In this episode of Boldin Your Money, Steve Chen sits down with Geoff Schmidt, the creator behind the wildly popular YouTube channel Holy Schmidt. Geoff shares his inspiring journey from Wall Street to YouTube, sparked by a mission to help his father and ultimately millions better understand retirement planning. With over 350 videos and 335K+ subscribers, Geoff offers powerful insights on financial literacy, Social Security, blind spots in retirement, and building wealth with clarity and intention. A must-listen for anyone navigating retirement planning or curious about becoming a trusted voice in personal finance.
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[Intro] Interview with Boldin CEO
Transcription
Steve Chen (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by the Boldin Financial Planning platform, formerly NewRetirement, create a financial plan for free Boldin.com. Welcome to Boldin Your Money, where we explore bold ideas and fresh places and personal finance. This is Steve Chen coming to you from Mill Valley, California, and today we’ve got Jeff Schmidt on and I was lucky enough to go on his podcast back in April 15th on his YouTube channel, holy Schmidt. And today we’re going to reverse it and I’m going to ask him some questions and he is going to be on our podcast. So with that, Jeff, welcome to our show.
Geoff Schmidt (00:46):
Hi Steve. Hi everybody. Thanks for having me on the show.
Steve Chen (00:49):
Yeah, appreciate you making the time. So Jeff, as we get started, what we do for our audiences. A lot of folks share their backstory, kind of how they got started and how they got to where they’re today and would love to hear that from you.
Geoff Schmidt (01:00):
Sure. Well, I started the channel in 2020, actually, 2019. It was a personal YouTube channel. I was just watching videos. I don’t like everybody else. In 2020, covid hit a lot of people. Had one of my parents who got sick during that time. And if you remember the early stages of Covid, people got sick for a long period of time, 2, 3, 4 weeks. And so I went in to basically pay the bills and help manage the finances while my dad got better. And I noticed that he was doing a lot of things. Number one, he was doing a lot of things in his head that I actually had to figure out, which was really, really hard. But also I thought while I’m here, let me start tinkering with things. So I worked on getting forms signed so he could consolidate accounts and have one view with his money.
(01:49):
And by the time he came out, my daughter said, dad, that was great. There are a lot of people that are at home right now. What do you think about starting a YouTube channel and helping not just grandpa, but people like grandpa? And with that, the channel was born and I said to her, I said, I’m not sure what I should call it. Do you think I should call it Jeff Schmidt’s podcast or Jeff Schmidt’s YouTube channel? She said, no, no, call it Holy Schmidt. And I thought, that’s pretty funny. So I looked up the name on, I think it was GoDaddy, to see if the website was available and it was somebody owned it, but I bought it for a pretty tiny fee. And so every time you hear the intro or the outro on Holy Schmidt, you hear that woman say, holy Schmidt, that’s my daughter. And so with that, the channel was born, and today we have over 350 videos, over 4 million hours of watch time, over 50 million views or 335,000 subscribers. And it’s growing pretty quick. So it’s something we’re very proud of. It was basically an accident but a happy accident. And we just kept working on it during Covid and then it took off and here we are today.
Steve Chen (02:56):
Yeah, I love the inspiration of helping your dad figure this out. And I feel that’s the same reason I got started with our business, help my mom, but are you still doing stuff with your parents?
Geoff Schmidt (03:10):
So after I straightened everything out, and to be fair, there was nothing wrong financially, it was just in a lot of weird places and it needed some direction. So I will have discussions with my dad, but he’s on top of it now and he owns it. He’s excited about it. And so it requires very little direction from me. I’ll occasionally poke my nose in and say, what’s happening with this? Or if you have documents for that. But now that he’s a hundred percent, again, he’s probably a little more reticent to take my advice. But at the time, I had the right opportunity and I took it.
Steve Chen (03:45):
Yeah, I do think this is going to become a bigger reality for many adult children that have aging parents that they’re going to get involved and there’s an opportunity to help them be more everyone to be more efficient and streamlined, but also keep an eye out for risks and fraud, especially as people get older, they have money and making sure they’re not getting taken advantage of. Do you worry about that?
Geoff Schmidt (04:09):
Oh, sure. I know family members who’ve been taken advantage of, we have an email inbox where we get incoming emails from, we have a live stream after I’m done with this. I’m going live on YouTube at 7:00 PM and we have emails that come in with questions and a lot of the questions aren’t questions at all. They are just, Hey, this has just happened to me. What do I do? And some of that is just you can’t answer the question on a live stream. You have to take the inbound questions as well as the questions that have come into the inbox. So I usually reply to those personally and give them some advice, but it happens all the time. And I just dunno how people can live with themselves, some of the stuff that they do because it’s just horrible. In terms of financial savviness, if you look at the world today and you think about the medical community, penicillin was invented in 1928 and medicine took off after that.
(05:07):
I would say true retirement planning started sometime in the forties or the fifties, 1935, the Social security administration was created, but it actually has less lead up time. And the businesses like yours, Steve, are the penicillin of this industry. The people look to something that that’s clear. It works. They’re not afraid of it. It helps ’em get clear about their own finances. And I got to tell you, from the vast majority of the people that I see and I talk to, that is the one thing. It’s not whether you have 15 extra salary or 12 extra salary, it’s getting clear about what to do. And that is the direction I think most people need to go. And that’s why the channel is done so well because it’s a no hype channel. And it’s one where I’ll say it like is, and I joke about this with my wife. I had one video which talked about the new head of the Social Security administration. It was his bio. And one commenter said, you’re clearly a Biden supporter, unsubscribed. And about three comments later, they said, you’re clearly a Trump supporter, unsubscribe. I looked at my wife and I said, they don’t like me because I’m telling the truth. So what ends up happening is there’s a lot of noise out there. It gets people very frustrated. And so clarity is power, I would say.
Steve Chen (06:27):
Yeah, I think there’s a huge demand for financial literacy. It’s starting to get taught in high schools. We’ve talked a lot about that in our podcast, but clearly YouTube feels like it’s hit this inflection point. I look around and there’s channels like yours, holy Schmidt, and some other CFPs that get on and they talk about explaining pretty detailed things. And some of these videos have 200,000, 300,000, 600,000 views, how to do Roth conversions, whatever. How does social security work, things like that. There’s clearly a strong demand for
Geoff Schmidt (07:02):
Those videos that have that many views. They generally tap into a pretty common question. It just hasn’t been answered. And so when you see a video with a million views or 2 million views or 600,000 views, it’s almost never something that’s super sophisticated. It’s not options trading or anything like that. It’s the average net worth of a 62-year-old and how do I compare? And people care about that sort of thing.
Steve Chen (07:28):
And I think they like to hear it from people like you that are independent and are fully aligned with them. So I think that’s something else that’s emerged. A lot of financial services is pretty opaque. How people are paid is not obvious. And I think hearing it from peers versus someone who might be selling you something but you’re not quite sure if they’re selling you something or not, is obviously important.
Geoff Schmidt (07:49):
And I don’t take clients, I worked on Wall Street for 25 years. In fact, I structured a lot of private investments for institutional investors and family offices. And these are investments that people never see traded on the stock exchange, but yet they are really good investments. So that group of people actually it would be impossible or nearly impossible to charge ’em a fee that they didn’t know about because that’s what they do day in and day out. But there are fees that are built into annuities. Some annuities are great, others not so much. And it just depends on what annuities is, but a lot of ’em have big fees and you just don’t see ’em. Same thing with mutual funds, same thing with a lot of different investments.
Steve Chen (08:31):
Yeah, no, I think it’s one of the things that’s going to get better. And for you, so you’re working on Wall Street, this YouTube thing emerges. Were you still working when you started doing the YouTube stuff?
Geoff Schmidt (08:41):
I did. I never intended for this to become a thing, so to speak. It was fun. It was something I could do with my daughters. It was making a big impact. But my day job was working in New York City on Wall Street, and the companies that I worked for were all great companies. They weren’t what you see on tv. These are nice people, smart, focused in on doing the right thing. But it is a lot of work. I have over 5 million miles on the airlines. I’ve been to Australia 135 times, been to 32 countries. It is a lot of work and it never stops being a lot of work. And so as I progressed through my career, once I got to about the 25 year mark, I thought, you know what? It’d be really nice to try something different that while I like doing what I’m doing, I wouldn’t mind not working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. And so that’s really when I committed to this. And that was about September. And we’ve seen some pretty big runup in numbers since then.
Steve Chen (09:42):
Just this last September?
Geoff Schmidt (09:44):
Yeah, just this last September. So of those 350 videos, 310 of them were done on weekends. A lot of the ideas were my daughters. She said that there are people that would really love to hear about what are five things that people shouldn’t do in retirement? What are five things they should do in retirement? I think we talked about this or we’re going to talk about this, but a lot of that is just my daughter coming up with ideas that she thinks or my dad, I talk to my dad and he’ll say something, then I’ll think about it. And if I think it’s great for a lot of people, it usually ends up in a video at some point. I’ve got a list of hundreds of ideas, hundreds. And usually when I wake up the next day I scratch it out and say, no, that’s not a good idea. But if it still sticks the next day, then it’ll probably end up as a video at some point.
Steve Chen (10:34):
That’s pretty amazing that you have been to Australia 135 times and the preamble, you were telling this story about your jacket and your outfit. Is that something you want, you’re willing to share?
Geoff Schmidt (10:46):
I have worn a suit my entire adult life. I was a public accountant for many years and then I went back to business school and then I went to New York and got into financial services. And I’ve always worn a suit and I’m very comfortable wearing a suit, but I also thank different people show respect different ways to their audience. For me, wearing a suit shows the people that have entrusted me with their time, that I respect them and that I’m showing that respect by wearing a suit. I’ve seen people wear T-shirts white and that’s it, and that’s their thing, and that’s really not who I am. And so you’ll probably see me wearing a suit really for the rest of my time on YouTube and beyond, I suppose.
Steve Chen (11:31):
Well, I’m wearing the FinTech uniform, which is the Patagonia piece thing.
Geoff Schmidt (11:35):
Yeah, everybody has the uniform of their industry, so it all works.
Steve Chen (11:40):
Yeah, a hundred percent. And then you said you wear glasses partially because you’re starting to get recognized and you got recognized in Australia.
Geoff Schmidt (11:49):
So these are reading glasses and they’re very, very light prescription. But I was in a business meeting in Australia a few years ago and somebody walked up to me. Now mind you, it kind of freaks you out when you’re 10,000 miles away and you are leaning into a client and you’re talking about whatever it is we were talking about. And you hear this Holy Schmidt mate, you’re holy Schmid. And I looked up and I’m like, no, not now. Not now. And so I had to explain to the client who thought it was funny and I talked to the guy who recognized me for a couple of minutes but told him I was busy. But the glasses really are number one, it’s easier to read because I do a lot of reading and I do a lot of reading when I’m on camera. I’m reading a lot of information, a lot of data, but also it’s probably okay if somebody doesn’t recognize me every once in a while when I’m out and about.
Steve Chen (12:43):
That’s an awesome story. Well, I don’t have that problem, but it’s cool that you do. So I want to ask you a couple more questions about YouTube just because it’s such an interesting thing for me that people are able to do this. I mean, not everyone does it right now. There’s a lot of people that don’t succeed at becoming an influencer basically, but you have, were you financially independent when you started doing this or were you like, no, this is actually going to be, I want to make money from this. I mean, obviously I want to make money or you need to make money.
Geoff Schmidt (13:09):
I mean, I don’t need to make money. I don’t do this for the money. The business makes money, but I never want to be in a position where the business is losing money because you have to cover costs, otherwise you’re paying for ’em yourself. But if I didn’t work another day in my life, I would be just fine. But the mission of the channel, first of all, there is a very discreet group of viewers who need this information. They don’t just like it, they need it. And so that’s the people we serve in serving them. There are some things that you should be doing if you’re running a channel or running any business that is providing them with good ideas, providing them with opportunities for things like well, sponsors. We are sponsored by Boldin, but we went to Boldin and asked if we could please be one of their influencers.
(14:00):
They didn’t come to us because we thought the product was so good. We wanted to make sure that if it was a possibility that we got in there quickly before they ran into too many people that wanted to represent them. And so fortunately Steve, you said yes, but also once that happened, it created an interesting dynamic because Boldin was the first sponsor that we started working with and it’s been a delight. It’s been wonderful, but you can only support a couple of them. You can only do a good job for two or three. If you have somebody who’s talking about Bitcoin one day gold the next, and then subscribing to the Wall Street Journal the third day, you probably look at it for what it is, which is it’s an ad. But if it’s somebody who’s dedicated two or three businesses and those perfectly aligned with your client base, you should really consider why that person chose them.
(14:57):
We have 25 approaches a quarter, maybe 30, 35 Now. I was looking at one of our less used emails and today we’ve got three. But you look at these and think this isn’t aligned with the audience. What our audience is is these are people that want to do well in retirement. They think about retirement, that’s why they’re watching YouTube videos. Sometimes they’re do it yourselfers, although that can be both a positive and a negative. That’s a positive because they’re interested. It’s a negative because they can sometimes get it wrong because they’re doing everything with spreadsheets, which is where something like Olden comes in really. But they want this information and like I said, we only have, right now we have three and I don’t think we’ll go up three. It’s too hard. It’s too hard to represent more than three companies if you want to do it right. And the companies deserve your full attention. So that’s how the business makes money, makes money from sponsorships and makes money from advertisement and on YouTube, the YouTube ads, and really that’s how most influencers
Steve Chen (16:02):
Make money. We really appreciate that you are working with us and I appreciate what you’re saying too, which is I think it’s clear to people if folks join it for the right reason, if they’re doing their work for the right reason, that comes through and people see that and they want to work with folks that are very aligned with them and authentic. And we have the same view as you do, which is we’re here to serve people, we’re here to do it at scale. We think that there’s a need for literacy and planning and helping people make good decisions strategically over the course of their lives to achieve better outcomes for them and their families. And that’s why we do the work. What are some of the big things before we move on, what are some of the biggest things you’ve learned building this YouTube channel? Just about how to be good at it, and do you think there’s opportunities for folks to do this as a, I mean clearly for some people there are to make a living at this.
Geoff Schmidt (16:59):
Oh, sure. So in order to be successful at YouTube, you almost need to de-romanticize the concept of YouTube. Now, lemme explain what I’m talking about. When somebody walks up to you in Sydney, Australia and says, you’re holy Schmidt, they have a certain view and that is you put some stuff out, it just magically goes to a million views and that’s it. That’s about as far from the truth as it possibly could be. You actually need to plan the content. You need to plan who is going to watch it. It’s the same person every single time because if you want to talk about art one day and you want to talk about investing the next day and you want to talk about how to rebuild your car the next day, well you won’t have repeat viewers. And so you pick one and you go hard at it.
(17:48):
For our first 50 videos, I felt like I was recording videos for myself. We’d get a couple of views and my daughter would high five me saying, dad, you got a couple of views. And I thought, oh, that’s the greatest thing in the world, but it would be great if we got a few more views. So if someone wants to do well on YouTube, I would say niche down really, really tight. Make sure that it is something that you either know about or can learn about. For example, a really big focus on our channel is social security. I’m a registered social security analyst. I’m a CPA, I have 25 years of financial services industry experience. You can’t get more straight down the center of the plate than that, but if my brother who’s an engineer wanted to start talking about finances on YouTube, he probably wouldn’t do very well, but he could talk about how Tony Stark’s rocket suit works I guess making it up.
(18:42):
But he could tell you that kind of thing and I would’ve no idea. So you can be successful on YouTube no matter what it is you’re good at, just pick the thing that you’re good at and go hard at it if that’s what somebody wants, but you got to stick to that group. That would be my advice to someone. The reality is because nobody ever listens to that. You might have one out of 10,000 channels that breaks a hundred thousand. You’ll have a lot that hit a thousand, 5,000, 6,000. In fact, if you were to tier what YouTube considers successful channels, 10,000 is what’s called a micro influencer. It means that you have enough sway with a certain segment of the population that they, I suppose they know what ads can run on your channel, but also it’s the same type of person over and over again.
(19:32):
Once you get to about 25 to 50,000, it’s more of a medium sized influencer, a hundred thousand above, and you’re considered a big influencer once you get to a million year enterprise level. And these are names that everybody recognizes, and so if you were to think about it, 10,000, 25,000, a hundred thousand, a million, those are the break points. And there are some that just Mr. Beast, I don’t, he’s got a hundred million, I’m even sure what the number is. It’s a huge number, but also you don’t need a hundred million in order to make a career out of it. I suppose you probably could do it with 10,000, maybe 25,000. You just need to be tight with your message.
Steve Chen (20:09):
Were there unlocks for you? Where is it like a step function as you’re growing where it’s suddenly jumped up or has it been kind of a linear predictable growth?
Geoff Schmidt (20:19):
There were points, and I found the more consistent I was with knowing the audience, the more the videos jump up. If you think about this, we have 50 million average of over 50. I feel like it’s 55 million views now with 350 videos. I’m not sure what the math is. Is that a hundred thousand video, 10,000 videos, something like it’s probably about a hundred thousand a video, maybe a little bit more. Videos are going to do great and others are going to do horrible, but when you get that one that takes off, and it might be for us, it might be one out of 10 and the others are 25, 10,000, 25,000. But when you have that one that takes off, it really takes off and that’s when the jumps happen and it’s because people what your message is resonating with whoever it is that is watching it and every YouTuber who does that should go back and really study the video and see what they did. That would be my strong recommendation.
Steve Chen (21:14):
And when it takes off, does it take off? You can just tell early on,
Geoff Schmidt (21:19):
There are two or three telltale signs. The click-through rates higher, the hang time of someone watching the video is longer. The amount of recommendations that it gets are more, and the number of like likes are really important. Our average like ratio is about 98% and 98% is extremely high. Anything above 95% is considered excellent, but if you’re running at about 98%, that means you’re doing something right. For example, the video that you and I did, Steve, it was at 98.6% and maybe even 99%. People love that video. The click-through rate was huge. The watch time was long. It’s everything that you would want and in the video. And so when you see a video that has those three key elements, it’s going to do well. And so if you focus on filming the video for the viewer, not the algorithm, which a lot of people think is what they should be doing, if you film it for the viewer, the algorithm will figure it out.
Steve Chen (22:15):
So you’re at 330,000 or something like that. Subscribers right now,
Geoff Schmidt (22:20):
335,000. The last time I checked that was a couple of days ago. We’re growing between five and 25 a month. It depends on the month.
Steve Chen (22:30):
So is it the ambition to be cross that million subscriber mark and then become an enterprise level influencer?
Geoff Schmidt (22:37):
So a lot of things happen. The higher up you go, the higher up you go and it starts to move faster because it’s always a percentage or it should be a percentage of your subscribers that you have. And so when you get to the enterprise level, different things can happen. First of all, the advertisements are different in terms of credibility. Once you cross the 10,000 person mark, you have pretty good credibility, a hundred thousand, you have extreme credibility in a million. Well, people really can’t argue with that, and that is our goal to get to a million as quickly as possible.
Steve Chen (23:13):
Where do you think this is going to be? This is my last question. Where do you think this will be in five years?
Geoff Schmidt (23:16):
Well, I think we’ll be over, knock on wood, we’re over, hopefully we’re over a million right now. We’re posting three to four times a week and it is super concentrated on the financial aspects of retirement. There’s so much more to retirement than just finances. There’s wellbeing, there’s health, there’s so many things you could do with a channel like this as long as you know the audience and the audience trusts you. Now, I’m not an expert in health by any means, but I know people who are, we had a trainer to the 50 plus community on a few weeks ago, and that was the interview after yours in fact. And then on the flip side, we had somebody who, professor Joel Lipman, who was extremely knowledgeable about investing, particularly for this client set, but just overall so I could see more interviews on the channel. We’ve done three so far and they seem to all have gone pretty well. So I think there’s a lot more of that.
Steve Chen (24:18):
Awesome. Alright, well let’s shift gears a bit. I appreciate the context about YouTube, some lessons for us as we’re at 5,500 subscribers, so got a lot of ways to go. Yeah. I wanted to talk about retirement blind spots and breakthroughs. This is something you’ve talked about on your channel, but as people approach retirement, what are five things you think people should do?
Geoff Schmidt (24:39):
So I think the first thing I would say is relax in terms of the scary numbers you see out there. Now what do I mean by that? Well, if you go to Vanguard, they will tell you that you need 15 x extra salary in order to retire comfortably. 94% of the people out there don’t have 15 x their salary, and so that means that 94% of the people out there are going to be a little bit afraid of that statistic. I think the median 401k balance is $79,000 between ages 60 and 64. I think for your audience it’s going to be quite a bit higher. Just people who tend to use personal financial planning software tend to really think about these sorts of things more deeply. But if you think the average is out there and you just discard the people where this is something that they think about day in and day out, it’s a pretty low number.
(25:32):
So I would say do the best that you can relax when someone puts a big statistical number in front of you that you can’t possibly hit because you’re not alone. However, at the same time, you do need a reasonable amount of money in retirement to retire. And so put the statistics out of your head and really focus in on doing the right thing between now and retirement and even in retirement, and that is building your retirement nest egg through your 401k through different types of investments. Real estate if you like that I’m not particularly good at real estate, but I know a lot of people are. There’s so many ways to do it, but focus in on the wealth builders out there. Take the data, the fear data and put it aside because there’s a lot of fear data out there and it’s not just numbers. There’s a lot of fear in the system right now overall anyway.
Steve Chen (26:24):
Yep, super helpful. Any other big things? So chill out a bit. Don’t over index on the scary numbers. Start focus on building wealth.
Geoff Schmidt (26:34):
I would say that if you think about when you come through the other end and you actually are retired, if you’ve done a reasonable job of saving for retirement, you’re going to have this big number in front of you and whether that number is the $79,000 that we talked about with the average, the median 401k balance or it’s millions of dollars, it’s going to feel like a big number. Be careful when you see that number because that’s a lifetime number. And so you want that to continue to grow. You want to use it, but it’s precious. You need to cultivate it. You need to make sure that it’s being used for the right things. I said to somebody the other day, a friend of mine actually, he went out and he bought a California Ferrari, I think it’s called the California and it’s the lower end Ferrari, and he bought it used and he bought it for, it was probably five figures, but I said, why’d you buy that?
(27:29):
He said, well, because I’ve always wanted one. And I said, are you going to drive that to the supermarket? He said, no, but I’ve always wanted one. That probably is okay once my concern particularly with this person is the boat will be next, the RV will be next. The timeshare in Aspen will be next because the money is there and it looks like it’s a big number. I would say true with respect because you’ve spent a lifetime building it and rent rather than buy. If you want Ferrari, rent it for the day, go have fun, rent Ferrara for the day, don’t go buy one. It may feel like the lotto, but it really isn’t. Guard the 401k with your life. That would be my biggest piece of advice for someone who think people should really focus in on don’t keep up with the Joneses. It was never a good idea even when you were working full time, but people get caught up in the game, their daughter got in an argument with somebody else’s daughter and all of a sudden that’s somebody else’s daughter has a new Tiffany purse. I guess that’s what they’re, I don’t know a lot about purses.
Steve Chen (28:34):
Birkin handbag
Geoff Schmidt (28:35):
One of those. And so all of a sudden you got to go buy 1, 4 0 2, you really don’t, 10 years from now, you won’t even know that you bought it, but you’ll definitely know the money that you spent for that handbag in your 401k is there to help fund the child’s college education. And so today, especially media has mastered the art of getting you to want something. The advertisements are really good. I mean, some of the, I look at an ad and on television and I’ll think, geez, I really want that. Oh, wait a minute, I can’t do that. That’s not who I am. But if I was, I’d buy that. And so I would say keeping up with the Joneses is not a great idea. Owning your numbers is supremely important, and this is bold again, just more generally, a lot of people, they’ll tell you what’s in their 401k.
(29:25):
They’ll tell you what’s in their IRA, they have a pension. They’ll tell you how much they’re getting from their monthly pension, but they can’t tell you how much they spent last month on their expenses. And the problem with that is it’s really easy to have expense creep and if you plan on spending $3,000 last month and you spent four, well okay, it’s only an extra thousand dollars I suppose. It seems like a lot to miss the mark by, but if you do it every single month, you’re going to run out of money pretty quickly. So own the numbers. Use something like Boldin to manage your finances because you can’t do it in your head, you can’t do it on spreadsheets. People have tried. It’s really hard and once you own the numbers, you treat your retirement savings with the respect that it deserves. And I think the rest is really just staying away from the things that you shouldn’t do.
Steve Chen (30:14):
I do think that this idea of building a budget, really understanding your spending, especially as you approach retirement, a lot of folks that I’ve interviewed say that’s a best practice. And then, yeah, tracking your planned actuals and making sure that you’re, it’s so interesting as people build plans, one, they understand where they stand and then they start to see what’s possible. And I think for a lot of people, especially our users and probably many of your listeners, they’ve been saving and been prudent and made good choices. And if you’ve done that your whole life as you get to retirement, very often that continues. It’s hard for people to start spending money and that’s something they have to develop, but they’ll also just keep building wealth throughout their whole life and very often their high point in wealth will be as they get older and just goes up with their age.
Geoff Schmidt (31:02):
There was a survey done, it wasn’t a survey, it was a report that was published by JP Morgan and in the report it showed wealth bands and you would think that at 65 their wealth would stop growing, but it actually showed that it continued to grow up through past 75 and it kind of leveled off there. And the reason it leveled off is because of required minimum distributions. If you don’t start taking it out and doing something with it, you’re going to have to pay this massive penalty. But that same report said that 84% of the people who responded to JP Morgan, again understand the audience a bit. The 84% of the people who responded to the JP Morgan survey that was used to build this report, they had not touched their retirement savings at all at the time that the RMDs kicked in. So either 73 or 75 depending on when they were born. That’s so interesting. 84%. It’s a huge number.
Steve Chen (31:56):
Yeah, I believe that. I mean, one of the most popular features on our platform is Roth conversions. People have been saving and they’re qualified money and then they get close to retirement and they try to, or they do reallocate from a tax location perspective, from qualified your 401k and IRA IRAs into a Roth, especially during, if they have some lower income years, they’ll try to engineer their income lower between say 60 and 65 and draw out the qualified money, pay, hopefully lower income taxes because filling up these marginal income tax rates, put the money into a Roth where I can grow tax free and then also come out tax free and go their errors as well in a very tax efficient way. So they’re doing this kind of long duration tax strategy that does work and it diversifies them From a taxability perspective,
Geoff Schmidt (32:51):
I would say that everybody’s really good at something that they’ve seen once before. The problem with going to retirement is you’ve never seen it before. Then there’s a group of people that are really good because they can model it out and that model is a good predictor of what will happen. That’s what you’re talking about. Someone may not have been 63, 64, 65 before or in low income years before, but the model says it’ll work and then magically it works. But you do need to be able to have some sort of guidance on that. And I think a lot of people, because they’ve never been through retirement before, without something like a financial planner or financial planning software, it’s really, really hard. They can figure it out, but it’s a little bit more scary.
Steve Chen (33:39):
What are some of the biggest worries that people have in your audience and also what are some of the biggest blind spots that you think people have in your audience as well?
Geoff Schmidt (33:49):
I’d say the biggest worry is the noise in the media right now. You can flip, it doesn’t matter where you sit left or right, there’s a lot of information that’s just put out there now because the internet exists and people can write a story. Anybody can write a story. My 20-year-old daughter can write a story about something. The World Investment Bank or some big bank in the country is not doing well and you better sell immediately. There would be no basis in truth in that, but if it got picked up and went viral, there are going to be a lot of people who are scared. The problem is that there’s a lot of bad information out there. And so I would say that people right now need to really focus in on just sources of good information. I read The Economist, it is a great source of good information.
(34:39):
I read both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times great source of information, but when you start going beyond really a core group of half a dozen outlets, you start to get scared and people are scared and they don’t need to be. One of the things people are terrified about is what happens to Social Security in 2034. And if you look back in time, we were here one time before and it was in 1983. In 1983, we were two months away from the Social Security Trust being completely depleted and then they would have to cut everybody’s social security payment. But like all things the politicians got together, they modified the rules for social security, they increased the tax on wages. They went from I think it was 5.4 to 6.2% with an employer match. And that happened immediately. That immediately shored up the social security system and then they put in place 20 years forward, an increase in full retirement age from 65 eventually up to 67. So it didn’t affect anybody who was 20 years close to retirement, but it all happened two months beforehand. That is something people worry about a lot. I understand the concern, but I also know that it would be highly unlikely that 57 million retired people drawing on social security would suddenly have the benefits cut by 30%. The politicians probably wouldn’t have a job at the end of their four years. So I would say that there’s a lot of worrying, unnecessary worrying out there, and I think people getting clear on information and good information is super important.
Steve Chen (36:18):
I did not know that. I knew that we had fixed it, but I didn’t know the exact story and I didn’t realize that we got within two months. But that makes sense. And it’ll probably be similar this time, right? We’ll be like, oh, we’re getting closer and then, or do you think we’ll get our acts together in a more advance?
Geoff Schmidt (36:35):
Personally me, Jeff Schmidt, here’s what’s going to happen. I think that they’re going to raise the social security tax from 6.2 to 6.9, 7.1, whatever the number is to keep it solvent and moving upward. Again, the push to extend full retirement age from 67 to 68, I guess it could happen. That was far less impactful on the outcome than nudge up on the social security tax. But I also don’t think anybody who’s 50 plus really needs to worry about that. I actually think if they’re 50 plus in 2034, they probably don’t need to worry about it. I think it’s going to be close to 2034 because no one really wants to tackle it until then.
Steve Chen (37:17):
What about raising the, because right now there’s a cap on the income, you pay social security up to a certain level of income and then you stop paying it. Do you think they’ll just raise the income cap?
Geoff Schmidt (37:27):
It goes up naturally every year with inflation anyway. It was at 145,003 or four years ago now it was 1 62, now it’s one 70. It continues to go up every single year with inflation, and that will continue up. The question about whether they’re just going to take it off all together, that is a solution. What people don’t think fully realize is that because social security is a progressive payout system or a regressive payout system, most of the benefit goes to the people earning the least amount of money. So if you as a payer into Social Security earned $1,200 a month, $14,000 a year, you’re going to get on average about 90% of that back for your social security payment full retirement day. But the more you earn, the less you get. So the next tier up is 32%, and that’s up to I think 7,350.
(38:24):
I actually have to look up the exact number and then the next tear up is 15%. And so you could keep tiering it and then just lift the cap and pay somebody 15% of everything, I suppose. But the social security payment, someone like Bill Gates would have a $5 million a year social security payment. I don’t think that would go very well. But yeah, I think everything is on the table and there’s nothing that doesn’t make sense. But the question is what can you get through Congress? And number two, what really solves the problem? And not just for the immediate group but for our kids because that’s really who you’re trying to protect here.
Steve Chen (39:00):
That’s right, and I think G Scott Galloway was like, I don’t think we should pay benefits if you get to a certain level of income or certain level of other retirement income or assets, and as you get older, do you think that’s going to ever happen where if you have 10 million bucks or something or whatever the number is,
Geoff Schmidt (39:21):
I don’t think so. Is it a bad idea? I don’t know that it’s a bad idea, but I think that anytime you do something like that and you change the rules of the game after the game is almost over, it’s much harder to get it through. If that had been a discussion point in 1983 and say 20 years from now we’re going to do this, that might work. But you can’t really sneak up on somebody a few years before retirement and say, okay, well we’ve just changed all the rules around you. We know you’ve got $10 million. It would be sensible, I suppose, is an option. But I think that if you’re going to do something like that, you need to plan that out 20 years in advance, 10 years in advance. You can’t just because if someone has, and I don’t know a lot of people who have $10 million, if someone has 10 million in retirement savings, but they’ve already committed 9.5 million to donate to some charity and nobody realizes that, well, this person’s now in trouble. So I think people with a lot of money, for better for worse shouldn’t be demonized because they’ve done well, but they also need to be able to pay their fair share as well. So taking the cap off my work, increasing the tax on social security, my work, and there are a lot of options out there
Steve Chen (40:41):
As you point out it, it’s already regressive, right? If you’ve been earning money and paying into it, you’re going to get a relatively smaller amount back. I mean, you’ll get money back, but not the same amount that someone who wasn’t fortunate enough to make as much money over their career. So before we move on to the end of this, I’m actually curious. You’ve been doing this for a while, you’ve helped a lot of people. Do you get positive stories back? Do people write to you and say, Hey, Jeff, you’ve really helped me get confident and retire or whatever, accomplish other goals in your life, and are you hearing that? How does it make you feel?
Geoff Schmidt (41:15):
All the time. In fact, I get more of those than the other. It’s nice when you have a channel that’s been around for five or six years, you have people that have just been doing what you recommend and it works every time. If saving for retirement is a good thing, whether you’re making a million dollars a year, you’re making 50,000, you’re making $25,000 a year, it’s a good thing for everybody. So it works every time, but the time tested stories of someone who’s five years out listening to the advice and then sending you notes saying, Hey, I just paid for my daughter’s wedding. Thanks for talking about this on a YouTube video, 225 videos ago. It really made a difference. It feels pretty great. I get a lot of those. We also get the soss from time to time, but I would say I get more of, we get more of the second than we do of the first, fortunately. So I love what I do and I get to do it every day.
Steve Chen (42:13):
I think there’s many people that want the permission that it’s okay, Hey, you’ve done well, you’re going to be fine and you can actually spend money and you should enjoy all the fruits of your labor. We see that in our community too, where folks are like, this really gave me a lot of confidence to understand my numbers and feel like I could leave my job or downshift a bit and work, and that’s freed me up to do other things that I love.
Geoff Schmidt (42:41):
Well, Steve, while we’re talking about our history, yours is pretty fascinating and how bold Boldin started. Maybe you can, if you haven’t told your viewers, your listeners about your story, I think they’d love to hear it. I was particularly interested in the interplay with your mom and you and its influence on how you thought,
Steve Chen (43:00):
Yeah, some folks have heard it, but yeah, always happy to share it. I think that you, I’ve worked in financial services and my mom came to my brother and I and was like, Hey, I’m approaching retirement. She was a small business owner working in advertising, and then she had downshift shifted a bit and things had gotten away from her a bit financially. And so she was looking to us for some guidance and assistance, and so we first tried to outsource the problem and help her find a financial advisor, and we really couldn’t find someone. I think one of the things about the world of Live is that financial services is kind of indexed two things. One is if you have a lot of money, you can get good advice, but you have to have a certain amount of money because the folks that deliver advice are mainly paid on your assets.
(43:46):
So if you don’t have that level of assets and now that number is a couple million dollars of savings, then it’s harder to get their attention. Otherwise, you could be talking to someone who’s potentially probably trying to making money on selling you something, or if you’re at the lower end of the tier, people are making money by giving you debt products like credit cards and loans and things like that. And so we just saw how the world was and we felt there needed to be a better way for people to get literate and get organized. And so we started creating software and that’s how we kind of got into this. And those problems still exist. It’s getting better, but there’s more choice for people, there’s more education. But if you look at the outcomes in this country that’s still in worldwide, there’s a 5% of the world that has a lot of money, and then there’s probably 25% of the or in the US that’s doing decently, 25% that can make it work.
(44:37):
And then there’s half this country unfortunately doesn’t have a lot of money, is really living a paycheck to paycheck world and just getting literate, understanding what the mechanics are figuring out to manage spending, start saving, start investing, what does it mean to even invest and how to make good choices. There’s a giant unlock for people. And so that’s what we’re trying to work on. And it also was great to find folks like yourself that are educating people at scale and in new ways that didn’t exist was even the mechanic of being able to create your own TV or channel to directly connect with people is an incredible advancement. That is obviously having a huge impact for folks. I mean, 55 million views is pretty materials,
Geoff Schmidt (45:21):
A lot of views. We have 55 million opportunities to help somebody.
Steve Chen (45:25):
Yeah, a hundred percent. So it’s cool. I mean that folks like us can get out there and have a voice and that other people will listen and also share it. I think probably for you and for us too, a lot of this is people hear what we’re doing and just tell family members or at work. There’s some stuff happening with Microsoft right now where folks at Microsoft have found our product and they’re sharing it internally. So it’s interesting stuff like that is starting to happen.
Geoff Schmidt (45:53):
That’s great. Well, as I said, I came to you because I was definitely a big fan before you and I met and before I met your team, but I do think that financial planning software today, Boldon in particular, but it’s the penicillin of the medical community in 1928 where people actually, it is the game changer for a lot of people, but if you went back 20 years ago, I used to call it Franken software because they’re all these weird things bolted on. You would sign on and I don’t want to name names, I don’t want to get in trouble, but you would sign on and you immediately get blasted with a pitch for a credit card, and then one came for a mortgage, one came for an auto loan, and then buy your car from this dealer. And it was really frustrating. The actual software was really hard to work with, and so you’re paying a big price mentally to get into the software then you actually can to figure it out. It’s not like today where it’s an interview, it asks you good questions, you drop in your information, and then at the end of it all, you’ve got something really good to work with. Big difference, big change in the last 20 years.
Steve Chen (46:59):
Yeah, no, it’s moving and I think AI is going to really change the world as well. It’s going to get easier and more personalized. So as we wrap up, when you look forward, what are you most excited about exploring around Holy Schmidt and the work that you’re doing?
Geoff Schmidt (47:16):
So I want the channel to grow very, very quickly. Now that I’ve committed to more than just weekends to the channel, I think that that’s very likely. I’m looking for different ways to really help people. We’re going to have some pretty big announcements on some things that we are, I’d say weeks away from at this point. I’ve been working banker hours for the last several months trying to get a project off the ground that we’re just about ready to announce. I think it will help a lot of people. I mean a lot of people, it’s never been done before. It’s something that I think will just help a lot of people. And don’t get me wrong, the one-on-one or one-on many videos are big. They help a lot of people. But what we’re going to do next, if you check with me in about three weeks, you’ll see it everywhere in about three weeks. I’m super curious, certainly going to tell you now, but I can’t. My wife said, don’t tell Steve. Don’t tell Steve. And I said, okay, but what if I just whisper? She said, he has an audience. Don’t tell Steve. So give me three weeks and then you’ll see it. You’ll know exactly what it is because it’s going to be big. And things like what we’re about ready to announce rapid fire after that, it’s going to be big.
Steve Chen (48:31):
Do you think your business is going to, I mean, it sounds like your wife and your daughter and maybe other kids are involved in this. Do you think that that is how it ends up? You’ll end up pulling everyone into the orbit of this business?
Geoff Schmidt (48:44):
I would love for all of the Schmidt clan to be part of this business. The Schmidt clan likes to be part of this business, but they don’t want to do it for the rest of their lives. And so I suspect if you were to look at this business in a few years, the Schmid that want to stay, they’re more than welcome. But we’ll start adding on from that point forward. There are some obvious things that we could definitely use. We could use a video editor for sure. We have a wonderful video editor, and my wife, she’s great at it. But if you’re cranking out the level of content that we actually need to crank out to get to a million enterprise level, it’s not just two videos a week through videos a week. Sometimes it’s two a day and it’s data driven. It’s based on more than just, I think people will really like this. Let’s all get together for about four hours and do a ton of research on this particular idea and come back and see if it works. It’ll be available and it’ll be just downloading it from, there are a dozen sources that we could go to tomorrow. If I wanted to spend $25,000 a year, I’d put a Bloomberg terminal in the office and just download the data from there. It’d be easy.
Steve Chen (49:52):
You’re going to have a Bloomberg terminal in there and a year, I’m sure.
Geoff Schmidt (49:56):
But yeah, so you’ll see behind me a bunch of monitors behind me and we’ll start the video off at the back of my head with me, kind of like a mad scientist trying to figure things out and looking over my shoulder. Oh, you’re there. You’re going to have a lot of fun with it. Sort of Frank and Schmidt type of thing.
Steve Chen (50:13):
Yeah, don’t go full Jim Cramer. Exactly. The Deltas are going to buy that.
(50:21):
I’ll say probably five years ago I met someone in financial services and they were thinking about trying to do some deal with some folks that were doing YouTube, but this family had built kind of a mini YouTube empire around, it was the guys that make the pancakes, the kids’ pancakes. Anyway, they gotten really good at YouTube and they built a studio and it was like a entire thing, business, studio, whatever. And clearly working well, but it was totally focused on kid stuff. And I don’t know, I’ll have to look back. I doubt they were able to make the conversion of financial services, but they were thinking about it.
Geoff Schmidt (50:57):
Financial services is a wonderful, a opportunity on YouTube, but you really need to know what you’re doing because there are so many YouTube channels out there that just kind of put something out. And I’m not saying that you need to have a CPA and an MBA and all the different certifications, but a great one that I think would do really well if anybody wants to start a YouTube channel on how to save money, how to coupon, things like that. That’s the type of niche I’m talking about. I’m not really good at that sort of thing. I’m good at finding things like stray subscriptions that I’m paying for that I really shouldn’t be. But you could get really good at something like that and you could get a million million subscribers because there’s going to be somebody on YouTube looking up how to coupon, and there’s a whole skillset to it. But there’s so many things like that. I think that there’s some big opportunities, but you really should niche, niche down.
Steve Chen (51:58):
That’s super helpful. Well, Jeff, really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your story, and it’s awesome to learn about how you’ve built this and why you’re building it. Congrats on what you’ve done so far. For everyone listening, hopefully check out. Holy Schmidt. It’s a great channel, and you’ve obviously met Jeff, but he’s producing a lot of good stuff, and it’ll be interesting to see where things end up in the next couple of years. But obviously things are going really well now, and it sounds like you’re very intentful on it. And I will say it comes through loud and clear how thoughtful you are about what you’re making and how you’re making it. And you mentioned your wife before and how she puts a lot of time in and editing stuff and the attention to detail makes a big difference. So shout out to your partners in this.
Geoff Schmidt (52:41):
That’s very kind of you, Steve. Thank you and thanks for having me on your podcast. It was a pleasure, and hopefully you’ll see me again at some point on another episode. Who knows?
Steve Chen (52:50):
For sure. Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I want to know in three weeks I’ll be definitely calling you. Thanks again, Jeff. I’m sure we’ll be in touch.
Geoff Schmidt (52:56):
You bet.