george grombacher 0:02
Chad to get us started. Give me two truths and a lie, please. All

Chad Hufford 0:07
right, two truths and a lie. Well, even though we even run a financial planning firm that manages about half a billion dollars, I have no formal financial education. I had a pet wolf growing up, and I killed a bear with a bow and arrow when I was 13.

george grombacher 0:28
Those are amazing. North no formal financial education and then it gets considerably just different. You killed a bear with a bow and arrow at age 13. And you had a pet wolf growing up. Oh, my goodness. No way. You had a pet wolf chat?

Chad Hufford 0:50
Actually, I did.

george grombacher 0:53
Nice. What was your wife’s name?

Chad Hufford 0:56
Wasn’t very creative. It was White Fang named it out. And so so the Disney movie came out in like the late 80s. And I was like, That is awesome. I have to have one of these and bought him from a musher here in here in Alaska. So back then you didn’t need a permit for him. And they actually raised hybrid wolves for movies. So some of some of the the lineage of my dog was actually in that that Disney movie, so, okay,

george grombacher 1:25
awesome. We’re gonna have to circle back on musher. Because I bet it’s a very small percentage of listeners who will know what that is. So did you in fact, which was the lie?

Chad Hufford 1:35
The lie was the bear. Okay. I was I was 12. Oh, sure. Well,

george grombacher 1:43
that is amazing. And were you bear hunting or Yes, and you’re just in your backyard and a bear attack to you and you had to kill it with a bow and arrow.

Chad Hufford 1:51
You know, we’ve had them come through our yard. So just to give you some acreage, Anchorage is a real town. It’s a real city, like we went to Costco, the movie theaters, the malls, about 300,000 people, but we lived on kind of the outskirts, and that’s what that’s what allowed me to have a hybrid wolf as a pet because it was nothing but 1000s of acres behind us of Parkland. So we had bears and moose come through our yard, but I was actually purposely hunting with a bow and arrow, it wasn’t just, you know, taking a walk in the neighborhood and this thing charges after me so

george grombacher 2:24
right. Okay, and what is a musher?

Chad Hufford 2:26
So a musher is somebody who raised his dog sleds, which again, yeah, probably not, not something in Phoenix, Arizona, you’re gonna run into a lot. But here in Alaska, we have the Iditarod, which is it’s usually not usually it’s always in February, but it’s like 1000 mile dog sled race, and it’s pretty intense. So these guys raced in it and they raised dogs for other mushers. And yeah, that’s my story. I’m sticking to it, George, it’s,

george grombacher 2:55
it’s awesome. I mentioned to you, I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, and we had the John beargrease sled dog race every every year. So I’m aware of mushers and sled dogs and all that good stuff, but just at a very different level, I suppose. So no formal financial education.

Chad Hufford 3:14
I did not know I actually my degrees in biochemistry. But I grew up in the financial world. And one of the things when I So my original plan was to go into medicine. But I started getting interested in finance. And realizing I had all these tools, I grown up with it, I just thought was normal the way that I grew up, but didn’t realize how valuable that that practical education was. So I asked my dad is like, you know, should I be going to get a finance degree. So he’s got a finance degree in the Econ degree. And he said, before you start any formal education, you need some practical application, because if everything that they taught in finance classes worked, then more people would be wealthy. But what works in theory in a classroom doesn’t actually apply to real life, because we are psychological human beings. And it comes down to behavior, not just the tools, you can’t, you know, you can’t give somebody a faster car and expect them to be a better driver. You have to teach them how to operate that tool in the finance industry is all about, hey, let’s let’s give you a faster investment or a a more luxurious investment. But we don’t actually teach people at a fundamental level how to operate better. So he wanted me to build that, that practical base first and he was already retired. So, you know, he had the time to kind of work with me and mentor me and, but then he also encouraged me to study people who not just created wealth for themselves as a one off, but consistently created wealth for others, and did it in a real meaningful way. Because there’s a huge difference between somebody who is, you know, a tenured professor with a pension, and everybody else, it not just says anything wrong, like if your tenure Professor listens, that’s awesome that you have that kind of job security and if you have a pension, that’s great. It’s just most people don’t have that. So to be able to live in the real world with all of the uncertainty that people face when they’re planning for their futures, and to actually create a pathway, so I studied people that did that, that created abundance and wealth in the lives of others and did it repeatedly. So we knew it wasn’t just a one off people like Nick Murray, Dave Ramsey, Larry Bearcat, some of these other other folks, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, they they were able to duplicate their process. It wasn’t just a fluke.

george grombacher 5:33
I love it. Well, what is top of mind for you right now?

Chad Hufford 5:38
What’s top of mind for me right now is we’re looking at this crazy world around us. And everybody is they’re worried about the election, they’re worried about interest rates. They’re worried about what’s the economy going to do? We’re going to go into recession. We’re not we’re already in recession. Who knows? But everybody, George, we’re worried about the things we can’t control. And I think what’s happening is people overlook, they’re overlooking their own agency. They’re overlooking their own ownership. And by focusing on what they can’t control, they’re missing what they can. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities out there that that people are either afraid of, they’re viewing an opposite opportunity as obstacle, or they’re just simply missing altogether, because the media in my industry is taking everybody’s focus. And we’re forced feeding them. A lot of distractions and misinformation.

george grombacher 6:30
And personal agency is one of the most important things that I have.

Chad Hufford 6:36
It absolutely is. And if if I, if I tell you, everything important, George is outside of your control, who’s going to be elected president, what interest rates are going to do what the inflation rate in this next year is going to be with the stock, you will eventually learn helplessness, because I’ve told you that everything that is going to change the financial trajectory of your life, you can’t do anything about, you’re just now waiting on the sidelines. You’re your own life, hoping for some good luck. And yes, luck helps. But it’s not necessary. And I that’s a big thing that we preach is personal agency, we’re not going to worry about everything you can’t control. Does it have an impact? Absolutely, it does. But we’re going to focus on your behaviors, your choices. I mean, just one example is everybody’s focused on investment returns, is that important? Absolutely. But between this growth stock mutual fund and that growth stock mutual fund, who knows which one’s gonna outperform the other, but we focus so much on on investment rate, that we miss investing rate, the rate, my savings rate, the rate at which I actually add to that investment. So if your large cap growth fund performs at 9.8, over the next 20 years, and mine gets 9.3. But we’re both broke on a park bench at 80. Because we didn’t save enough. What difference does it make the relative performance those funds so people need to focus on on savings rate more than they look at return rate?

george grombacher 8:09
That makes a lot of sense to me. I think so much really powerful stuff there learned helplessness I wrote down taught helplessness. And now if somebody tries to just spoon feed it or shove it down my throat enough, and if I’m a young person, it’s probably going to stick just because I don’t know any better. Not to go crazy off the rails here. But that’s the problem, from my perspective, with a lot of isms is if I think that there’s some boogeyman out there, who’s gonna get me and I’m taught that from an early age, I think that that deprives me of my agency. But that’s neither here nor there. But it certainly applies to every aspect of life, certainly personal finance and your overall success. It

Chad Hufford 8:47
absolutely does. We all bring biases into the investing game, we all have a lens through which we view, whatever whatever ism that you think might be out to get get you, or just any circumstance, we all have a lens and a bias. And in some ways, we can’t change that. Like, you’ve got things that happen in your life, your childhood, that that I can’t I can try to understand empathize, but I can’t see it and view it the way you did. And you can’t see things when I grew up homeschooled in the 80s, long before it was cool. I’ve like I’ve got enough stuff to keep therapists really busy for a long time. But just just one example is like back in 2022. And everybody was afraid of the recession. And you had we had a lot of people my industry especially talking about the crash and this market decline and bear market and all that. Our clients were saying like, well, the best companies world are on sale, how can I get more money in their exact same circumstance? You had the some of the best businesses in the world at a discount, but most people were running away from it. And then you got a handful people viewing it as an opportunity to differences the bias that we bring into the world that we were During that situation, so I think you’re you’re, you’re 100% right on George. And that’s, that’s a big thing we try to do is have to shift people’s perspectives. We can’t force them to think differently. But can we get them to look at an old problem in a new way? Just long enough to see, okay? Do I need to readjust my thinking patterns a little bit,

george grombacher 10:19
I find, I’m fine to saying that I chop wood all summer, not because I want to be burning the wood during the summer months, but I need to be burning it in the winter. So it’s just, it’s, it’s all about staying ready. And, you know, I’m 45. And I’ve missed, just in my earlier years, opportunities to buy when the market crashes, and I don’t want to miss those opportunities ever again. So I need to be prepared.

Chad Hufford 10:45
And, and to have the courage to step into that. Because it isn’t easy. There’s actually there’s actually a proverb that I believe is Proverbs 19, that talks about plowing during winter. The fool does not plow during winter, but you will starve during the harvest. And you think about like, who’s gonna plow during the winter, like, that’s if there’s snow on the ground, but it’s doing the difficult thing in the midst of adversity. And, and that’s what buying during a downturn is isn’t feel like a good thing, just like getting out and going for a run in Anchorage, Alaska, when it’s 45 degrees in the morning, even though it’s July, and it doesn’t feel good, but it’s paying that price now to reap reward in the future. And that’s what investors is what everybody needs to do is have that better relationship with their future self. So that investment they make in the short term feels less like a sacrifice, and more like what it should and investment.

george grombacher 11:43
So how do I get that courage to be able to recognize, okay, this is my opportunity, I’m going to pull the trigger on bind when

Chad Hufford 11:52
things are down. I think one of the biggest things, George is having a plan, if you’re building a house, and you know, what that house needs to look like. And you have a blueprint connecting, where you want to be in the future with what you’re doing today. And a certain tool or material comes on sale, you’re like, oh, I need that for my financial house, you already have a game plan, you can see where that thing fits in. But if you don’t, if you’re just wandering through the aisles of Home Depot, the tendency is to pick the most popular tools, not necessarily the tools that you need. So I think having a strategic game plan, a roadmap, a blueprint, however you want to look at it, but something that connects your current actions with what you’re building in the future. So when you go through those difficult periods, which I believe are opportunity, you’re more likely to see them as such and less likely to see them as an obstacle, because you can connect that hard action in the short term with the payoff in the long run.

george grombacher 12:52
Opportunities versus obstacles, we can look at the same scenario. And if you think it’s an opportunity, you’re going to act differently than if you think that this is an obstacle.

Chad Hufford 13:03
Well, that just reminds me of an episode you recently released on work, and you talked about work shouldn’t be something that we avoid, like it’s and that’s that’s our culture right now is we look at work as an obstacle to be avoided, rather than opportunity to be embraced and I get it like there’s tough things with work and things like that. But that’s that’s exactly what I thought of when I was thinking that episode of if we looked at work as an opportunity to express our truest self. Now, some jobs be hard to do that. But we can view it as an opportunity rather than an obstacle to be avoided. So I actually I not to pat you on the back too much and toot your horn, George, but that was people do not understand how, how precious that message is. Just within this week, just yesterday, I had a retired law enforcement officer. And he spent 20 years in crimes against children, the job I would never want. And he retired recently, and I told him I was like, you gotta find something retire to your unplugging from this thing, which is stressful. It was hard. It was probably taking years off your life. So I’m glad you’re retiring. But you got to plug into something else. And he’s he said, I had so much stress in my job. It was hard to take that advice seriously. But now two or three years has gone by and he’s like, I’ve actually dealt with have dealt with some really strange emotions. And I’ve realized how valuable that advice was to find meaningful work to plug into because even though he unplugged from something that that was that was stressful, and was probably wearing on his health. He needed something else to step into. It’s, you know, we don’t we don’t want retirement to be like You’re running away from a burning building. It should be more about what you’re chasing. And one of the metaphors I give is, you know, if you watch any nature show, and I’ve got six kids so we watch a lot of nature shows but you watch like a nature show on Netflix and you see like a leopard Chase Seeing a gazelle or something like that, they’re both running as hard as their bodies will lead them. But only one is having any fun because one is being chased. And one is chasing something. They’re they’re both running with the same effort and intensity, but only one is enjoying it.

george grombacher 15:21
That’s awesome. I love everything about that. So what a great couple of great stories, they’re particularly well, they’re they’re both really good. The law enforce professional dealing with crimes against children, I mean, every day must have been just the most intense thing in the world. And just so committed to the work and just so heavy and important that oh my goodness, you to step away from that what a void that’s going to be there. And if you’re in a job that you don’t like, and you just stop working, I just I don’t even know what that’s gonna look like either you probably just turn into a couch potato.

Chad Hufford 16:05
Well, there’s there’s a huge risk in viewing retirement as a finish line for two reasons. Number one, is if we view retirement like a finish line, the tendency is to be overly focused on that tape in front of us and we can miss the journey. We can sacrifice too much as we approach that tape. But the other thing is, you know, what do you do when when you cross the finish line, you slow down, you stop you rest. And that’s okay in seasons, but that shouldn’t be like retirement, I don’t believe should be 20 years of Saturday’s and we there’s a lot of people that if they don’t have something to retire to, they crossed that that proverbial finish line into retirement. And they’re like, is this all it was? And I think I think you mentioned as we’re gonna release, this episode is gonna be in the Olympics. In another life, I used to train some professional athletes, some mixed martial arts fighters, some Olympians, as working with a skier, a professional skier who he skied for Team Canada, two or three Olympics, so we don’t judge him for that he’s a good guy. But he said one of the most elating moments of his life, was standing on the podium and hearing the Canadian National Anthem play. And he said one of those empty moments of his life was the very next day when he woke up and realize if he sacrificed for the next four years, every relationship, his time his sleep, even his body to some degree, the best he could hope for was to be where he was the day before. And he was looking back and saying, was this all there was because there was a finish line there. And I think too many people view retirement and financial independence the same way. So George, we started, we started calling it a job optional lifestyle. Where you’re you live independently from a paycheck. Does that mean you stop working? It doesn’t mean, you don’t maybe start a new career. Maybe you go in business for yourself, maybe you stay at your other job, because you know what, if you don’t have to go back to work on Monday, the stress that you’re dealing with actually rolls off your shoulders, it’s easier to deal with the TPS reports and the drudgery at work if you don’t have to be there. But looking at it from an independent standpoint, where if if you are working at a job, if you’re still collecting a paycheck, you’re doing it because you want to not because you have to. And that’s where we try to get people where they have a job optional lifestyle.

george grombacher 18:31
You are crushing it, Chad, I love that too. How would your perspective be? If you could just walk out the door whenever you wanted? Would your enjoyment your experience be elevated? Probably.

Chad Hufford 18:45
And, you know, sometimes people get promoted into areas that they don’t like, and we’ve all seen people promoted beyond their level of confidence. Like, you know, maybe you’re a car salesman, and you’re great at sales. Now they promote your sales manager. Well, managing salesman is completely different skill set. You might love selling because you just everything about the car, the nuances, the smell, the leather, all that stuff, but managing a bunch of other salesmen that might steal your soul. But people make those those decisions because of the professional accolades and the money attached to it. But if you don’t need the money, you’d be like, No, thank you. I don’t need this promotion. I value the job duties more than I value the money attached to it. We’ve had people that that make really, really good money, retire and go take jobs like Cabela’s and Bass Pro, or, you know, working at a restaurant or just because they love it. They love people. We’ve got a lady that’s getting ready to retire from one of the oil companies. Her and her husband are going to go to remote Alaskan villages to minister to help with building projects and to teach and things like that. And they’re going to be self supported. So they because they can provide their own income they don’t need an organization Mission, they don’t need a charity, nobody to sponsor them, but they’re doing what they love in the service to other people. And George, I just think that if people have that viewpoint, that perspective of retirement as these could be the most impactful years of my life, not only will they enjoy retirement more, Bill, enjoy the journey to get there much, much more. Because if my goal to save money for the future is just to quit working, that’s going to make my job feel more and more like a drudgery rather than a means to end. But because if all I want to do is quit working, Matt can do that. Now the government will take care of me, and I’m not I’m not suggesting that as a as a as a plan for any of your audience, but but our, our drive our objective, our goal, our vision has to be much, much more than simply, I don’t have to go to work anymore.

george grombacher 20:51
Well said, well, Chad, you’ve given us a lot of um, but we’re ready for that difference making tip. What do you have for us, man? All

Chad Hufford 20:57
right. So kind of going back to this distraction thing. Most people are looking at their investments, and they’re, they’re overly fixated on the principal value, the amount of money that if they sold all their mutual funds, all their stocks, that they if they cleared out their 401k. That’s what it’s worth today. That’s the principal value, financial independence job. Optional. Lifestyle is an income issue, not a principal problem. So people need to be focusing on the amount of income that their investments can produce over the lifetime, not what it’s worth at the moment. So just one practical tip around that. If people were to focus on their dividend income, the dividends that their funds produced in their IRA, their 401k on a quarterly basis, rather than looking at how much those funds are worth on a daily or weekly basis. Not only would they be a more patient and better investor, they would also enjoy the journey a lot more. So financial independence is an income issue, not a principal problem.

george grombacher 22:00
Well, I think that is great stuff that definitely gets a Come on. Chad, why let you go? You’ve got six kids. Do you have a wolf as a pet at the house?

Chad Hufford 22:11
We do not. So actually move back to the same neighborhood that I grew up. But it is far more popular than it used is called stuck again, heights. It earned that name stuck again, because you might get stuck today, but you’ll probably be stuck again in the future. And they’ve cleaned up the road. So it’s there’s about 50 homes up there. And now there’s a couple 100 So we just we don’t have the land. And you know what? I’m raising six kids. I don’t need anything else to raise right now. But maybe someday. Okay,

george grombacher 22:41
fair enough. It was more just a question of would you allow a wolf into your house and was an indictment of your parents looking backwards more so than a practical thing?

Chad Hufford 22:50
Well, you know, what was interesting is he didn’t want to be in the house. No, I

george grombacher 22:55
don’t imagine. Yeah,

Chad Hufford 22:56
he loved he loved the family. But the wolf liked being out Yeah. As he wanted, he wanted to run around and chase things in the woods. So that’s what we did.

george grombacher 23:06
That’s awesome. Well, thanks again for coming out. Where can people learn more about you? How can people engage with you,

Chad Hufford 23:11
Veritas alaska.com is our website and don’t let the name fool you. We got folks who work with all across the country but we’re founded here in Alaska, it’s got some cachet to it. And then Veritas dot Alaska on Instagram. We’re also on Facebook. And if you just look for Chad Hufford on LinkedIn, you’ll find me there too.

george grombacher 23:31
Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, should shed your appreciation share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to Veritas alaska.com Regardless of whether you’re part of in the lower 48 or in Alaska or Hawaii, or wherever you are at go find him on Vera toss dot dot Alaska on social media, and get in touch. Thanks. Good, Chad. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Finally, friendly reminder, never gonna be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are. So act accordingly.