In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and co-founder of PAX Financial Group, is joined by Bryan Wing, Financial Advisor and Advice Research Manager at PAX, to discuss the intricate landscape of investment strategies. They break down the importance of having a clear ‘why’ behind investment decisions and the role of behavioral finance in achieving financial goals. Bryan shares insights from his extensive research background and highlights both simple and complex investment strategies, including the growing market of alternative investments.
Key show highlights include:
*The significance of a strong ‘why’ in investment planning.
*An overview of simple investment strategies like passive index ETFs.
*An introduction to alternative investments and their benefits.
*Insights into Bryan’s background and his role at PAX Financial Group.
*Personal anecdotes and a glimpse into Bryan’s hobbies and family life.
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons CEO and co-founder of PAX Financial Group and you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax or legal advice. Visit Paxfinancialgroup.com for more information. And then again go to Paxfinancialgroup.com and grab some of our eBooks on there, that’s a great resource for you to learn more. And in our last podcast I talked about pivoting, and I want to encourage you that we have the Cash Flow worksheet.
Darryl: It’s a way to organize your money in such a way that you can look at it from the lens of what are your needs and what are your wants. I really like that cash flow worksheet. It was developed amongst a group of certified financial planners, but stress tested with, I don’t know, 100 clients. So, check out that cash flow worksheet on Paxfinancialgroup.com.
Darryl: Okay, so today is not a solo day for me. I wanted to bring in Bryan Wing. Bryan is one of the partners here at PAX. You probably know him, but if not, he’s behind the scenes and he does a lot of research. He was an advisor for a number of years and still plays that role to a certain degree, but the majority of his time is nerding out. Is that okay? Nerding out on just stuff.
Bryan: That’s very appropriate.
Darryl: So, Bryan spends a lot of time, doing research for our organization, which is really helpful as we’ve grown in scale, paying attention to the details. We just have to have somebody that has their eyes on a lot of those things. And of course, the problem with me is there’s always an idea coming your way, right?
Bryan: And that’s okay. Keeps me busy. That’s the great thing about this industry is that it’s an ever-changing landscape. And that’s part of my role and responsibilities is to just be aware of what’s working, what’s not, what’s new.
Darryl: So, what does it look like for you?
Bryan: Every day is different. So, there’s a good portion of my day that is spent looking over the various investments that that we have. Some of it is advisor support. So, when our advisors need a little bit of information about what’s going on with an investment strategy or some insight, I can step in and help out there. So, every day is a little bit different.
Darryl: Yeah, I would imagine so. You have to have an organized week, but you often get stuff that’s thrown at you, which is you play that role really well. Let’s back up real quick. I want our community to just know who you are. Where are you from originally?
Bryan: Born and bred right here in San Antonio. So, my family’s here. After college, I wanted to move to Colorado. When I was in high school, I went to visit Colorado and just fell in love with the place. But then when I met my wife, Norma, she helped me understand that there’s a difference between visiting cold weather and living in cold weather.
Darryl: Yeah.
Bryan: And so, I’m very much a visiting cold weather type of person.
Darryl: Yeah, same.
Bryan: But yeah. Born and bred right here in San Antonio. All my family’s here. Norma’s family’s here.
Darryl: So, where’d you go to school at?
Bryan: High school was Marshall. And then, I went to college in Houston, Rice University.
Darryl: Rice University. And then did you get your undergraduate degree and then go and get your other degrees after that?
Bryan: I did my undergraduate at Rice and my undergraduate is education in English is in English literature. And, I had aspirations of being an English teacher and that’s what I was going to do once I got out of college. And when I began teaching, the first place that I went to go look for a job, they needed a math teacher at the time.
Bryan: Like, at that moment, somebody was going to military leave, and I was the person in the office that had just submitted an application saying that I was willing to be a substitute. And I had checked off everything, including math, and they said, hey, so you can teach math. And I said, well, yeah, I can do it. I’m very comfortable with it.
Bryan: And I started off as an engineering major. So that’s how I got into teaching math with an English degree and since I didn’t have a teaching certificate, Incarnate Word at the time, had a program that was, being sponsored by NASA to certify teachers, that were going to be in the science or mathematics field. So, I ended up going to that program and got a master’s in education from now, the University of the Incarnate Word.
Darryl: If you’re listening, Bryan’s a very sharp guy. You’re in a great role at PAX. I think. Being able to just help everyone kind of think through things. And I just love seeing you grow in your leadership roles, too. I know you’ve been working on a lot of things over the years, just refining your skill sets as PAX has grown. What’s interesting for those that have grown with PAX over the years, we’ve had to grow as leaders, and we’ve had to refine our skill sets.
Darryl: And Bryan knows that Bryan’s been working really hard at that, but he comes with a good skill set and great giftings in terms of intelligence. I want to get into some more specific business stuff for the audience to be able to take away. But just real quick, I just want to know your hobbies. What does it look like on the weekends and in the evenings?
Bryan: If there’s a spare moment, which they’re few and far between, but whenever there are spare moments, right now, I very much enjoy playing guitar. My hands try to write checks that I cannot cash.
Darryl: Yeah. I’m sure you’re better than you’re letting us on.
Bryan: But I really do enjoy playing guitar. It’s a passion that came to me from my dad. He grew up playing rhythm blues here in San Antonio. That’s where I got that love and interest from.
Darryl: How old are your kids?
Bryan: My son Jonah just turned 11 this summer, and I’m going to have a teenager this fall in November. So, my daughter will be turning 13.
Darryl: Lately, everyone I’ve been meeting, there’s been some people I bumped into that I haven’t seen for 5 or 6 years. You know what they always say to me? They go, Darryl, you got a lot of greys. I’m like, yeah, these greys over here are teenagers, and the one’s over here is the stock market.
Darryl: Our common interest is the Spurs. We talked about that.
Bryan: Of course.
Darryl: We love the Spurs. So let me jump into a little bit of business stuff for a second. What do you see from your vantage point as the biggest challenge for people who are investing? Everyday folk, people that we meet with that are really salt of the earth, that own construction companies, that are teachers, that maybe they’re doctors.
Darryl: They’re people that really, they want two things in life, generally speaking. They want to get a fair shake, and they want to leave the world better than they found it. And that’s most of our clients. What do you think the biggest challenge is for them to be able to meet their financial goals?
Bryan: One of the biggest challenges, I think something that PAX has been very intentional about addressing. I think one of the biggest challenges, not only for our clients but, a lot of investors in general, is just starting out and asking themselves what their goals are. Why are they doing what they’re doing? Meaning, it’s one thing to go, I’m investing money so that I can grow my money.
Bryan: But there has to be a why behind that. With our exercise of honest conversations that we do with our clients that are open to doing that, I think it’s a great way to identify, you know, what they’re why is. I think one of the challenges for investors that can easily get them derailed is if they don’t have a why, then they’re very easily susceptible to the winds of change. There’s a lot of volatility in the market today. So, without that why?
Darryl: Yeah.
Bryan: And it’s very easy for somebody to go, you know what? I’m out. But if you have a very strong why and know the reason why we’re investing, the reason why we are saving money, the reason why we’re willing to stick through this down market is so that we can send the kids to college, so that we can retire when we want to, so we can spend time the way that we envisioned, with spouse, partner or friends or family. Having a strong ‘why’ can really get you through the inevitable, tough times in the market.
Darryl: Yeah, it’s a good point. You know, if those that are listening that haven’t ever looked up Simon Sinek’s, ‘Starts with Why’. That’s a classic video and I think it’s critical to for anyone to listen to that. It doesn’t tell you your ‘why’, but it just it helps you understand how important that is.
Darryl: I was talking to a leader of a nonprofit the other day and we were talking about the challenges on a board, and we’re both on nonprofit boards. I know that you just got appointed to the Casa board. If we have time, I want to hear more about that. And being a part of the community is one of the things that we do at PAX. Many of our advisors, almost everyone, is on a nonprofit board.
Darryl: But I was talking to this nonprofit leader, and we’re talking about the makeup of the board and how the makeup of the board was generally focused in on the here and now and fixing problems. And what we wanted to do is we were thinking about, in an ideal scenario, is getting the board just to begin to think about what does it look like in the future, and creating a vision and starting to think deeply about that vision.
Darryl: I say all that because this exercise of thinking long term, but I always talk about vision casting. That’s just a challenging exercise because we just live in the world wind of like braces and doctor’s appointments, and my back hurts. All kinds of stuff. And so, we don’t have that capacity, the bandwidth, the even the energy to think about our ‘why’.
Darryl: And so that’s why I just want to make sure I just want to double click on what you said, because it’s so important part of the exercise here that we do, even though it may seem kind of mundane, is we have a specific behavioral finance exercise that helps people, to a certain degree, discover their ‘why’. So, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’s called honest conversations for those that didn’t hear that.
Darryl: Let’s get even more granular. We have investment strategies that you play a key role in organizing, researching, double checking, meeting with all the reps around the countries. Because all these investment strategies, there’s thousands guys, there’s thousands and thousands. It’s overwhelming. We meet with their representatives and some of the managers and just make sure things are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
Darryl: So, I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit. What do you think is the most simple strategy we have?
Bryan: I think it’s just going to be a passive, index ETF type of strategy.
Darryl: Very low cost. Right.
Bryan: Exactly. So, one of the benefits of an ETF or an exchange traded fund is going to be that they tend to be low cost. They’re going to track and index. Now, most of our portfolios that are comprised of just ETFs, they’re going to track like you’re going to have one ETF that’s going to track large cap U.S. stocks for the S&P 500. You’ll have another component in there that’s going to track small caps. So, they’re still diversified, but your money is spread out tracking all these various asset classes.
Darryl: Yeah.
Bryan: That’s probably the simplest investment that we have.
Darryl: Yeah, and people could even do that simple strategy on their own. If you wanted to do this simple strategy, they could do it on their own. Doing it with us, allows us to walk alongside of you basically and talk about the ‘whys’ and think about things that you might not think about.
Bryan: I think you bring up a great point as far as, can people do this on their own? That’s one of the great things about the day and age that we live in now, is that, yes, the investment opportunities that I was talking about, you can certainly do this on your own.
Bryan: However, that would be similar to somebody who wanted to get physically fit. It’s not a secret. You eat well, you go out running, you exercise on a regular basis. And sure, you’re going to get fit, but there’s a reason why not everybody is fit. There’s a reason why some people do need accountability and need a guide to help them achieve their goals.
Bryan: And so, for those that want that partner, I think we’re a great place to be with.
Darryl: What’s a more complex strategy? Something that people might not do on their own or might not even know about?
Bryan: So, some of our more complex strategies, one end of the spectrum could be a concentrated stock portfolio, but really, on the far end of the spectrum.
Darryl: Give me far end.
Bryan: Okay. So, what I just talked about with the more average type of investment strategy deals with the common buckets of stocks, bonds and having some money invested in cash. Outside of those arenas then you’ll have what we call alternative investments. So alternative investments are going to be things that are different or alternative to those basic buckets I just mentioned of.
Bryan: So alternative investments could be things like investing in privately held companies. So, when we’re talking, when you turn the news on and you’re seeing them talk about the S&P 500. They’re talking about companies, Apples, Googles, you know they’re small companies but publicly traded companies. On the alternative side, they’re talking about investments in companies that are privately held, or we have private credit managers, partners as well, that will lend money to companies that don’t want to go through public avenues.
Darryl: That’s a growing market by the way because there’s a lot of reasons that companies don’t go public. So, imagine. I collect sports cards still as a grown man, and sports memorabilia, and have since I was a kid and enjoyed it. But Topps is a manufacturer of sports cards. Last time I checked, it could have changed by now, it’s been while, they were a private company. You can buy their stock on your portfolio. But it’d be nice to own the company. How do I get access to that company? I can’t buy it on my computer.
Darryl: HEB is another good example. HEB is a private company.
Bryan: Crayola.
Darryl: Crayola, yeah. There’s a lot of good private companies.
Bryan: Absolutely.
Darryl: And they just don’t want to go public because they don’t want to deal with the nonsense of what it means to go public. You’re kind of governed by the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. But that’s a good complex idea.
Bryan: Yeah, and as one’s investments grow and you want more diversification, then you can begin to introduce those types of strategies. So that is something that is not readily available to just the average retail investor that is doing it on their own. So, getting some access to those types of investments that’s where you would want to partner with the firm, like ourselves, or through an advisory firm to get some access to that.
Darryl: Yeah, it’s a good, good point. Okay. We ran out of time.
Bryan: Okay.
Darryl: It’s been awesome. Who’s your favorite Spurs player of all time.
Bryan: All time? So, I think it’d have to be Manu.
Darryl: Manu?
Bryan: Yeah.
Darryl: What’s your favorite kind of salsa?
Bryan: Oh, I like Julio’s lately.
Darryl: Yeah, with the chips, too.
Bryan: Yeah.
Darryl: Okay. Good for you.
Bryan: Trader Joe’s. The blue corn chips. That’s my go to.
Darryl: Love it. Man, I’m honored to be able to have you here at PAX and be a partner here and to be on this journey with you. You and your family are just wonderful people. And so, thank you for joining me today.
Bryan: It has been a pleasure.
Darryl: Thank you guys for listening and if you want to chat with Bryan a little bit more you can find him on our website. There’s a ‘Contact Us’ button, you can do it there. Of course, if you’re a client listening and you’re a fan of Bryan, ping him and say great job, I know that’s encouraging. And, for those that are listening and who listen always, I want to remind you, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
Tune in to gain valuable insights and practical advice for navigating your financial journey. Don’t forget to visit http://www.paxfinancialgroup.com for more resources and information.
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