, not a recommendation for now, but just I thought that was a good example of what we’re talking about. Bob: Well, this episode teaches all about learning how to buy low and sell high, not buy high and sell low using other people’s emotions. And the markets are emotional, too. Very emotional. Alright… Shawn: We’re going to have three quick honorable mentions that we’re not really going to discuss much before we cover our number one. But those three, they didn’t quite make the top seven. Episode 125, “The Basics of Estate Planning”. Every family needs a will or a trust, period. And the time to get that set up is yesterday. Bob: Episode 169 was “Financially Handling the Loss of a Spouse”. That’s never fun. It’s never easy, very painful. And finances spend any time are the last thing you want to deal with during a time of loss. Shawn: That’s right. And then episode 134, “The Number One Reason for Financial Failure”. I’ll give you a hint. Procrastination. This episode we cover all the financial areas where we procrastinate that costs people tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars. Alright. And so our number one top recommended topic over the years by far is episodes 177-178. It was a two-parter, but it covers “What God’s Word Says About Money”. This was actually a remake of the very first episode before my time as co-host. But need we say more, the Bible should be the primary guidebook for how Christians manage what God puts into our possession. Bob: My kids have always said, and I’m kind of a Proverbs nut. I love Proverbs. Shawn: That’s a good book. Bob: It’s a great book. And it is the owner’s manual for managing our finances. And I want to make this statement, and this is a very, very powerful statement. I want you to hear it. Okay. I have never seen anyone hurt financially by following Biblical principles, BUT I have seen many people and families hurt by not following Biblical principles. Shawn: Amen. So there you have it, our top seven financial topics that we’ve covered over the last four years and the first 199 episodes plus our three honorable mentions. But today’s 200th edition was just one we thought to go back and maybe listen to a few times. We’ll make sure we put stuff in the description depending on where you’re consuming this content so that way you can reference these seven financial topics and the honorable mentions. But we are committed to continuing to bring you financial topics from a Christian perspective for hopefully many more years. I know Bob doesn’t have any intent on retiring anytime soon. He loves doing this, loves teaching. And we just want to thank everyone who has listened or watched over the years, the comments, suggestions, keep them coming, by the way. We love getting feedback or suggestions on topics that you’d like us to cover and help you with. So if you’d like to learn more about Christian Financial Advisors®, please visit our website@christianfa.com or call or text us at (830) 609-6986 during business hours. Thank you so much and God bless. [DISCLOSURES] * Investment advisory services offered through Christian Investment Advisors Inc dba Christian Financial Advisors®, a registered investment advisor registered with the SEC. Registration as an investment advisor does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Comments from today’s show are for informational purposes only and not to be considered investment advice or recommendations to buy or sell any company that may have been mentioned or discussed. The opinions expressed are solely those of the hosts, Bob Barber and Shawn Peters, and their guests. Bob and Shawn do not provide tax advice and encourage you to seek guidance from a tax professional. While Christian Financial Advisors® believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability.