It’s Boring… But This Is How You Build REAL WEALTH

I love being a resource for this online community and when you ask a question, I read every comment down below. Try it out. Go ahead and ask a question down below and see if I make a video that answers that question in the very near future. For today, I took 12 of the best questions I could find to compile my thoughts for you. Questions like, is the S&P 500 enough or should I own other sectors? What three stocks would you buy and hold forever today? Should I invest in gold or precious metals? And how do I know if my portfolio is too risky? Also, this one's for you, First Last 1732. Basher says hello and says, "You got to lighten up a little bit, bud." But for real, on the last video that I had Basher in, you guys all had so many nice comments and you all said hello to Basher and he felt very loved. So, for today, Basher says, "Happy Saturday." Let's get it. My name is Nolan Goa. My students call me Professor G and I made this channel to make investing simplified. Remember that all investing carries risk, so do your own research. This is not financial advice and I'm not a financial adviser. So, number one, how can I set up my life financially to be as safe as possible but still get the upside of growth long term? This is a very good question because unfortunately, when I'm doing my one-on-one private financial coaching, I see people go in one of two areas, and both aren't necessarily the best. Sometimes people go way too aggressive and they're just trying to get as much growth as possible and sometimes people are playing it way too safe and not getting any growth. That's where my three fund portfolio comes in. My thought and my research suggests that having something foundational like the S&P 500 or total US stock market is a great base for the portfolio and you're going to get average market returns on that somewhere between 8 to 10% usually per year. But then to keep the portfolio a bit safer and less volatile, especially as you get closer to retirement and definitely in retirement, you want something lower volatility and very much recessionproof. And that's where something like SCHD or a highly value ETF comes in. But then on the flip side, especially in your growing years, especially as you're accumulating and you're nowhere near retirement, this portion should be a bit more aggressive, maybe even more risky than the overall market. So that if things go up, this portion goes up a lot more. Something like QQQM or SCHG or VUG. You could even go more aggressive and go very sector specific like VGT for technology, SMH for semiconductors, things like that. Now, just know that all of that is still moderately risky because it's still all equities. If the entire stock market drops, all three of those are going to drop. it's just going to drop less in the safest portion. That's why I always recommend an emergency fund. That right there is going to be the key. But the other key is the one that nobody really listens to and just glosses over. And that one is to keep your debts low, but also to spend less than you make. That sounds obvious, but in my experience, it's not obvious enough. And on that note, I wanted to clue you in on a free seminar that I'm doing Saturday, September 19th at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, noon Eastern. Is your portfolio retirement ready? This is for those close to retirement or even very far from retirement. How to set your portfolio to be very safe and successful in retirement and financially free, but also how to grow that portfolio so that you can retire and be very, very solid. I'll also have a live Q&A time. So, if you'd like to get your question answered in real time, show up on Saturday, September 19th. The link's down below. It's 100% free, so save your spot today. Number two, is the S&P 500 enough or should I own Growth Small Caps International? For most people starting out, the S&P 500 is more than enough as a core portfolio because it gives you instant diversification across 500 major US companies and keeps things simple while you focus on consistently investing and letting compounding work. As your portfolio grows and your goals become more specific, that's when adding growth, small caps, international bonds, or other asset classes can make sense. Not because the S&P 500 is lacking, but because you may want to tailor your portfolio around your risk tolerance, income needs, time horizon, and retirement goals. I always go back to the facts and look at the actual data. Remember that the S&P 500 has a long-term average return of about 11% per year. If you just invested $500 per month for 40 years at 11%, you'd have $3.5 million. That seems pretty good to me. Number three is one that I get inevitably pretty much every single day. Should I invest aggressively or pay off all my debt first? Here's how I look at it. The interest on your debt is the most important number to understand in order to be able to answer this question. Let's say you have $20,000 in credit card debt at 20% interest. That debt is costing you roughly $4,000 a year in interest. If you have extra money, paying that off is essentially a guaranteed 20% return on your money. It's very difficult to justify investing while carrying debt that expensive. But now, let's say you have a $20,000 car loan at 4%. That's only about $800 a year in interest. Instead of rushing to pay that loan off, you could make your normal payments and invest your extra money in something like an S&P 500 fund. Now, the S&P 500 doesn't guarantee a return, but historically it's produced roughly 11% annually over very long periods. So, if your debt costs you 4% and your expected long-term investment return is higher, there's a reasonable argument for keeping the lowinterest debt and investing the difference. So, my general rule, if it's highinterest debt, attack it aggressively. Low interest debt, say under 5%, make the normal payments and consider investing the rest. Not all debt is bad debt, but also what's going to help you sleep at night. If having any amount of debt isn't letting you sleep or you're anxious or you're just too worried about any of these things, then for you it's probably the best move for you to pay it off. If it's going to help you to be able to relax, hang out with family, go on a trip, and not have to worry about it, then absolutely pay that debt off. And speaking of traveling, when I was traveling around Europe recently, surprise roaming charges and hunting down local SIM cards at every airport were the absolute worst. Nothing frustrates me more than wasting time and dealing with unhedged, unpredictable expenses. Switching to Olafly Plans during my trip was the best decision for keeping my fixed costs low while staying connected. Thank you to Olafly for sponsoring this video. Olafly plans is a monthly global e sim covering over 160 destinations with two flexible options, light and unlimited. I use unlimited because it gives me unlimited data and hotspotting. From a financial security standpoint, one key feature makes this a complete no-brainer. The unlimited option gives you a US phone number. That means you can seamlessly receive bank verification codes and two-factor authentication texts for your accounts without risking locked access overseas. Every plan also includes their always on feature. Think of it as a built-in risk buffer that gives you 1 gigabyte of backup data per month for free across 150 plus destinations, even when your main plan isn't active. Stop letting hidden roaming fees drain your travel balance sheet. Head to the link down in my description to check them out and use code investing simplified at checkout to get 10% off Ola plans or 5% off standard eims. All right, on to a huge one. What are three stocks that you'd buy today and hold forever and why? Number one is Berkshire Hathway. This one's a buy and hold forever stock because it gives investors exposure to a diversified collection of highquality businesses, disciplined capital allocation, and Warren Buffett's long-term investing philosophy. Not to mention the behemoth cash pile they have to go buy more businesses when they start to fail big time in the next crash. Number two is Alphabet or Google. I'm buying this and holding forever because its dominant search and advertising business generates enormous cash flow while its leadership and AI, cloud, YouTube, and other emerging technologies gives it multiple engines for long-term growth. One of the most interesting parts is that you're getting exposure to several potential future giants beyond search and YouTube. Whimo. This is Alphabet's autonomous driving company already operating commercial robo taxi services and expanding into more US cities in Europe. SpaceX. Alphabet has a 4.2% stake making it one of SpaceX's largest shareholders. Anthropic. Alphabet has made major investments in the claude AI company, giving Google indirect exposure to another potential AI powerhouse. Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AIdriven drug discovery company, using DeepMind technology to attack pharmaceutical research and drug development. Google DeepMind, technically part of Alphabet rather than a separate investment, but potentially one of the company's most valuable long-term assets as AI advances. And number three is one of my biggest holdings as far as individual stocks goes, and this is Microsoft. It combines an incredibly durable software ecosystem with Azure and AI, giving it multiple powerful engines for long-term growth and cash flow. It's not simply investing in AI. It controls much of the infrastructure, cloud platform, developer tools, and software where businesses will actually use AI. Microsoft says it now operates 400 plus data centers across 70 regions and is building AI infrastructure at enormous scale. You're buying a dominant company today that's simultaneously positioned to benefit from cloud computing, AI, cyber security, enterprise software, productivity, gaming, and the next generation of computing. And I practice what I preach. Those three are the biggest holdings in my entire portfolio as far as individual stock holdings. Number five, should I have gold or precious metals in the portfolio? Statistically, gold is a great store of value. It's gone up in value forever, like longer than the stock market's even been around. It's a very solid asset, and it's something to hold in the portfolio that is a hedge against cash, a hedge against inflation, even a hedge against the stock market. But recently, people think of gold as this crazy growth stock because last year it went up over 100%. And I would just say be careful if that's the reason why you want to have gold. Since 1971, gold has delivered roughly a 9% annualized return through 2025. Comparable to equities while also serving as a diversifier and inflation hedge. You don't need a huge gold allocation, but 5 to 10% position can give a long-term portfolio another source of return and potentially reduce volatility and draw downs when stocks struggle. Especially for my clients that are retirees, holding a little portion of gold or what I always recommend is just something outside of the stock market. Whether that be cash and cash equivalents, it could be real estate. It could be gold. Some type of asset that is generally always appreciating. And gold definitely fits into that to make your portfolio a little less volatile and a little less dependent on what happens in the stock market. Number six, if one of my investments drops 30 to 50%, should I buy more or get out? Now, if you've been watching this channel for any period of time, I hope that you've seen that what I've taught you is that you should be able to answer this question. If you can't answer this question about your certain stock or ETF or whatever it is that you're holding, then you probably didn't do enough research at the beginning. I know for a fact that if Microsoft dropped 30% 50% all I'm doing is backing up the trucks and buying more. Bergkshire Hathaway has been relatively flat for a year or so and I've just been adding to that while everything else goes up because I know right now is the accumulation phase. When Google dropped a bunch about a year or two ago, I was telling my private group that I'm buying a lot now and a lot of them did too. And most recently, it's gone up a bunch. And since it's gone up, I've just gone back to just dollar cost averaging, not adding extra extra more to it each and every month because at this point it seems more fair valued. All that to say is that if you believe in the asset, if the company hasn't changed fundamentally, if the ETF is still what you bought it for, and right now we're just going through a healthy correction in the stock market or there's a reason why it's down, then absolutely be adding more to it, or at the very least just stay put. I will caution you though, just because something drops doesn't mean that that's a dip. It could be a crash and it could never come back up, especially if it's an individual stock. So, make sure and do your research. Number seven, should dividend investors focus on high yield or dividend growth? Very good question. And the answer to that is it depends on where you are in your investing journey. When I say high yield versus dividend growth, what I mean is high yield would be like a covered call ETF, something like SPY or Jeepy or something where you're getting 7, 10, 12% dividends, usually monthly. A dividend growth would be something like SCHD or maybe even dividend king stocks like Proctor and Gamble or Johnson and Johnson. Those are going to have a dividend like 3%, 4%, something of that nature. but each and every year or at least consistently they're going to be growing that dividend by a couple percentages. If you're in retirement or you need the income right now, then the high yield dividend is the one that you're probably going to want to go for. If you're far away from retirement, you have time for this thing to compound and just do a dividend snowball, it's going to be your best bet to more so be in the dividend growth. You also don't really need that income, so you don't need to be taxed on that. And speaking of taxes, that's the other thing we have to understand where you're holding this. If you're holding in a retirement account versus a taxable brokerage, that changes things up, too. Unfortunately, the answer to this is it depends. But it very much depends on where you are in your investment journey. So, figure that out and you'll probably figure out the answer for yourself. Number eight, how do I know if my portfolio is too risky? This is a great question. And this is one that I talk about a lot in my school group and we talk about these when we have our weekly live calls. But my answer to that is if it feels like it's too risky, then it probably is. If you have one of these types of dips that we've seen over this last year or so, cuz every couple of weeks we have some type of dip, even if it's just 3 or 4%. If that freaked you out too much, if your emotions were all over the place because your portfolio dropped too much in a short period of time, you're probably too risky for what your risk profile actually is. Generally, we would say if you're closer to or in retirement, you want your portfolio to be less volatile, meaning you want to have a portion of the portfolio in something absolutely safe that can't be touched if the stock market drops. That would be bonds, cash equivalents, things outside of the stock market, gold kind of fits into that as well. If you go and you look at your portfolio and it's all equities, we could still make that moderately safe by having more value in there. But if you look at your portfolio and it's all growth stocks and growth ETFs and things that can go up like crazy and they're all maybe technologyheavy, just know that they can go up very fast and they can drop very fast. So, you want to be a disciplined investor and have at least a portion of that portfolio in something boring. That's why a lot of people rip on me when I talk about SCHD. But over this last year, SCHD has been killing it. So, I think that it's okay to have some safety in the portfolio, keep things a little more boring. And what that does is that actually keeps you in the market for longer. I always tell people the best portfolio is one that can stay invested. And usually people pull money out of their portfolio or sell out of a certain thing because it's too risky and too bumpy and they lose too much money too quickly. If you don't know if your portfolio is too risky for where you are in your investment journey, just book a call with me and we'll do a one-on-one private financial coaching session. Number nine's a big one, and this is where should I keep cash? There's so many options out there. There's your regular bank account, which I hope that's not where you're putting most of your cash because that return or that interest is terrible. There's also high yield savings accounts or CDs or tea bills or money market account. Like, where do I keep them? For the most part, if you're just starting out and you're not in a very high tax bracket, a high yield savings account is a great place to put it. I like Capital 1, Capital 1 360 savings. The money market at Fidelity or Charles Schwab or Robin Hood or wherever that's giving you above a 3% is great as well, but if you are in a higher tax bracket, you do need to pay attention. Number one might be municipal money market funds or short-term municipal bond funds. The interest is generally federal tax exempt, making them particularly attractive in high brackets. Another place would be your state's municipal bonds, potentially federal and sales tax exempt if you buy qualifying bonds from your state. Also, treasury bills. Interest is federally taxable, but exempt from state and local income tax. So, they're especially attractive in high tax states like California. Also, taxable money market or high yield savings like I was talking about. It's good for liquidity, but the interest is generally fully taxable. So, the headline yield can be misleading for someone in a high bracket. The key calculation is tax equivalent yield. A 4% tax-free municipal yield can be worth roughly 6.5% of taxable yield for someone in a 38% marginal federal bracket and potentially even more when state taxes are considered. For a highincome California investor specifically, I generally look at California municipal money market funds and California municipal bonds or treasuries before simply chasing the highest taxable cash yield. Number 10, when do I have enough invested to stop adding money and let compounding do the work? This is called the crossover point. And I actually did a video on this very recently, so I'll cue that up as a video for you to watch right when this is done. But basically, it talks about that when your investments start making more money than you can even invest, you're basically at that point. So if in general you're able to invest $1,000 a month, that's $12,000 a year. But let's say you have $300,000 invested and it gets an average of around 10%. That investment makes you $30,000. You can only invest 12,000. So technically, your investments are investing more for you than even you are. But an even better crossover point, and one that I go over deeper in the video, is when your investments are actually taking care of all of your expenses. So, if your expenses are something like $5,000 a month or $60,000 a year and you have about $600,000 invested and on average it's getting a 10% return, you're receiving about $60,000 that you can then put towards your expenses. Now, obviously, we wouldn't want that to be that tight, and I definitely wouldn't tell you to take out 10% on average from a retirement portfolio, but just generally, if we're talking about what the crossover point might be, we're getting close at that point. It all comes down to this idea that you've been very disciplined, working so hard and aggressive to put money towards investing for your future, but at a certain point, it starts working harder than you even can. And so you can take your foot off the pedal just a little bit. I wouldn't say stop investing altogether, but you can cut it back a bit and maybe just uh chill out a little bit or enjoy life or do things with your family and things that actually matter today in the present moment because the most important thing that we have is time. That's the biggest and most important asset and honestly the most valuable asset that we can never get back. Number 11. What should I do differently once my portfolio reaches $100,000, $500,000, or a million? The biggest change in your portfolio as it grows is not to go and try to make it more complicated. It's becoming more intentional with diversification, taxes, risk management, and income. At $100,000, focus on building a strong, lowcost core, and consistent contributions. At $500,000, start optimizing diversification across growth, small caps, international, and other assets based on your goals. At a million dollars plus, tax efficiency, asset location, downside protection, and creating sustainable income become much more important because protecting and efficiently compounding the wealth you've built can matter as much as generating additional returns. The free webinar that I'm doing on September 19th is going to go much deeper into this. Not just how you can live and be financially free with a portfolio in retirement, but how can we build to get you there. Both of those are very important. And the big thing that I see that people do wrong is how they invest to get to retirement is not the same thing as when you're in retirement. You can't keep the same portfolio. And even now, people are doing things wrong that I'll go over in that webinar that's going to help them actually get to financial freedom much quicker. Even if you can't make the actual seminar, if you just sign up with the link down below, I'm going to record it and send it out to you via email. So, sign up today, totally 100% free. Okay, number 12. How do I prepare my portfolio if I think a recession is coming? This is a big one. We feel like the stock market is way overpriced. There's a lot going on with the war in Iran, the midterms coming up. We have inflation fears. We have tariffs. We have the Fed rate going up, going down. Who knows what's going to happen? So, watch this video if you're worried about the possibility of the next loss decade coming. This is going to tell you exactly what to do, how to prepare, and even what to do while in it, if that actually happens. or watch this one about the crossover point that I was talking about from before where adding more money to your portfolio actually barely matters at this certain point and you have to figure that out for yourself.